My problem wasn't so much getting the basic system to work, though getting the pcHDTV card working was a bit frustrating simply because a weak signal can cause the tv player software to crash...but getting seemingly simple stuff set up right has been a challenge.
I have myth running under Debian on a 3Ghz P4 w a pcHDTV card. That part works fairly well, though I don't have many HD signals to choose from yet in my market.
On the other hand... when I play a DVD with xine it uses my full 5.1 speaker setup and sounds great. When I play or rip DVDs through myth, it uses only the front channels. As often as not it will take play foreign language audio tracks no matter what I tell it to play. So now the simple job of ripping a DVD to the hard drive becomes trial and error and provides inferior results. I'm sure there is a simple fix for that, but I haven't found it.
IDE mirrors are theoretically wonderful, but don't base your entire recovery plan on them.
Here's the story from about a month ago...
Small webserver running on a Soyo DRAGON plus MB (Promise IDE Mirror built in), 1700XP CPU, 2 60GB in RAID1, Gentoo, etc. I set the system up in January of '02, and it took a digger this past July. Down hard, with a HD failure. When I went to check the contents of the hard drives, I discovered that one was toast (physically defective), and the other had a fully functional image of my system... from January of '03! The mirror had come appart six months ago with no errors, warnings, notifications, or anything else. I'd even rebooted the machine a few times over the last six months (new kernels, etc) and it never glitched or beeped at me. Nothing amis in the log files. No warning.
Slashdot Mirror
My problem wasn't so much getting the basic system to work, though getting the pcHDTV card working was a bit frustrating simply because a weak signal can cause the tv player software to crash...but getting seemingly simple stuff set up right has been a challenge. I have myth running under Debian on a 3Ghz P4 w a pcHDTV card. That part works fairly well, though I don't have many HD signals to choose from yet in my market. On the other hand... when I play a DVD with xine it uses my full 5.1 speaker setup and sounds great. When I play or rip DVDs through myth, it uses only the front channels. As often as not it will take play foreign language audio tracks no matter what I tell it to play. So now the simple job of ripping a DVD to the hard drive becomes trial and error and provides inferior results. I'm sure there is a simple fix for that, but I haven't found it.
IDE mirrors are theoretically wonderful, but don't base your entire recovery plan on them. Here's the story from about a month ago... Small webserver running on a Soyo DRAGON plus MB (Promise IDE Mirror built in), 1700XP CPU, 2 60GB in RAID1, Gentoo, etc. I set the system up in January of '02, and it took a digger this past July. Down hard, with a HD failure. When I went to check the contents of the hard drives, I discovered that one was toast (physically defective), and the other had a fully functional image of my system... from January of '03! The mirror had come appart six months ago with no errors, warnings, notifications, or anything else. I'd even rebooted the machine a few times over the last six months (new kernels, etc) and it never glitched or beeped at me. Nothing amis in the log files. No warning.