thelinuxlink.net

I have a 1Ghz box with a 60 gig drive that I would like to hook up at home to the TV. I have a few questions for those who have set these up.

1. I'm not interested in having an encoder card because I would like to use the box to play my MP3 or OGG collection, play downloaded videos, and play Google Talk Videos on the TV. What would be the best option to connect the computer to the TV which is just a 25" tube TV with RCA video in?

(I'm considering either a Nvidia card with TV out or a Scan Converter. I'm thinking the scan converter would be the better option because I could use any old slow computer I have sitting around to send the video to the TV. Does anyone have experience with using a scan converter for the video out on a Myth Like box? Either the card or the scan converter would set me back about $40 but the scan converter seems more useful because it could be used even with systems that have built in video cards and not AGP slot.)

2. What would you install on the box, Knoppmyth or just a distro with a video player with all the codecs and an music player installed? (After all I wouldn't be trying to get an encoder card to work.)

Thanks for any thoughts.

I'm not real sure what a scan converter is so I can't comment on that.

I wouldn't recommend mythtv for what you are trying to accomplish. The only advantage you would get from mythtv is the menu system that's specically sized for tv viewing. However the music and video modules for mythtv are not very good so that kind of gets cancelled out.

I'd recommend a lean distro with the codecs, video and audio players you like. From there you could work on customizing whichever window environment you use to be readable on the tv. Stuff like changing font sizes and making icons big.

As far as the tv out. Once a video player is running and full screened it usually looks pretty good no matter how its connected to the tv.

hellonorman wrote:I'm not real sure what a scan converter is so I can't comment on that.

A scan converter is a little box that hooks up to the RGB port that then usually converts the video signal to RCA or S-Video which can be plugged into a TV. It will usually convert a 800x600 or 1024x728 signal to RCA or S-Video TV signal. Used to be used more for hooking up computers to TVs for powerpoint presentations.

I appreciate your comments. I was kind of thinking the same thing about setting up my own window environment with video players that have all the codecs.

Why not just get a video card that does s-video out? Or does the TV only have RCA in/coax in?

Myth might be overkill in this case, but it's also a nice front end. Navigating folders to play avis is not very elegant. If you don't care about that then there is no reason to install myth at all. I know there are some video plugins for amarok at this point, which would make keeping a "collection" a lot easier, but beyond that xine and mplayer (or anything that used their engines) should do whatever you want. I'd probably go the amarok route, if it's possible, since a) I really love amarok, and b) I much prefer having a colelction that is sortable/browsable than I do digging through a milion folders.

Snarkout wrote:Why not just get a video card that does s-video out? Or does the TV only have RCA in/coax in?

The TV does only have a RCA jack in the back and front. I am considering the video card option with an RCA TV out on the graphics board. However, if I go with a scan converter I could use some of my old Pentium 500 with the onboard video and not AGP slot. Or I could try to find a cheap Nvidia PCI (old pci) with TV out, then I could put it into almost any old box. I just thought the scan converter would be easier because it works with any RGB video out whether onboard or AGP card or PCI card. Like I mentioned I looking into a lower end tech solution that would still look good on the 8 year old TV that I have.

I operate a small closed circuit TV studio at work. It is entirely Open Source. I use $100 scan converters between each computer (650 and 933 mhz) and their respective monitor to break out a usable tv signal.

In my experience, I have found that any font below 24 point is very fuzzy on the tv screen. This make it unsuitable for anything like surfing the internet.

I use TVtime with a bt878 chipset TV card. All the studio cameras are fed into an A/V switchbox, that is connected into the composite input of the tv card. The scan converter is between the computer and the monitor. The RCA of the converter goes to a T8 modulator that sends the signal to the demodulator at the in house headend for rebroadcast on cable channel 31. We use a bandpass filter to filter out any incoming signal from Charter on channel 31.

I stacked kicker panels on the bottom of the desktop. The top panel has a digital clock and Knewsticker (pointed to a local rdf file that can be edited to display messages). The bottom kicker panel is off screen due to overscan. That holds all the usuall desktop stuff.

I use Xmms in window shade mode to play music. This also allows the kicker panel to remain .on top of TVtime (in full screen mode).

