build an HTPC

T was gone for the weekend. I decided to geek out, and go round 2 with knoppmyth. This time with the new capture card. I initally had some issues getting it installed, finnally settling on automatic install. I’m still in the same situation as before, when attempting to play it locks up. It appears that it isn’t configured properly for my video card, or my box doesn’t have enough ‘juice’ to display tv. wierd since the card does all the compression / decoding. I’m thinking it might be time to give in, and test the windows based software for this…
Very frustrating.
AO

PVR blog syndicated via LJ to you on 43things…
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/pvrblog/136836.html

Welcome to an RSS directed post! woot!.
AO

Wintv-350 pimp.
Early christmas gift. I’m psyched. I haven’t installed it yet, but I will be very soon. Hopefully I’ll have a working htpc by the end of the week.
AO

The xbox 360 can act as a client to a windows media center pc. Acting as a multiroom dvr. That’s cool. All the more reason to get my htpc setup…
AO

Failure with mythtv has been sorta crushing. I really wanted to do this without buying any hardware, without spending too much money. At this point I’m not sure what I want to do. I have a few choices. I could buy a capture card ($150) that would work, assuming the card is the real problem. I’d still have only a semi functional system, but… I’m now second guessing why I want this.
I think it would be great to have a file / print / media server. That could burn cd / dvds, rip mp3’s, maybe act as a dvr, but I’m not sure that’s necessary at this point…
:(
AO

I installed knoppmyth and I got most of it working, but not all. I’m pretty frustrated. I was able to get it installed, and was able to do pretty much everything… except watch tv. When I tried to do so the system just bailed. Black screen, no response… It even trashed the install.
I’m leaning towards buying a mpeg compression card for further testing, but I’m not 100% sure I want to spend the money.
AO

Rebuilt one more time, using the proper hd (20gb), but forgot some important information… ie, setting the passwords right etc… so… round 6 is a charm.
AO

http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/media

After watching this… I realised what I did wrong the 2nd time, the problem is, It caused me to have to hard shutdown 2x, and now I corrupted my install. Sooo… I’ll have to reinstall yet again. I don’t think the existing harddrive (8gb) is large enough for this install so I’m going to have to tack, and scrounge for some additional hardware for this before I get it going. However I feel I’m very close.
AO

Knoppmyth. Knopix + mythtv so noobs like me can use linux, and mythtv without too much fuss. It’s getting the show listings now, doing it’s thing. I’ll need to go back and tweek all the channel stuff later, I just want to see this thing work… that’d be real cool. Basically, at this point all I’ve done is burn a cd, dust off a video capture card from the ole spare parts bin, and drop a cd in the machine to get it installing, and configuring. If I hadn’t messed up the first install (I set the server to dhcp, and not static) I’d already be running this thingy… so far, so good. the only downsides I can see at this point: I’ll have to configure sound, currently I don’t think the card is attached to my sound card, so, that’ll need to be sorted. 2nd the noise from the pc. This thing is quite loud, of course it has it’s case open, and I’m sitting nearly on top of it. It seems also, that the server’s bios needs a poke, as it’s only running at 600, and I believe it’s a p3 800, not a 600. It also keeps forgetting the time, which is potentially problematic. The recording is going to need the right time to know when to record shows. These are all minor issues at this time until I really get to test this thing.
I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.
AO

some links that will be helpfull this weekend.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/
http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythtv
http://knoppmythwiki.org/