I agree that this is a very important feature, and very rare outside of full-on PC based media centers.
My current box (SageTV HD300 media extender) does this. It is very sad that SageTV was purchased by Google, and you can no longer purchase this hardware. This is the exact same Sigma tango3 hardware as the WDTV Live Plus (and probably a few others), so we know that low-end STB hardware is capable of it.
I'm not a ports tree committer. I maintain a few device drivers in the src tree. I'm much less active than I was 10-12 years ago.
And yes, I do know that there are packages. The problem with packages is that the packages are generally updated infrequently (like every point release), and when they are updated, they have new versions & dependencies, and not just bugfixes. So even if you (try to) do a binary update, you run into the same sort of unintended consequence where picking up a bugfix for package A hoses some unrelated package B.
Back when I ran FreeBSD on the desktop, I used linux versions of web browsers, just so I could go outside the ports tree to get something I needed the latest version of & not have to worry about the newer dependancies for a browser causing me to have to update ports & possibly break something.
IMHO, ports are the single biggest problem with FreeBSD.
.... Because a rolling release, build-it-yourself based software package model is too big of a hassle (ports tree, I'm looking at you).
I've been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years. I ran FreeBSD on the desktop for many years, but I switched to running Ubuntu Linux 4 years ago on my desktop because "apt-get install foo" and "apt-get update" are about 10x simpler and faster than doing the same things using the FreeBSD ports tree, and I don't have time to deal with broken dependancies, unfetchable files, etc.
For those who don't know, FreeBSD base system is maintained directly by the FreeBSD "src" team, and is what constitutes a FreeBSD release. This is the "basic" stuff like the kernel, a few shells, fs utilities, ls, cron, a customized system compiler, etc. This stuff is rock solid, and security updates fix bugs.
The "interesting" stuff (X server, web browser, most shells, perl, python, IDEs, etc) are provided by a rolling-release based "ports tree". The big problem is that the FreeBSD ports tree is a "rolling" release. If you need to update your X server due to a bug, you risk breaking some totally unrelated piece of software which has had a version update. Worse, you have to compile all ports yourself when you update, so updates are unnecessarily time consuming and complex.
Compare this to say, an Ubuntu/Debian/Mint or RHEL/Centos/Fedora release where there are no huge surprises when updating. Every apt-get update or (or yum equivalent) fixes bugs, and you don't have to worry about an update to fix program "A" totally hosing program "B"
This is the same reason why Debian or Red Hat based distros are so much more popular than "rolling release" distros like Arch or Gentoo.
I have hope that the new PC-BSD might be as easy to deal with as Linux. I love their "PBI" concept, where every every package contains all of its dependencies. I'm planning to replace an older Fedora on my laptop with PC-BSD 9.
I've used this... it has been very helpul for development, but I would not run it on a production machine. In most cases when I've run it, it has managed to eventually crash the machine, usually just after obtaining the information I was after. For driver development, that is fine. But not for production.
I'm a cord-cutter & I'm worried about the impact this will have on my free TV reception.
My understanding is that these devices are supposed to phone home, and find an "unused" UHF TV channel, so that they don't interfere with local TV broadcasts. But what is the definition of "unused" ? Will I still be able to pick up TV stations from 60 miles away, or will they be drowned out by the neighbors wireless gadgets? How about low-power (college / community) stations?
And then there are hacked gadgets (like people do now to enable wifi channel 14) and broken gadgets to worry about.
Google bought a small company called SageTV a few months back. They were one of the only companies offering a "whole house" PVR solution via tiny thin-client media extenders running on multiple TVs, and PVR software running on PCs. They had an extensible UI, as well as a number of features (like local media file management) that cable company DVRs either don't do, or do very poorly.
My guess is that they intend to apply the SageTV team to making cable boxes suck less; especially whole house solutions. Obviously they won't be using clients PCs as the server any longer, but a lot of the technology is applicable.
