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MythTV Update

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:04:16 GMT

It has been a while since I have posted any news on my MythTV journey. The truth of the matter is that I ran in to a couple problems after working so long getting it all together that I decided to take a break from MythTV'ing.

Problems:

Display looks cruddy, I am using an Nvidia card and an S-Video out. There is a black border around the entire picture, and it is somewhat grainy.

Channel surfing would only take me through the network channels (4-13 ish).

I decided I would take 15 minutes yesterday and do a little more work (baby steps!) and I had a general idea what #2 might be caused by. You know how, on some TV's, you have to select which type of source your TV is utilizing. (Antenna, Cable, etc). Well I never saw a mention of this in the HOW TO's for setting up MythTV with a PVR 150. It turns out this was the case for my set up as well.

Fix for #2:

Exit out of MythTV and open up a terminal.

Run mythtv-setup

Step through the screens for setup until you see the section related to TV formats (like NTSC, PAL, etc). On that screen you will see the choice to change it from us-broad, us-cable. I made that change, "next"'d out of there and had to restart MythTV for it to work.

AHHH glorious cable channels (and with my on-screen display even working right)!

The fix for #1 is in the pipes, I ultimately want to run DVI-HDMI cable from the MythTV machine to my television so I am going to find one of those cables before I spend too much time troubleshooting the S-VIDEO connection.

My MythTV Machine

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:03:09 GMT

I spent several hours over the past few days installing/configuring my MythTV machine. So let me say, the those first time MythTV'er out there, "IT CAN BE DONE!" I finally got to the point last night of being able to use my remote to surf channels, and browse/control the MythTV app itself.

Back to the machine

For the case, I used an Antec ARIA cube case for micro atx boards. Pretty cool looking little cube, with LEDs on the front. Should look pretty nice in my entertainment center. Here are some pics:

For my processor I used an Intel 3.2ghz hyperthreaded processor...Not too fancy but I think it will be the last processor I ever need for this machine.

I only have 768 MB of RAM in this machine right now. I assembled this machine from some new/some left-over stuff. So I have a 512 and a 256 stick. Maybe some day I will upgrade...we'll see.

The video card was another left-over, an Nvidia geforce 4600. It has s-video out, as well as DVI. We'll see how it does when I plug it in.

I have one 160GB hard drive right now. 140GB of which has been slated to store recordings. I think that works out to around 140 hours. I may or may not need to add some more drives.

For the TV card I used the Hauppauge PVR-150 that I mentioned in my intial blog post . There are several PVR-150's it seems, the one that I ordered is here

I hope to have the detailed write-up on how I did the install, and any feedback from day-to-day use in the near future.

MythTV here I come!

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:03:31 GMT

Look out everyone. Here is the first post on my experiences with setting up my very own DVR using Linux and MythTV .

Today I took the first crucial step. Ordering the TV Tuner card.

According to the documentation I have found on MythTV the Hauppauge PVR-150 card is very heavily used and done so with much success.

I ordered mine from Newegg.com. Check it out here

Here are some screenshots of MythTV in action:

Stay tuned for a detailed rundown on the machine that I have assembled that will run this sure-to-be-awesome DVR.

Robots and main page accessibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

On my quest towards e-stardom (aka a relevant and content-rich website), I realized that the navigation towards my older "news items" was somewhat lacking. My solution for this problem was to create a side bar menu that would contain all of the news item titles in descending date order (aka newest first).

A day or two after this change, I began to notice a positive side-effect to including all of these titles as links on the main page...The robots (spiders) were crawling all through my site! I'm not 100% sure, but I can't imagine how this increased indexing would hurt my chances of being returned in some search results.

In a possibly related subject, a Google search for 'Aaron Lynch' now returns this page in the top 10 search results (#6 as of this entry) and an MSN search returns www.AaronJLynch.com as #3!

Does anybody want my autograph?

UPDATE 1/25/06: Either Google has changed my ranking somehow, or my switch to BlogCFC has harmed my accessibility somehow. I now turn up on like page 5 or something terrible. Back to the drawing board!