Media PC

I finally finished my media PC. It has a Fusion HDTV DVB-T Plus card which I had to test four different kernels to get it to work. It was an extremely painful process. I also had the original motherboard fry on me which put me $90 out of pocket that I would have preferred not to be (even more cause I’m superstitious and decided not to trust the power supply).

It runs NineMSN tv grabber to get the TV listings. It has been the most reliable program so far. I also use fluxbox with this fix “xvattr -a XV_COLORKEY -v 0” to remove the blue borders (or lines) around the image. I had to fiddle a lot with the overscan to get the image right, I eventually set on 0.4 . I also had to program the remote control manually and then edit the myth’s lirc file to set up the key mappings which was a painful process. I put a symlink to the cd drive in the video folder so mythvideo can play videos on cds I have inserted that are automounted. Then I mapped a button to eject the disks. I enabled mythtranscode and got that transcode our recorded shows which so far works great. So far I haven’t wanted to export anything.

If you are thinking of doing a similar project or stuck halfway give me an email and I’ll see if I can help you. I learnt a lot in the process. Most important lesson – use a current but custom kernel 🙂 and almost everything makes an assumption you are using gcc-3.0. That knowledge alone would have saved me a day heh.