First, the best quality is arguably 1080i (1920x1080 at 30fps), which is same resolution as 1080p once it is de-interlaced. 720p (1280x720 at 60fps) is better for motion, since it is not interlaced.
Second, the reason that nobody broadcasts 1080p is because there is not enough bandwidth in a single channel. To clarifly the current ATSC standards provide for 19Mb/s and require MPEG2 and limit the codecs they can use, which terrible compression. If broadcasters could use a modern codec (H.264, VP8, etc), then they could probably squeeze 1080p out of a single channel. But then you'd need to buy new digital tuners to get the h.264 encoded TV.
Third, broadcasters's greed is their own worst enemy when it comes to signal quality. In my area, many stations have as many as 2 SD sub channels (and our ABC has 2 HD channels, and one SD channel). Some are also carrying mobile DTV. These subchannels are usually re-runs of crappy old TV/Movies, music videos, shopping channels, and other junk like you'd see on basic cable. They limit the bandwidth for the main HD channel to 12Mb/s or less. I've recently put up a bigger antenna so I can pull in channels from a market 50 miles away, simply because the broadcasters there use less subchannels, and have far better quality.
It is a pig. Playing videos with this uses about 5x the CPU and 35 watts more power as playing the same video with VLC (measured via a Kill-A-Watt). Details:
Running Ubuntu 10.04 on my Athlon II X4 635 in a 780G motherboard with on-board Radeon HD3200 graphics (using the Radeon driver), playing a 480p clip from Hulu scaled to 1080p full screenuses 220% CPU (eg, over two full cores). If I download the same video from hulu with get_flash_videos, I can play it in VLC with 35% CPU utilization (eg, less than 1/2 of a core). The VLC playback is smooth (as well as add and logo free), while the flashplayer playback is dropping frames.
Note that I tried both huludesktop and a chrome browser window, and got the same (terrible) performance.
Sage & Myth will work together, but fairly poorly. I moved from MythTV to SageTV a few years ago. I had intended to export my recordings from MythTV and import them into SageTV, but I never got around to it. I just used the mythrename perl script to create meaningful filenames for the myth recordings (rather than 1021_2010010010.mpg style mythtv names), and re-recorded anything I really cared about the show descriptions / etc.
The really nice thing about the sagetv media extender is that all the normal plugins for sagetv (like commercial skipping) work on the extender. The new extender is a little bigger than a box of playing cards, and pulls 7W when playing back 1080p. People have velcro'ed them to the back of wall mounted TVs.
Yes, it is definitely about what works best for you. I've been using *nix for about 20 years (SunOS, Ultrix, OSF/1, FreeBSD, Linux). I "switched" to MacOSX in 2006. In my experience, using MacOSX as a desktop OS was horribly painful, and I gave the Mac to my inlaws, switched back to Linux on a whitebox about a year later.
The main problem I had was that there was no way to configure the native window manager to my liking. I've spent 20 years with *TWM and KDE variants configured so that: 1) focus follows mouse 2) Meta-mouse1 moves a window, Meta-mouse2 resizes a window, and Meta-mouse3 moves a window I'm so tied to these bindings that I even submitted a patch to KDE about 10 years ago when I switched from CTWM they would work with KDE (I also submitted a patch to Gnome, but they ignored me..)
Since I couldn't configure the native Aqua interface / window manager to do what I wanted, I ended up using CTWM and X for most of my work (xterms and emacs windows). The big problem I had was that when I wanted to switch from a native MacOSX app (like Mail) into an xterm, I'd forget to click on the xterm, and end up doing odd things because the Thunderbird mail window would still have focus. If I had a dollar for every email I accidentally deleted or replied to while typing in an xterm while Thunderbird still had focus, I'd be rich. I just could not train myself to work with a click to focus system.
I will say that lots of stuff that is a PITA in *nix worked quite well (suspend/resume, flash video, multimedia stuff, printing). But for me, not being able to customize the user experience to my liking forced me back to *nix. If I need commercial apps that don't run under linux, there is always a Windows VM..
