I got started with a lot of good info at: http://forum.byopvr.com/dvr/index.php
People answered my questions, and it had some decent starter tips. I mentioned MediaPortal as that was a new one that I hadn't heard about before; when I was doing my MythTV stuff I don't think it was as mature as it is now. Some others off the top of my head are GB-PVR, Freevo, BeyondTV (though I think this costs money). Good luck and have fun!
Haha, I've heard of that, but I'm not holding my breath. It may be available at some (most?) places in a few months, but my money's on it not being in this podunk hellhole of a bedroom community to two major cities in Michigan (I'm in the Battle Creek area) for a lot longer. We're just now getting On Demand...I've had to go through two STBs before I got the "current" channel guide, and to do that I needed to get the DVR in the first place. They originally gave me an HD STB with the "tan guide", and then a slightly updated "blue guide" or something. Talking to the techs, the tan guide boxes are common and everywhere in the area. Fuck, the damn things are running software from like the 80s, why are they still around? The national CSRs have no clue what's going on in this area. I want Verizon FiOS so bad.
Yeah, I hate Comcast with a passion.:-) Oh yeah, another point popped into my head....all those recordings on the Comcast boxes, what do we get to do with them if we switch providers or get rid of Comcast!
When you use the IR blaster, doesn't that essentially take over your STB then? Are you able to record a show off your STB, and then watch another digital show at the same time? Record two digital shows at the same time and watch a third? I thought those were the hitches with using the IR blasters....
of going on 2 years, I'd have to say it's not even close - Tivo wins for the masses. Sure, my MythTV box does what my friends' Tivos do and more. But even though they are tech guys, too, I don't see many of them going through the pain in the ass experience that is setting up and maintaining the MythTV box.
I built my MythTV box a couple of years ago so I could record two shows at the same time (dual tuner PVR500 card) and then watch a third on our main cable. I planned on reusing olds parts as I had a fairly decent PC sitting around unused; all I needed to invest in was the tuner card and a remote. I got the MCE remote and a PVR500 for the job. All was fine and dandy until I found out that some obscure library for MythTV didn't work on my Athlon VIA motherboard chipset. A new motherboard meant new memory, and a new CPU. I also got a "HTPC" case so the thing didn't look ugly in the living room. So right off the bat my quest to do a homemade Tivo on the cheap without monthly fees set me back about $600 after throwing in a large hard drive, too. This didn't really bother me, though, as I figured it was part of doing business.
I used Knoppmyth to set things up, and granted, it did go fairly smooth. The basic install goes along fine, it's the customization and other tweaks that take time and effort. I currently have it recording up to two shows at once, use it as a multimedia center so I can copy videos and MP3s to it and use it as a jukebox, and have used it to play emulated NES, SNES, and MAME games. But here are some things that I've noticed while using MythTV, in no particular order:
I started off with a Ti4600 video card. It's fan started to die, so I spent money on an FX5200 card which I've read is recommended for MythTV. This went fine, and configured fine. But for some reason if I need to reset my MythTV box, the video settings revert back to a "generic" video card, and I have to recopy over the FX5200 settings from the Knoppmyth wiki. I have no idea why this is.
Related to the above, when the generic video settings are on, recorded audio and video is out of sync. The video quality is noticeably bad, too. When it's configured correct, things are a lot better.
I've played NES and MAME games on it. I've tried SNES, but can't get my Gravis controllers to work for some reason. Supposedly there's Genesis emulators out there, but I can't figure out how to use those within MythTV. I had issues setting up two controllers for the NES games, and they worked for awhile, but then I had some friends over and we were going to play and the 2nd controller didn't work anymore. I don't know why. Also, with the games, integrating the remote is supposed to be possible, but I don't know how to do it for my remote. It would be nice to be able to map certain keys to the remote to do emulator actions or to hit escape. Otherwise, I have to have a keyboard and mouse available when I'm using the emulators (currently via VNC). I don't have a wireless mouse/keyboard for the HTPC yet.
After about a year, things started locking up, recordings were out of sync. Turns out MySQL defaults to logging every database action, and the database logs filled up my hard drive, killing MythTV. There was a fix in the forums, but it was a pain.
I can only record basic cable. It can do digital, but it would have to hook up to my digital box and use IR forwarding to control the box. That would sort of defeat the purpose of being able to record a show and watch something else at the same time. Not to mention the whole reason I got it was so I could record *two* shows at the same time. I'd either need another digital box dedicated to the MythTV box, or some sort of CableCARD thing.