I tried to run a Superkaramba weather app on the desktop, but noticed frame drops in the video. I guess it's just too much for those old PIII's.

The sound card output and studio mic's are fed into a small mixing board. I feed the output of a cheap mp3 player into the line in on the soundcard to play the news theme "on que".

I have used Linux this way for two years now. No one at work has a clue it's all open source. They just know it works! In the beginning I had one old Sony video camera, with a mic connected to the camera, fed directly to the T8 modulator. After playing with TVtime at home I started to get the idea of processing the signal throgh a linux box. Everything is second hand donated equipment. I have no budget.

Alpha13

Alpha13 wrote:I operate a small closed circuit TV studio at work. It is entirely Open Source. I use $100 scan converters between each computer (650 and 933 mhz) and their respective monitor to break out a usable tv signal.

In my experience, I have found that any font below 24 point is very fuzzy on the tv screen. This make it unsuitable for anything like surfing the internet.

Thanks for the info. Personally, I'm not planning to use it for websurfing. I just want to use it to play movies and use it to play my mp3 and ogg collection with some media player. I won't be using it to send email or anything. So if I can find a way to do those two things it will be great. I don't know if I will use a $100 scan converter, but I was just wondering how well they work.

Alpha13 wrote:I operate a small closed circuit TV studio at work. It is entirely Open Source. I use $100 scan converters between each computer (650 and 933 mhz) and their respective monitor to break out a usable tv signal.

In my experience, I have found that any font below 24 point is very fuzzy on the tv screen. This make it unsuitable for anything like surfing the internet.

I use TVtime with a bt878 chipset TV card. All the studio cameras are fed into an A/V switchbox, that is connected into the composite input of the tv card. The scan converter is between the computer and the monitor. The RCA of the converter goes to a T8 modulator that sends the signal to the demodulator at the in house headend for rebroadcast on cable channel 31. We use a bandpass filter to filter out any incoming signal from Charter on channel 31.

I stacked kicker panels on the bottom of the desktop. The top panel has a digital clock and Knewsticker (pointed to a local rdf file that can be edited to display messages). The bottom kicker panel is off screen due to overscan. That holds all the usuall desktop stuff.

I use Xmms in window shade mode to play music. This also allows the kicker panel to remain .on top of TVtime (in full screen mode).

I tried to run a Superkaramba weather app on the desktop, but noticed frame drops in the video. I guess it's just too much for those old PIII's.

The sound card output and studio mic's are fed into a small mixing board. I feed the output of a cheap mp3 player into the line in on the soundcard to play the news theme "on que".

I have used Linux this way for two years now. No one at work has a clue it's all open source. They just know it works! In the beginning I had one old Sony video camera, with a mic connected to the camera, fed directly to the T8 modulator. After playing with TVtime at home I started to get the idea of processing the signal throgh a linux box. Everything is second hand donated equipment. I have no budget.

Alpha13

Brilliant! I would love to see some pics and possibly have some more info sometime. I would love to do something like that in-house, possibly at work and maybe even for that much anticipated episode of tllts tv!

I thought I would give an update

I have an old 25" TV with an older Pioneer receiver/home theater with 5 speakers for surround sound, and finally an outdoor antenna for TV channels. I don't have HD TV, digital hookup for the receiver, cable, or satellite. With such a spartan home entertainment center by today's standards I was not looking for much in an audio/video jukebox.

Many of you suggested that I did not need to install mythtv because my needs were so small. Just wanted to play mp3, oggs, Google videos, and occasionally use to play DVD when DVD recorder is in use.

Well, I installed mythtv anyway for the following reasons:

1. Keyboard only control. I did not want to mess with a mouse in my living room. A wireless keyboard (someday if I upgrade) or a tethered keyboard on the floor was fine for now. Although I could have set up a window manager with hotkeys and learned all of the keyboard commands for a few programs, mythtv comes set up with a keyboard controlled menu that works well.

2. Full screen video. Mythtv has an internal player that defaults to full screen. Once again could have done it with an other player and one key command, but would have to set that up.