I thought that Hulu upped their encryption, and broke rtmpdump in January. Is there some way to use Hulu via rtmpdump and MediaTomb these days? I'm using PlayOn, and ever since the encryption change in January, the streams are horrible quality because Playon is now rendering them via flash, and re-encoding the rendered video, rather than just transcoding the video.
I'm in the process of trying out Chrome, and was looking for adblockers. Right now, I'm using adthwart (http://qux.us/adthwart/). It uses EasyList, just like AdBlockPlus on firefox. So far, it seems to work nearly as well as AdBlockPlus, but is not as configurable.
I maintain a 10GbE network driver for an IHV. We have one guy (me) doing our 10GbE drivers for all non-Windows OSes. Our driver is GPL has been in the Linux kernel (minus a many helpful features) for quite a while, and is also in other open source OSs (FreeBSD, OpenSolaris). However, we also have to offer a driver directly from our site with all the latest features and bugfixes, since distros are so slow to pick up changes. In this driver, I abstract Linux kernel API changes away, so that the same driver compiles on 2.4.0, 2.6.32rc and all versions in between. The Linux kernel API churn is responsible for over 20% of the size of this generic Linux driver, and is a frequent source of problems when vendors like Red Hat backport new features (like GRO) from the mainline kernel in incompatible ways. OSes with stable kernel APIs are so much easier to deal with that it isn't even funny.
As long as you are selfish, and don't mind buying things made in 3rd world sweatshops, then yes the choice is obvious.
One of the reasons we purchase legos (both for our son, and as gifts for other kids) is that they are one of the few toys you can easily purchase which are still made in the first (or at least second) world. I suspect this will drive them to do more offshoring themselves, to reduce their costs....Sigh
Sign up for cable today, and cancel after the election. Most cable companies in the US don't have contracts, and you can cancel service at any time. You might end up paying for a month of service and an installation fee, but it could be cheaper than a baby sitter.
Yes, trying it as a fuse module was mostly an experiment. I went with xfs myself. I'd have loved to use FreeBSD or Solaris, but I was limited by the drivers available for my TV tuner.
ZFS is available on Linux, via Fuse. This gives a heavy performance penalty over a native implementation(*), but it would probably be fast enough for MythTV. However, ZFS is not shrinkable, so it doesn't meet the original poster's requirements.
(*)For a raidZ 3-disk array of WD "green" 750GB Sata drives (WD7500AACS-00ZJB0), I see 80MB/s sequential write, and 144MB/s sequential read for a native ZFS implementation on FreeBSD/amd64 7.0. For the same setup, I saw 25MB/s write and 95MB/s read from ZFS via fuse.
He's concerned about "large files" because ext3 takes eons (10 to 20 seconds) to delete large (8GB/hr) files generated by recording HDTV. This used to be important on MythTV, because deletions were synchronous. So using ext2 in combination with HDTV on MythTV meant a 10 to 20 second "freeze" when manually deleting something, or missing 10-20 seconds of a new recording while an auto-expire deleted an old show.
In newer versions of MythTV, deletions are done by a separate thread, so there should be no concerns about using ext2/ext3.
Can you elaborate a bit on "terrible" results? Does your vendor include tools to measure signal strength and signal to noise ratio? Do you have poor signal strength, lots of noise? Do you have widly varying strength?
If you have a poor signal and/or lots of noise, you should first try adjusting your antenna. Walk all around the apartment, trying every location you can. Check all the connections between the antenna and the tuner. If that doesn't help, get an amplifier and install it as close to the antenna as possible (eg, amplify signal and not noise).
If you have a wildly fluctuating signal, that is a sign of multipath, which is a fancy way of saying the signal is bouncing off things and you're seeing 2 copies of it. In the analog days, multipath resulted in "ghosting". Again, adjusting your antenna may help. You have a highly directional antenna, which helps with multipath rejection. Some ATSC demodulators are better than others when it comes to multipath rejection. I've never used an HVR 1800 and I don't know how its Samsung demod works, but I can say that my cards using LG demods are much better than my cards using NXT demods. You might want to try a card with an different type of demodulator (like an LGDT3303 used on older Dvico fusion cards). I believe the HD Homerun also uses a good demod, and has the advantage of being outside your computer case, which may reduce RF noise.