Perhaps the coolest thing about MythTV is the commercial skip. After it records a show, it marks commercials, and pressing a certain button while watching them jumps to the next segment of the show. I've found this to be accurate about 50% of the time. Usually, it works for the first commercial break,
Same old same old. What I don't get is why people think you have to run the preloaded crap anyways. The first thing I did when I got my dell laptop was flash the HD and reinstall an OEM copy of windows.
As is the case for most tech geeks, and probably most everyone on Slashdot. If I don't build it myself, it gets wiped clean and installed with what I want. But Joe Average Consumer doesn't get a shiny new PC and then wipe the drive clean, reinstalling with the other copy of Windows that he has around. Heck, most of the new PC's don't even come with media anymore - it's sitting on another partition. Is Joe going to know how to fdisk the thing and reclaim the partition, too?
Ironically, it's the anarchy caused by everyone saying "I do what I want to do, and don't care about anyone else" that is the crux of the problem around decentralized open source software. You essentially have a million people saying "You should use my software! But I don't care if you use it or offer constructive criticism!"
Interesting article, but I still feel like I have questions and don't really understand why or what I should do, if anything, with IPv6.
I'm on Comcast cable, XP w/o IPv6 turned on, and with a WRT54G router with stock firmware. IF I enable IPv6 in XP, what do I gain? Would it mess up the other PCs on my network? Would it affect performance? Would my router handle it without modification? Does it even matter since I'm on Comcast?
I guess I keep reading about IPv6, reading that it's an improvement (which I wouldn't argue with), but I guess I don't know if I should do something about it now (would I be a small part of mass progress?), or just wait until things straighten themselves out? I know it's better, but what am I supposed to do?
Sounds good and all, but when is this new stuff going to be at stores? If it's going to take 1-2 years before we see anything at the stores, won't CFL technology in turn have improved that much more by then?
I've been saying the same thing for some time now. The "winner" in this whole media ordeal in the coming years will be the person/company (Google?) that gives me access to ALL CONTENT when and how I want it, for a price. Imagine if all historical media content was as ubiquitous as television, or what the Internet is approaching to be. Part of the whole reason people collect DVDs, download torrents, DVR programs, is because they want the security of knowing that that content will be available whenever they want it. What if there was a monthly service, like your internet or cable (or maybe it becomes a part of that?) that in turn gives you the ability to watch/listen/whatever any sort of media content that exists. You "subscribe" to The World. All historical movies, television shows, music, from all publishers, available in one place all the time, ready for you to search and bring up whenever you want. Throw in current stuff, too. Albums aren't released in stores, they just show up in The Network, and you can listen when you want. You can watch the latest episode of "24" whenever you want. Throw in wifi access tied to your cars, so you can do all of this mobile, too. How much would you pay for a service like that?
I'm not aiming to troll, so hear me out. One of my friends really wants one, and I know a couple others that have one. Both of those that have it rave about Zelda. The one that wants one wants it for the multiplayer games. They piqued my interest, so I went to IGN to see what games are out, etc., and to read up on it some more.
What are the "must have" games for the Wii? Seriously. I'm aware of Zelda, but ehh, I don't have much time to actually *play* a lot, so I'd probably get bored of it. My game playing time during the week is limited, and even on the weekends I might not have much time. On IGN half or mor of the reviews were for VC games - reviews of Mario 3 and the like. While that's cool and all, I don't want to spend $250 so I can download my old collection of Nintendo games, and I already know what those old games are like - I played the originals. There are the party games, but I'd only have a use for them maybe once a month or so - whenever we have a bunch of people over. The woman isn't interested in watching me play through a single player game, and she's not much into gaming anyway. Maybe if there were something she'd be interested in....
I could always go with the sports games, but that only lasts awhile, and why get a Wii if I'm just going to get Madden or some NCAA game? I'm interested in the potential of a Wii, but when I got right down to it, I had to ask myself - what would I get it for? Is it just the novelty and then it'd wear off? What are the must-have games everyone is talking about?
Ahhhh, it doesn't matter anyway. In my medium sized city, not one of the area stores has any in stock, let alone knows when more might come in. Bah. Maybe I've outgrown video games - that's depressing...
If you're going to go out and spend $400 on a portable music player, then I don't see you really see an $800 price tag stopping you.