3. Full screen audio player. I never saw an audio player that I thought would look good on such an old TV screen, but mythtv has a plugin that looks great on an old TV. I can't imagine using XMMS on a TV, I can barely make out its icons and text on a computer screen.

4. I wanted directions that I could follow step by step. Mythtv has this for several distros. I used the Ubuntu wiki guide here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV

Disadvantages I experienced:

1. Long set up. It took me about 5 hours to do the software install, and the physical hook ups to the entertainment center (last part was only 5-10 minutes) Part of the issue was the complexity of the install for me.

2. Had a problem with the Ubuntu guide. I couldn't run the install setup for mythtv because of a problem with the mythtv user the install had created. The mythtv user was not given permissions for one of the mythtv backend databases, so it would not let me complete the install until I had fixed this issue. Not knowing anything about mysql, or administering databases, I was lost when the fix placed on the Ubuntu wiki did not work. After installing phpmyadmin and just clicking around and changing the permission settings it then worked. This was just dump luck, since I had no idea what I was doing by changing the permissions. This issue probably added at least an hour to two hours of frustration.

3. Lots of extra needed to be installed just to get an audio/video jukebox. Although I wouldn't be using the mysql databases, and many of the other features, you needed a working mythtv frontend and backend in order to install the mythtv pluggins which let me do the audio/video jukebox work.

4. Shutdown is not great. When you exit out of Mythtv you are dumped into openbox. Then you need to exit openbox to get to GDM. Then you need to shutdown from GDM. I would think that this could be streamlined a bit better. Like exiting mythtv shuts down the computer since that is all this computer is used for. Also because of the way it works I have a few other issues. I have not mouse, so I can't seem to bring up the openbox menu (maybe there is a key combination, but I don't know it) So I do CTRL+ALT+BKSP which brings me to GDM. However GDM has the lower left part of the screen cut off on the TV (this is odd since when in mythtv I don't seem to have any part of the video cut off in that area or any other) So that option menu is in that corner which you can't see. So I hit ALT+t to get the menu then arrow keys to highlight the shutdown option. If anyone knows how to stream line that it would be great.

I did use my 1ghz, 256 megs or ram, 60gig hard drive computer for this with a $33 scan converter from Computer Geeks. Overall, I'm impressed with the picture quality and sound. I'm getting 5 speaker surround sound from the AC97 onboard sound. I'm getting a nice 25" picture. In fact, since I can sit in my la-z-boy recliner the experience is far better than watching a video on a 17" monitor with cheap little computer speakers. The computer was a cast off from a family member who did not want to fix it. I had to install a new power supply and the scan converter I got as a gift this last Christmas. So total I have $42 dollars into this project for a power supply and a connecting audio cable from 1/8" stereo male to two RCA males. I plan to use it only 4-6 times a week, so I would say that all in all, I'm happy with what I got.

It probably seems useless, but I think it would be nice for a project to take the benefits of the mythtv interface, and combine it with the ease of a simplified install to create a simple audio/video jukebox. There is probably little interest in such a project since we have mythtv that does that and so much more, but sometimes for me less is more. I still love plain old bashpodder, because it does what I need and adds nothing more to the mix. Simple, functional, and super easy to install.

mowestusa wrote:It probably seems useless, but I think it would be nice for a project to take the benefits of the mythtv interface, and combine it with the ease of a simplified install to create a simple audio/video jukebox. There is probably little interest in such a project since we have mythtv that does that and so much more, but sometimes for me less is more. I still love plain old bashpodder, because it does what I need and adds nothing more to the mix. Simple, functional, and super easy to install.

Well if the point of the box is simply to have a MythTV system, why not install Knoppmyth? The entire reason for that distro/project is to make MythTV install simple and painless. And assuming you have all the correct hardware and wires run, the install is indeed simple. Depending on the system, you can have a default system up and running in about twenty minutes.

chuck wrote:Well if the point of the box is simply to have a MythTV system, why not install Knoppmyth? The entire reason for that distro/project is to make MythTV install simple and painless. And assuming you have all the correct hardware and wires run, the install is indeed simple. Depending on the system, you can have a default system up and running in about twenty minutes.