Last, you might want to consider getting just basic cable and using QAM tuning. Check your local AVS forums thread to see what, if any, QAM channels are available in your area. You can also check the www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/channels resource. However, I know that Windows has had... issues... with that. I'm not sure what the current state of VMC with respect to QAM is (I use linux). However, I know that QAM can be made to work using Vista with SageTV running on top of it using HD Homerun tuner.
I ran MythTV for 4 years, and had all kinds of problems getting perfect HD display on my TVs (old 1080i tube, new 1080P panel). I switched to SageTV specifically for their HD media extender. Unlike media extenders for MythTV, the SageTV media extender runs the standard SageTV gui, and extensions. This means I can have a silent, low power box (~10W) which does perfect HD playback in my family room, rather than a PC, and I can move the PC into the closet where my toddler can't mess with it. Since the HD Extender runs the SageTV gui, it means extensions like commercial skipping just work, and I don't have to suffer through some crappy UPnP video browsing interface.
When I moved to SageTV, I was impressed with how easy and user friendly the setup was as compared to MythTV. As an added bonus, SageTV's purchase price includes lifetime guide data, so there is no need for a Schedules Direct subscription. The only thing I miss from MythTV is the "time stretch" playback mode, where you can speed up the video (while keeping the audio at the correct pitch).
Oh, and SageTV is also multi-platform. It started on Windows, and has ports for MacOSX and Linux, can transcode videos for iPod, etc. I run SageTV on Linux.
Ditching MythTV for SageTV was the smartest HTPC move I've ever made.
Heck, I want to know how they managed to use as much as 60W at idle from hardware this skimpy. My dual core AMD 4850e based system with an M3A-H/HDMI motherboard, 4GB ECC memory, and 3 750GB sata drives registers 58W when idle, according to my kill-a-watt.
The X11 server shipped with Leopard is utterly broken for people who make heavy use of X (broken dual monitor support, no full screen mode, X11 Applications custom menu times do not work, X may not launch because it depends on launchd tricks, etc). If you upgrade to Leopard, do NOT install X11. If you've already upgraded, and X doesn't work correctly, there are instructions online to downgrade to Tiger's X11: http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2007/Nov/msg00005.html
I'm in the same situation. For 99% of what I do, MacOSX is a flaky pain in the neck. I'd love to be able to confine MacOSX to a window. Here is my background:
I've run *nix on the desktop for roughly 17 years. Last year, after we had a baby and I had essentially no time, I finally got tired of maintaining my system, and thought the "just works" aspect of MacOSX might be a nice change. I've been running 10.4.x on my Core 2 Duo iMac since last October. I've found that after more than a decade and a half of being able to customize my desktop behavior, I just can't adjust to the MacOSX gui. I hate the menu bar at the top, I hate not being able to define *MY* hotkeys for resize, move, and iconify, I miss the easy X11 1-click cut and 1-click paste, etc. To get around some of this, I run most of my shells via xterm. However, X locks solid every few weeks (usually when I scroll too much or too fast in some window).
I also find that the only MacOSX application I ever use is iTunes. I started out using Mail and Safari, but I moved back to Thunderbird and Firefox for the plugins. Specifically, the external editor plugin for Thunderbird so that I can edit messages in xemacs, and the noscript and adbplockplus extensions for Thunderbird.
I also hate that my 4 USBserial connectors are flaky, and have to be re-plugged before they'll all show up on boot. Neither Linux nor FreeBSD had this problem.
At any rate, how is the codeweavers support for playing iTunes videos? That's really the only thing I use iTunes for is video.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that this is a very important feature, and very rare outside of full-on PC based media centers.