Except you're going out to spend X amount of dollars, and instead they want you to spend 2*X amount of dollars. I don't know about you, but when I go to buy something, especially a somewhat large something (you can do a lot with 400 bucks!), I'm not usually in the mindset of saying "oh well" to spending twice that.
A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications.
Not that I necessarily disagree with the point of the article, but couldn't you argue that if a hacker has to "investigate each memory access to see if it is vulnerable", then by having more entry points it would be MORE secure? If I have 10 possible vulnerable points to look through versus 1000 possible vulnerable points, wouldn't I want to tackle the smaller job?
How to you get a lot of information at a glance? Do you have a single startup page (Google?) and then individually go to each site you want to check in the morning? Are you still using a browser without tabs?
I use Googles/ig page, and when my browser opens I can see at a glance my email, my calendar, and top headlines via RSS feeds from a dozen different websites. All on one page. Why wouldn't you use a customized portal??
Heh, I agree. I, too, will probably have to check this out, but I know I've heard all over how using tables for layout is bad and using CSS instead is Teh Good. But every time I try and do a layout that would take two minutes with a table, and do it it CSS, it takes many times longer to get things to actually *work* and look right. Float that to the left! Oops, once I add another column, they're both squished to the top! Etc etc....
This sucks from my point of view when building Windows systems, but how does this compare to Apple's offerings? When a new version of OS X comes out, do you usually do an upgrade to the new version, or do you flatten the drive first, then install from scratch? If you're upgrading in place, does it reliably work?
I've been saying this for some time now. It would be awesome to be able to install a "gmail" server in-house - being able to access our company's email via the gmail server, but having the software sitting on a server that we run and maintain. Really, for all the hackneyed "Office-killer" OSS attempts out there, I would think Google would have the best chance to actually make it so. Or even just focus on Exchange - Google could offer a suite of collaboration tools (calendaring, email, tasks, and contacts) that you run on your own server. Hell, put it in a "google box" like the search appliance even. Why haven't they done this?
Ummmm, I'm on Verizon and Cingular would need to dangle a heck of a lot of discounts to make me want to drop 600 bucks on a phone, switch carriers, PLUS pay for a service plan. Not the least of which would be steady coverage EVERYWHERE I go. The main reason I stick with Verizon is that pretty much everywhere I've gone, Verizon's coverage will work where others won't.
How do the rabbit ears work on an HDTV? I've been curious about the OTA signals compared to our Comcast lineup, but everything I've heard about getting an HD tuner have been expensive. Or do you still need an HD tuner, but you can just hook basic rabbit ears up to that?
Slashdot Mirror
I got started with a lot of good info at: http://forum.byopvr.com/dvr/index.php People answered my questions, and it had some decent starter tips. I mentioned MediaPortal as that was a new one that I hadn't heard about before; when I was doing my MythTV stuff I don't think it was as mature as it is now. Some others off the top of my head are GB-PVR, Freevo, BeyondTV (though I think this costs money). Good luck and have fun!
Haha, I've heard of that, but I'm not holding my breath. It may be available at some (most?) places in a few months, but my money's on it not being in this podunk hellhole of a bedroom community to two major cities in Michigan (I'm in the Battle Creek area) for a lot longer. We're just now getting On Demand...I've had to go through two STBs before I got the "current" channel guide, and to do that I needed to get the DVR in the first place. They originally gave me an HD STB with the "tan guide", and then a slightly updated "blue guide" or something. Talking to the techs, the tan guide boxes are common and everywhere in the area. Fuck, the damn things are running software from like the 80s, why are they still around? The national CSRs have no clue what's going on in this area. I want Verizon FiOS so bad.
:-) Oh yeah, another point popped into my head....all those recordings on the Comcast boxes, what do we get to do with them if we switch providers or get rid of Comcast!
Yeah, I hate Comcast with a passion.
When you use the IR blaster, doesn't that essentially take over your STB then? Are you able to record a show off your STB, and then watch another digital show at the same time? Record two digital shows at the same time and watch a third? I thought those were the hitches with using the IR blasters....
of going on 2 years, I'd have to say it's not even close - Tivo wins for the masses. Sure, my MythTV box does what my friends' Tivos do and more. But even though they are tech guys, too, I don't see many of them going through the pain in the ass experience that is setting up and maintaining the MythTV box.
