The media server hooked to my big Sony Bravia in the living room has been running MythTV for awhile now, though my wife has never been a big fan of its UI. In fact, she hasn't asked to use it. Ever. She prefers the ease of use of Web based […]
MythTV
Santa, in the form of my wife and daughter, really came through this year. Ry got me a Dell ST2010 HDMI monitor to use with my BeagleBoard. I think she saw the mammoth CRT TV I had hooked up to it and thought I deserved something more modern. I have […]
Happy Holiday: Lilliput and HDMI monitors, another WD archive
2 I’ve gotten the embedded bug lately. I dug around for an interesting hardware platform to work with and stumbled across the BeagleBoard. This 3×3″ board provides impressive multimedia capabilities via the TI OMAP35xx processor. It appears to serve the purpose I had long ago thought about for the miniITX boards […]
Announcing BeagleBox: Internet video platform for the BeagleBoard
I tested the antenna in my basement with the first of two digital converters (the second from Amazon still hasn't arrived even though it was ordered the same day) and an analog TV. The antenna was able to pick up all the expected channels which antennaweb.org said we should get. […]
Antenna up, first digital box tested
The problem with getting rid of cable TV comes from the desire to continue to receive local off-air broadcasts. When the government mandated switch to digital broadcasts occurred, cable users ignored it because the cable companies would handle the situation for us. As long as we were plugged into the […]
Dumping cable: not as easy as it might seem
I’ve been having problems with my external USB drives used on my MythTV backend. The drives are no longer being recognized on bootup. This started happening after I added additional 500GB and 1TB drives to the system when there was already a 500GB drive. All of the drives are USB […]
Reviewing disk labels, problems with USB attached drives and running ...
I was researching why Battle of Britain would not auto-fill using the new tmdb.pl in MythTV’s Video Manager when I started a tail on the backend log. tail -f /var/log/mythbackend.log I got a bunch of these messages: 2009-07-07 20:09:22.069 Error: offset>181, pes length & current can not be queried According […]
MythTV: EIT errors in backend log and fixing Video Manager ...
2 With the upgrade to F11 I’ve discovered that when I install a DVD GNOME automatically mounts it with an option (right click on the desktop icon) for copying the DVD to an iso image. The ISO is typically 4-8GB which is roughly 3-4 times the size of the AVI files […]
Switching from AVI’s to DVD ISOs for use with MythTV
The terms of service apparently changed for imdb.com and the original imdb.pl script in MythTV that is used to retrieve data about movies (via the Video Manager) is no longer working properly. The results vary but in my case the director information was not be pulled properly. There is a […]
Update to MythVideo imdb.pl – getting the right metadata for ...
5 Fedora 11 was released this past week and I’ve already downloaded the various netinst and DVD ISO images for both 32bit and 64bit systems at home. I’ve got 5 computers to upgrade: 1 development server, 1 MythTV server, my desktop, 1 Myth client and my laptop. Since I’ve now […]
Preparing for Fedora 11: Installation on the Acer laptop
I’ve been having problems playing flash video on my new system at home. The system is a 64bit AMD running F10. Flash video plays but the audio skips a lot. I had similar problems with other applications but was able to get around it by using the right audio setup, […]
Quickies: Flash 64, fixing skipping audio, mapping keys to applications
Prior to F10 I always created a second user that I allowed to display applications on my desktop that I use to launch a second instance of Firefox. There are lots of reasons to want to do this. The most obvious is that the second user is completely isolated from […]