HDTV and video cards with component out

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 10:23 pm

Hey Pat, do you plan on installing using Knoppmyth, or using something like Ubuntu or Xubuntu to get a base install, then install MythTV on top of that? Just curious what has worked well for you in the past.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Tue Mar 27, 2007 11:23 pm

Yeah! Thanks for the tip on the hardware, Pat. After some initial troubles caused by a bad hard disk and a flirtation with linuxmce, using basically the same mb & cpu as you did mixed with a gig of RAM, 500 gig HD, and a pcHDTV 5500 card, and Knoppmyth had me up and running in no time. Seriously took me less than two hours to be up and running. MythTV is fantastic.

Post by **Patrick** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 6:46 am

Vogateer wrote:Yeah! Thanks for the tip on the hardware, Pat. After some initial troubles caused by a bad hard disk and a flirtation with linuxmce, using basically the same mb & cpu as you did mixed with a gig of RAM, 500 gig HD, and a pcHDTV 5500 card, and Knoppmyth had me up and running in no time. Seriously took me less than two hours to be up and running. MythTV is fantastic.

So is that LinuxMCE vaporware or what? In that video demo of it the guy made it sound like it would do EVERYTHING under the sun. Previously I've installed MythTV via FedoraCore and KnoppMyth. Both were easy. This time around I'm going the Ubuntu route. One of the LUG members absolutely raves about it so I'm giving it a try. I've put the box together but haven't done the install yet. I've been very busy with other things lately. I'm going to try to do the install this weekend. I'm waiting for the optical audio bracket to come in the mail the next couple of days. What kind of tv are you using? Are you getting 1080i? Did you have to do much manual configuration of xorg.conf? I saw this thread on the KnoppMyth forum regarding the tv configuration:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ght=#85462

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 10:04 am

LinuxMCE definitely isn't Vaporware, I just get the impression it's huge ( I think they said it's well over a million lines) and perhaps unwieldy. It seemed like a lot of stuff was working, but it also felt like I lost control, and couldn't change anything like the resolution, and even worse I couldn't get the nVidia drive to load or be recognized, which was working fine on the plain Edgy install. On LinuxMCE, I couldn't get the capture card (pcHDTV 5500) to be recognized at first, so I installed the drivers, and it finally recognized it, but it didn't matter without nVidia drivers to give me a decent resolution. It had a ton of stuff for voicemail, security, lights, automation, and all that fun stuff that pluto home offers, I just couldn't get MythTV to work or get a decent picture on the menus, and when I thought about how I had absolutely no hardware that could be automated anyhow, and all I was going to use is MythTV, I decided just to focus on that. I spent about 6 days fiddling with LinuxMCE, and knocked out KnoppMyth in no time.

Of course, even with KnoppMyth I'm still getting terrible resolution on that TV of mine, it's actually embarrassing to say how little I'm getting. Since I could get absolutely no good info on that horrid Insignia TV I own, I just stuck with one of the standard nVidia "TVStandard" resolution lines. I can set it on 1080i and get a picture that's crisp, but it shrinks down to a small part of an already small screen. It's just a crap TV, and there's really nothing to do but wait until I have money to buy a proper TV. As it is, I don't notice much of a difference between the picture I get with the straight antenna and with Myth, and the features are incredible. I couldn't sleep last night, I was having so much fun with it.

Unfortunately, I can't get anyone to approve my login at the KnoppMyth forums. I tried to register over a week ago, and haven't been able to login yet.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 11:32 am

Everything looks good, but I would like to work on getting the CPU usage down, since it tends to peg one of the CPUs at 100% during playback. I imagine I'll have to work at it for a while, but if you have success using something like XvMC or other configuration options to really take advantage of the nVidia processor, or if you just find this to be normal for HDTV playback, I'd like to know.