I built my MythTV box a couple of years ago so I could record two shows at the same time (dual tuner PVR500 card) and then watch a third on our main cable. I planned on reusing olds parts as I had a fairly decent PC sitting around unused; all I needed to invest in was the tuner card and a remote. I got the MCE remote and a PVR500 for the job. All was fine and dandy until I found out that some obscure library for MythTV didn't work on my Athlon VIA motherboard chipset. A new motherboard meant new memory, and a new CPU. I also got a "HTPC" case so the thing didn't look ugly in the living room. So right off the bat my quest to do a homemade Tivo on the cheap without monthly fees set me back about $600 after throwing in a large hard drive, too. This didn't really bother me, though, as I figured it was part of doing business.
I used Knoppmyth to set things up, and granted, it did go fairly smooth. The basic install goes along fine, it's the customization and other tweaks that take time and effort. I currently have it recording up to two shows at once, use it as a multimedia center so I can copy videos and MP3s to it and use it as a jukebox, and have used it to play emulated NES, SNES, and MAME games. But here are some things that I've noticed while using MythTV, in no particular order:
I started off with a Ti4600 video card. It's fan started to die, so I spent money on an FX5200 card which I've read is recommended for MythTV. This went fine, and configured fine. But for some reason if I need to reset my MythTV box, the video settings revert back to a "generic" video card, and I have to recopy over the FX5200 settings from the Knoppmyth wiki. I have no idea why this is.
Related to the above, when the generic video settings are on, recorded audio and video is out of sync. The video quality is noticeably bad, too. When it's configured correct, things are a lot better.
I've played NES and MAME games on it. I've tried SNES, but can't get my Gravis controllers to work for some reason. Supposedly there's Genesis emulators out there, but I can't figure out how to use those within MythTV. I had issues setting up two controllers for the NES games, and they worked for awhile, but then I had some friends over and we were going to play and the 2nd controller didn't work anymore. I don't know why. Also, with the games, integrating the remote is supposed to be possible, but I don't know how to do it for my remote. It would be nice to be able to map certain keys to the remote to do emulator actions or to hit escape. Otherwise, I have to have a keyboard and mouse available when I'm using the emulators (currently via VNC). I don't have a wireless mouse/keyboard for the HTPC yet.
After about a year, things started locking up, recordings were out of sync. Turns out MySQL defaults to logging every database action, and the database logs filled up my hard drive, killing MythTV. There was a fix in the forums, but it was a pain.
I can only record basic cable. It can do digital, but it would have to hook up to my digital box and use IR forwarding to control the box. That would sort of defeat the purpose of being able to record a show and watch something else at the same time. Not to mention the whole reason I got it was so I could record *two* shows at the same time. I'd either need another digital box dedicated to the MythTV box, or some sort of CableCARD thing.
Perhaps the coolest thing about MythTV is the commercial skip. After it records a show, it marks commercials, and pressing a certain button while watching them jumps to the next segment of the show. I've found this to be accurate about 50% of the time. Usually, it works for the first commercial break,
Do you get many nosebleeds up there on that high horse?
Ironically, it's the anarchy caused by everyone saying "I do what I want to do, and don't care about anyone else" that is the crux of the problem around decentralized open source software. You essentially have a million people saying "You should use my software! But I don't care if you use it or offer constructive criticism!"
My comments I posted on the Ars forum:
Interesting article, but I still feel like I have questions and don't really understand why or what I should do, if anything, with IPv6.
I'm on Comcast cable, XP w/o IPv6 turned on, and with a WRT54G router with stock firmware. IF I enable IPv6 in XP, what do I gain? Would it mess up the other PCs on my network? Would it affect performance? Would my router handle it without modification? Does it even matter since I'm on Comcast?
I guess I keep reading about IPv6, reading that it's an improvement (which I wouldn't argue with), but I guess I don't know if I should do something about it now (would I be a small part of mass progress?), or just wait until things straighten themselves out? I know it's better, but what am I supposed to do?
How does this affect Wordpress mu (multiuser)? http://mu.wordpress.org/
Come on! And that can't possibly be comfortable to type on for long periods of time....
Too bad it's not HiDef, right?
Sounds good and all, but when is this new stuff going to be at stores? If it's going to take 1-2 years before we see anything at the stores, won't CFL technology in turn have improved that much more by then?