My current box (SageTV HD300 media extender) does this. It is very sad that SageTV was purchased by Google, and you can no longer purchase this hardware. This is the exact same Sigma tango3 hardware as the WDTV Live Plus (and probably a few others), so we know that low-end STB hardware is capable of it.
I'm not a ports tree committer. I maintain a few device drivers in the src tree. I'm much less active than I was 10-12 years ago.
And yes, I do know that there are packages. The problem with packages is that the packages are generally updated infrequently (like every point release), and when they are updated, they have new versions & dependencies, and not just bugfixes. So even if you (try to) do a binary update, you run into the same sort of unintended consequence where picking up a bugfix for package A hoses some unrelated package B.
Back when I ran FreeBSD on the desktop, I used linux versions of web browsers, just so I could go outside the ports tree to get something I needed the latest version of & not have to worry about the newer dependancies for a browser causing me to have to update ports & possibly break something.
IMHO, ports are the single biggest problem with FreeBSD.
.... Because a rolling release, build-it-yourself based software package model is too big of a hassle (ports tree, I'm looking at you).
I've been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years. I ran FreeBSD on the desktop for many years, but I switched to running Ubuntu Linux 4 years ago on my desktop because "apt-get install foo" and "apt-get update" are about 10x simpler and faster than doing the same things using the FreeBSD ports tree, and I don't have time to deal with broken dependancies, unfetchable files, etc.
For those who don't know, FreeBSD base system is maintained directly by the FreeBSD "src" team, and is what constitutes a FreeBSD release. This is the "basic" stuff like the kernel, a few shells, fs utilities, ls, cron, a customized system compiler, etc. This stuff is rock solid, and security updates fix bugs.
The "interesting" stuff (X server, web browser, most shells, perl, python, IDEs, etc) are provided by a rolling-release based "ports tree". The big problem is that the FreeBSD ports tree is a "rolling" release. If you need to update your X server due to a bug, you risk breaking some totally unrelated piece of software which has had a version update. Worse, you have to compile all ports yourself when you update, so updates are unnecessarily time consuming and complex.
Compare this to say, an Ubuntu/Debian/Mint or RHEL/Centos/Fedora release where there are no huge surprises when updating. Every apt-get update or (or yum equivalent) fixes bugs, and you don't have to worry about an update to fix program "A" totally hosing program "B"
This is the same reason why Debian or Red Hat based distros are so much more popular than "rolling release" distros like Arch or Gentoo.
I have hope that the new PC-BSD might be as easy to deal with as Linux. I love their "PBI" concept, where every every package contains all of its dependencies. I'm planning to replace an older Fedora on my laptop with PC-BSD 9.
I've used this ... it has been very helpul for development, but I would not run it on a production machine. In most cases when I've run it, it has managed to eventually crash the machine, usually just after obtaining the information I was after. For driver development, that is fine. But not for production.
I'm running with this version, and it is working great for me on my first test machine (8T raid-z with an L2-ARC)
I'm a cord-cutter & I'm worried about the impact this will have on my free TV reception.
My understanding is that these devices are supposed to phone home, and find an "unused" UHF TV channel, so that they don't interfere with local TV broadcasts. But what is the definition of "unused" ? Will I still be able to pick up TV stations from 60 miles away, or will they be drowned out by the neighbors wireless gadgets? How about low-power (college / community) stations?
And then there are hacked gadgets (like people do now to enable wifi channel 14) and broken gadgets to worry about.
Google bought a small company called SageTV a few months back. They were one of the only companies offering a "whole house" PVR solution via tiny thin-client media extenders running on multiple TVs, and PVR software running on PCs. They had an extensible UI, as well as a number of features (like local media file management) that cable company DVRs either don't do, or do very poorly.
My guess is that they intend to apply the SageTV team to making cable boxes suck less; especially whole house solutions. Obviously they won't be using clients PCs as the server any longer, but a lot of the technology is applicable.
First, the best quality is arguably 1080i (1920x1080 at 30fps), which is same resolution as 1080p once it is de-interlaced. 720p (1280x720 at 60fps) is better for motion, since it is not interlaced.