I've heard that Knoppmyth is not always an easy install. I had heard good things about the Ubuntu Edgy guide, so I tried it on the basis of a recommendation. I might give knoppmyth a try if I ever have to redo my mythbox to see if the experience is any easier than what I went through with the Ubuntu guide that I used.

However, I would like something with even less options than Knoppmyth, because it will still be running a database and all sorts of other things that I don't need with the basic install.

mowestusa wrote:I've heard that Knoppmyth is not always an easy install. I had heard good things about the Ubuntu Edgy guide, so I tried it on the basis of a recommendation. I might give knoppmyth a try if I ever have to redo my mythbox to see if the experience is any easier than what I went through with the Ubuntu guide that I used.

However, I would like something with even less options than Knoppmyth, because it will still be running a database and all sorts of other things that I don't need with the basic install.

Knoppmyth is not always easy, which is why I put the caveat of "all the correct hardware and wires run" in my original post. Assuming that, then it is typically an easy thing.

Considering what you want to do with the system you may not need to use the database features. I know that the last time I installed Knoppmyth much of what I used the system for worked flawlessly. However the DB access would not work. I typoed the ip address in the config so the database just never had a chance. So if you decide to you should be able to disable the db and still do what you want I think (having never run it long term that way).

chuck wrote:Considering what you want to do with the system you may not need to use the database features. I know that the last time I installed Knoppmyth much of what I used the system for worked flawlessly. However the DB access would not work. I typoed the ip address in the config so the database just never had a chance. So if you decide to you should be able to disable the db and still do what you want I think (having never run it long term that way).

My understanding from the mythtv wiki is that you need to have a working mythtv frontend and backend (this is the database functions) before you can get the mythpluggins working and installed. This might be wrong, but that is what I read on the wiki. So I would think that you realy don't have the option to turn off the database functions which is essence is the mythtv backend. My point in my post, was simply that a project that simply offered an easy keyboard driven fullscreen way to play content hosted on that machine or on the network without everything else that mythtv has would be nice.

I'm not really complaining about mythtv because mythtv is a program that can be used to do so much more than I'm doing with it. I'm impressed what can be done with the system, and the UI that they have designed is amazing when one considers what you can do with it. In fact their UI is the main reason I decided to install mythtv instead of trying to cooble together a solution on my own using mplayer, fluxbox, and some mp3/ogg player. I figured the hours I would have spent patching together my own solution could be better spent watching videos and listening to music on the mythtv UI which looks great on an old 25" TV.

mowestusa wrote:My understanding from the mythtv wiki is that you need to have a working mythtv frontend and backend (this is the database functions) before you can get the mythpluggins working and installed. This might be wrong, but that is what I read on the wiki. So I would think that you realy don't have the option to turn off the database functions which is essence is the mythtv backend. My point in my post, was simply that a project that simply offered an easy keyboard driven fullscreen way to play content hosted on that machine or on the network without everything else that mythtv has would be nice.

And this goes back to my last Knoppmyth install that I did where I mistyped the IP address into the config. The DB could not be used by the software because Myth could not find the DB. However I was able to view my AVI list, my MP3 list, and play both the formats without the DB. TV functions did not work however and that may be why the DB is required. So from my mistake and the knowledge that I do have about how MythTV works, the DB is for TV listings, scheduled recordings and maintaining your list of recorded shows. None of which you are using the Myth system for.

chuck wrote:And this goes back to my last Knoppmyth install that I did where I mistyped the IP address into the config. The DB could not be used by the software because Myth could not find the DB. However I was able to view my AVI list, my MP3 list, and play both the formats without the DB. TV functions did not work however and that may be why the DB is required. So from my mistake and the knowledge that I do have about how MythTV works, the DB is for TV listings, scheduled recordings and maintaining your list of recorded shows. None of which you are using the Myth system for.

I'm surprised that you could even run mythtv. Until I fixed my database connection issue, which was related to the permissions of the user created, mythtv would not start up. It gave me the mythtv "blue screen of death". After I got the database working with the user then at least mythtv started up and gave me the opening screen. After I got mythtv running, I know that I'm not using the databases at all. But it must look for those databases and users at least when it starts up. With yours perhaps it is just happy that you have the database files on the computer and the user, even though it can't connect properly.

All in all, very interesting.