I've been saying the same thing for some time now. The "winner" in this whole media ordeal in the coming years will be the person/company (Google?) that gives me access to ALL CONTENT when and how I want it, for a price. Imagine if all historical media content was as ubiquitous as television, or what the Internet is approaching to be. Part of the whole reason people collect DVDs, download torrents, DVR programs, is because they want the security of knowing that that content will be available whenever they want it. What if there was a monthly service, like your internet or cable (or maybe it becomes a part of that?) that in turn gives you the ability to watch/listen/whatever any sort of media content that exists. You "subscribe" to The World. All historical movies, television shows, music, from all publishers, available in one place all the time, ready for you to search and bring up whenever you want. Throw in current stuff, too. Albums aren't released in stores, they just show up in The Network, and you can listen when you want. You can watch the latest episode of "24" whenever you want. Throw in wifi access tied to your cars, so you can do all of this mobile, too. How much would you pay for a service like that?
I'm not aiming to troll, so hear me out. One of my friends really wants one, and I know a couple others that have one. Both of those that have it rave about Zelda. The one that wants one wants it for the multiplayer games. They piqued my interest, so I went to IGN to see what games are out, etc., and to read up on it some more.
What are the "must have" games for the Wii? Seriously. I'm aware of Zelda, but ehh, I don't have much time to actually *play* a lot, so I'd probably get bored of it. My game playing time during the week is limited, and even on the weekends I might not have much time. On IGN half or mor of the reviews were for VC games - reviews of Mario 3 and the like. While that's cool and all, I don't want to spend $250 so I can download my old collection of Nintendo games, and I already know what those old games are like - I played the originals. There are the party games, but I'd only have a use for them maybe once a month or so - whenever we have a bunch of people over. The woman isn't interested in watching me play through a single player game, and she's not much into gaming anyway. Maybe if there were something she'd be interested in....
I could always go with the sports games, but that only lasts awhile, and why get a Wii if I'm just going to get Madden or some NCAA game? I'm interested in the potential of a Wii, but when I got right down to it, I had to ask myself - what would I get it for? Is it just the novelty and then it'd wear off? What are the must-have games everyone is talking about?
Ahhhh, it doesn't matter anyway. In my medium sized city, not one of the area stores has any in stock, let alone knows when more might come in. Bah. Maybe I've outgrown video games - that's depressing...
How to you get a lot of information at a glance? Do you have a single startup page (Google?) and then individually go to each site you want to check in the morning? Are you still using a browser without tabs?
/ig page, and when my browser opens I can see at a glance my email, my calendar, and top headlines via RSS feeds from a dozen different websites. All on one page. Why wouldn't you use a customized portal??
I use Googles
Heh, I agree. I, too, will probably have to check this out, but I know I've heard all over how using tables for layout is bad and using CSS instead is Teh Good. But every time I try and do a layout that would take two minutes with a table, and do it it CSS, it takes many times longer to get things to actually *work* and look right. Float that to the left! Oops, once I add another column, they're both squished to the top! Etc etc....
This sucks from my point of view when building Windows systems, but how does this compare to Apple's offerings? When a new version of OS X comes out, do you usually do an upgrade to the new version, or do you flatten the drive first, then install from scratch? If you're upgrading in place, does it reliably work?
I've been saying this for some time now. It would be awesome to be able to install a "gmail" server in-house - being able to access our company's email via the gmail server, but having the software sitting on a server that we run and maintain. Really, for all the hackneyed "Office-killer" OSS attempts out there, I would think Google would have the best chance to actually make it so. Or even just focus on Exchange - Google could offer a suite of collaboration tools (calendaring, email, tasks, and contacts) that you run on your own server. Hell, put it in a "google box" like the search appliance even. Why haven't they done this?
to the Pizza Hut P'ZONE?
Ummmm, I'm on Verizon and Cingular would need to dangle a heck of a lot of discounts to make me want to drop 600 bucks on a phone, switch carriers, PLUS pay for a service plan. Not the least of which would be steady coverage EVERYWHERE I go. The main reason I stick with Verizon is that pretty much everywhere I've gone, Verizon's coverage will work where others won't.
How do the rabbit ears work on an HDTV? I've been curious about the OTA signals compared to our Comcast lineup, but everything I've heard about getting an HD tuner have been expensive. Or do you still need an HD tuner, but you can just hook basic rabbit ears up to that?
Strippers don't like it when you stick a credit card in their g-string. Come to think of it, neither does my wife....
Will it be through the Microsoft Pyrat Bhay website?