Second, the reason that nobody broadcasts 1080p is because there is not enough bandwidth in a single channel. To clarifly the current ATSC standards provide for 19Mb/s and require MPEG2 and limit the codecs they can use, which terrible compression. If broadcasters could use a modern codec (H.264, VP8, etc), then they could probably squeeze 1080p out of a single channel. But then you'd need to buy new digital tuners to get the h.264 encoded TV.
Third, broadcasters's greed is their own worst enemy when it comes to signal quality. In my area, many stations have as many as 2 SD sub channels (and our ABC has 2 HD channels, and one SD channel). Some are also carrying mobile DTV. These subchannels are usually re-runs of crappy old TV/Movies, music videos, shopping channels, and other junk like you'd see on basic cable. They limit the bandwidth for the main HD channel to 12Mb/s or less. I've recently put up a bigger antenna so I can pull in channels from a market 50 miles away, simply because the broadcasters there use less subchannels, and have far better quality.
It is a pig. Playing videos with this uses about 5x the CPU and 35 watts more power as playing the same video with VLC (measured via a Kill-A-Watt). Details:
Running Ubuntu 10.04 on my Athlon II X4 635 in a 780G motherboard with on-board Radeon HD3200 graphics (using the Radeon driver), playing a 480p clip from Hulu scaled to 1080p full screenuses 220% CPU (eg, over two full cores). If I download the same video from hulu with get_flash_videos, I can play it in VLC with 35% CPU utilization (eg, less than 1/2 of a core). The VLC playback is smooth (as well as add and logo free), while the flashplayer playback is dropping frames.
Note that I tried both huludesktop and a chrome browser window, and got the same (terrible) performance.
Sage & Myth will work together, but fairly poorly. I moved from MythTV to SageTV a few years ago. I had intended to export my recordings from MythTV and import them into SageTV, but I never got around to it. I just used the mythrename perl script to create meaningful filenames for the myth recordings (rather than 1021_2010010010.mpg style mythtv names), and re-recorded anything I really cared about the show descriptions / etc.
The really nice thing about the sagetv media extender is that all the normal plugins for sagetv (like commercial skipping) work on the extender. The new extender is a little bigger than a box of playing cards, and pulls 7W when playing back 1080p. People have velcro'ed them to the back of wall mounted TVs.
Drew
Yes, it is definitely about what works best for you. I've been using *nix for about 20 years (SunOS, Ultrix, OSF/1, FreeBSD, Linux). I "switched" to MacOSX in 2006. In my experience, using MacOSX as a desktop OS was horribly painful, and I gave the Mac to my inlaws, switched back to Linux on a whitebox about a year later.
The main problem I had was that there was no way to configure the native window manager to my liking. I've spent 20 years with *TWM and KDE variants configured so that:
1) focus follows mouse
2) Meta-mouse1 moves a window, Meta-mouse2 resizes a window, and Meta-mouse3 moves a window
I'm so tied to these bindings that I even submitted a patch to KDE about 10 years ago when I switched from CTWM they would work with KDE (I also submitted a patch to Gnome, but they ignored me..)
Since I couldn't configure the native Aqua interface / window manager to do what I wanted, I ended up using CTWM and X for most of my work (xterms and emacs windows). The big problem I had was that when I wanted to switch from a native MacOSX app (like Mail) into an xterm, I'd forget to click on the xterm, and end up doing odd things because the Thunderbird mail window would still have focus. If I had a dollar for every email I accidentally deleted or replied to while typing in an xterm while Thunderbird still had focus, I'd be rich. I just could not train myself to work with a click to focus system.
I will say that lots of stuff that is a PITA in *nix worked quite well (suspend/resume, flash video, multimedia stuff, printing). But for me, not being able to customize the user experience to my liking forced me back to *nix. If I need commercial apps that don't run under linux, there is always a Windows VM..
I thought that Hulu upped their encryption, and broke rtmpdump in January. Is there some way to use Hulu via rtmpdump and MediaTomb these days? I'm using PlayOn, and ever since the encryption change in January, the streams are horrible quality because Playon is now rendering them via flash, and re-encoding the rendered video, rather than just transcoding the video.
I'm in the process of trying out Chrome, and was looking for adblockers. Right now, I'm using adthwart (http://qux.us/adthwart/). It uses EasyList, just like AdBlockPlus on firefox. So far, it seems to work nearly as well as AdBlockPlus, but is not as configurable.
I maintain a 10GbE network driver for an IHV. We have one guy (me) doing our 10GbE drivers for all non-Windows OSes. Our driver is GPL has been in the Linux kernel (minus a many helpful features) for quite a while, and is also in other open source OSs (FreeBSD, OpenSolaris). However, we also have to offer a driver directly from our site with all the latest features and bugfixes, since distros are so slow to pick up changes. In this driver, I abstract Linux kernel API changes away, so that the same driver compiles on 2.4.0, 2.6.32rc and all versions in between. The Linux kernel API churn is responsible for over 20% of the size of this generic Linux driver, and is a frequent source of problems when vendors like Red Hat backport new features (like GRO) from the mainline kernel in incompatible ways. OSes with stable kernel APIs are so much easier to deal with that it isn't even funny.
As long as you are selfish, and don't mind buying things made in 3rd world sweatshops, then yes the choice is obvious.
One of the reasons we purchase legos (both for our son, and as gifts for other kids) is that they are one of the few toys you can easily purchase which are still made in the first (or at least second) world. I suspect this will drive them to do more offshoring themselves, to reduce their costs. ...Sigh
Sign up for cable today, and cancel after the election. Most cable companies in the US don't have contracts, and you can cancel service at any time. You might end up paying for a month of service and an installation fee, but it could be cheaper than a baby sitter.
Yes, trying it as a fuse module was mostly an experiment. I went with xfs myself. I'd have loved to use FreeBSD or Solaris, but I was limited by the drivers available for my TV tuner.
ZFS isn't available on Linux.
ZFS is available on Linux, via Fuse. This gives a heavy performance penalty over a native implementation(*), but it would probably be fast enough for MythTV. However, ZFS is not shrinkable, so it doesn't meet the original poster's requirements.
(*)For a raidZ 3-disk array of WD "green" 750GB Sata drives (WD7500AACS-00ZJB0), I see 80MB/s sequential write, and 144MB/s sequential read for a native ZFS implementation on FreeBSD/amd64 7.0. For the same setup, I saw 25MB/s write and 95MB/s read from ZFS via fuse.
He's concerned about "large files" because ext3 takes eons (10 to 20 seconds) to delete large (8GB/hr) files generated by recording HDTV. This used to be important on MythTV, because deletions were synchronous. So using ext2 in combination with HDTV on MythTV meant a 10 to 20 second "freeze" when manually deleting something, or missing 10-20 seconds of a new recording while an auto-expire deleted an old show.
In newer versions of MythTV, deletions are done by a separate thread, so there should be no concerns about using ext2/ext3.
Can you elaborate a bit on "terrible" results? Does your vendor include tools to measure signal strength and signal to noise ratio? Do you have poor signal strength, lots of noise? Do you have widly varying strength?
If you have a poor signal and/or lots of noise, you should first try adjusting your antenna. Walk all around the apartment, trying every location you can. Check all the connections between the antenna and the tuner. If that doesn't help, get an amplifier and install it as close to the antenna as possible (eg, amplify signal and not noise).
If you have a wildly fluctuating signal, that is a sign of multipath, which is a fancy way of saying the signal is bouncing off things and you're seeing 2 copies of it. In the analog days, multipath resulted in "ghosting". Again, adjusting your antenna may help. You have a highly directional antenna, which helps with multipath rejection. Some ATSC demodulators are better than others when it comes to multipath rejection. I've never used an HVR 1800 and I don't know how its Samsung demod works, but I can say that my cards using LG demods are much better than my cards using NXT demods. You might want to try a card with an different type of demodulator (like an LGDT3303 used on older Dvico fusion cards). I believe the HD Homerun also uses a good demod, and has the advantage of being outside your computer case, which may reduce RF noise.
Last, you might want to consider getting just basic cable and using QAM tuning. Check your local AVS forums thread to see what, if any, QAM channels are available in your area. You can also check the www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/channels resource. However, I know that Windows has had ... issues ... with that. I'm not sure what the current state of VMC with respect to QAM is (I use linux). However, I know that QAM can be made to work using Vista with SageTV running on top of it using HD Homerun tuner.
Good luck!
I ran MythTV for 4 years, and had all kinds of problems getting perfect HD display on my TVs (old 1080i tube, new 1080P panel). I switched to SageTV specifically for their HD media extender. Unlike media extenders for MythTV, the SageTV media extender runs the standard SageTV gui, and extensions. This means I can have a silent, low power box (~10W) which does perfect HD playback in my family room, rather than a PC, and I can move the PC into the closet where my toddler can't mess with it. Since the HD Extender runs the SageTV gui, it means extensions like commercial skipping just work, and I don't have to suffer through some crappy UPnP video browsing interface.
When I moved to SageTV, I was impressed with how easy and user friendly the setup was as compared to MythTV. As an added bonus, SageTV's purchase price includes lifetime guide data, so there is no need for a Schedules Direct subscription. The only thing I miss from MythTV is the "time stretch" playback mode, where you can speed up the video (while keeping the audio at the correct pitch).
Oh, and SageTV is also multi-platform. It started on Windows, and has ports for MacOSX and Linux, can transcode videos for iPod, etc. I run SageTV on Linux.
Ditching MythTV for SageTV was the smartest HTPC move I've ever made.
Heck, I want to know how they managed to use as much as 60W at idle from hardware this skimpy. My dual core AMD 4850e based system with an M3A-H/HDMI motherboard, 4GB ECC memory, and 3 750GB sata drives registers 58W when idle, according to my kill-a-watt.
The X11 server shipped with Leopard is utterly broken for people who make heavy use of X (broken dual monitor support, no full screen mode, X11 Applications custom menu times do not work, X may not launch because it depends on launchd tricks, etc). If you upgrade to Leopard, do NOT install X11. If you've already upgraded, and X doesn't work correctly, there are instructions online to downgrade to Tiger's X11: http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2007/Nov/msg00005.html
Yes, Run X11. And watch it lock up every 2 or 3 weeks, as I mentioned in my original post. If X11 didn't lockup, I'd be almost happy...
I'm in the same situation. For 99% of what I do, MacOSX is a flaky pain in the neck. I'd love to be able to confine MacOSX to a window. Here is my background:
I've run *nix on the desktop for roughly 17 years. Last year, after we had a baby and I had essentially no time, I finally got tired of maintaining my system, and thought the "just works" aspect of MacOSX might be a nice change. I've been running 10.4.x on my Core 2 Duo iMac since last October. I've found that after more than a decade and a half of being able to customize my desktop behavior, I just can't adjust to the MacOSX gui. I hate the menu bar at the top, I hate not being able to define *MY* hotkeys for resize, move, and iconify, I miss the easy X11 1-click cut and 1-click paste, etc. To get around some of this, I run most of my shells via xterm. However, X locks solid every few weeks (usually when I scroll too much or too fast in some window).
I also find that the only MacOSX application I ever use is iTunes. I started out using Mail and Safari, but I moved back to Thunderbird and Firefox for the plugins. Specifically, the external editor plugin for Thunderbird so that I can edit messages in xemacs, and the noscript and adbplockplus extensions for Thunderbird.
I also hate that my 4 USBserial connectors are flaky, and have to be re-plugged before they'll all show up on boot. Neither Linux nor FreeBSD had this problem.
At any rate, how is the codeweavers support for playing iTunes videos? That's really the only thing I use iTunes for is video.