<RANT>Man it's been one thing after another. I finally have everything set about the way I want it and NOW.......I've lost the ability to "right click" on my secondary screen to start ANY applications. This includes the ability to restart Myth, as well as start a terminal to change permissions on files, run apt-get...etc....etc.

I can't believe this thing is so buggy!!!! PLEASE don't tell me windoze has Linux beat on this.</RANT>

OK...I'm going on a walk with my wife now and calm down.

a. What distro?
b. What window manager?
c. What window manager?
d. What version of Myth?
e. Packaged version, or compiled?

Yeah, it ain't easy. But that's what keeps out the shoe salesmen.
However bugs should not be a factor, if you're running 0.21-fixes, Debian, and KDE.

OK, I've settled down. Sorry for the rant. I was SOOOOO close.

I'm using Mythbuntu 9.04 packaged. Xfce.

I've noticed (after the several re-boots throughout my testing) that sometimes there's an "Applications" in the upper left corner of the screen that gives the same options as a "right click" on the empty desktop. But it's not always there - specifically not now :confused:

I'm not real familiar with xfce - I use gnome on my Ubuntu 9.04 desktop computer.

I could just re-install, but I'd like to figure out what happened and how to fix it.

Thanks for replying.

I don't think any of the rest of us here are using Xfce, so can't help.

You only need to get some package manager running, install gdm and all the Gnome packages, and on the login screen choose Gnome. No need to reinstall.

XFce is the default manager on Mythbuntu 9.04, and also earlier versions iirc. The reason he's not seeing the top panel is probably because of overscan on his TV or he's screwed up the display settings. Either way, It's not much of a loss. Certainly no need to re-install. There's a settings manger somewhere in the menus if it's that.

Windoze does win the HTPC battle for now, but a Myth .22 is around the corner.

If you mean ease of use, there is little change with 0.22. In fact there's little fundamental change at all with 0.22. But we can help you set it up if need be. Auto commercial-skip is the naz.

Windoze does win the HTPC battle for now, but a Myth .22 is around the corner.

What battle are you referring to?
I've used mediaportal, GBPVR, MCE, XBMC, and myth and I strongly prefer myth. I think which htpc software wins will depend on your desired features, your skillset, your hardware, and your wallet. For me, it isn't close. Myth wins. For others, I'm sure that's different. I keep my eye on the other ones.

I think people should use whatever works best for them. There are a lot of variables.

Windows despite all it faults just works after doing some simple GUI setup. No supergeek skills required to get Myth DVR working. I do prefer ubuntu for my desktop, it works better than Windows IMHO. Ubuntu is just as "plug and play" for a desktop as Windows is, myth isn't quite there yet.

Windows may "just work", but it never works the way I want it to. For that I'll stick with the hard work of MythTV.

if bluray never gets to linux then windows will always have it beat.Bluray is usually the main focus on a windows htpc.

What battle are you referring to?
I've used mediaportal, GBPVR, MCE, XBMC, and myth and I strongly prefer myth. I think which htpc software wins will depend on your desired features, your skillset, your hardware, and your wallet. For me, it isn't close. Myth wins. For others, I'm sure that's different. I keep my eye on the other ones.

I think people should use whatever works best for them. There are a lot of variables.

I'd like to do a media server with network based media players in three different rooms. There is a lot of information on this forum about players, servers, tuners and subscriber capture. It is very useful stuff to say the least.

The one part I am missing is what software brings it all together? I will be building the server and have no preconceived ideas about OS. I've used Ubuntu as well as MS products in the past. Although I am no expert with Linux, I feel comfortable with it.

Given that you have used so many different packages, what would you recommend for someone that wants to manage a dual tuner (Silicon Dust) and a subscriber based capture device (Hauppage) coupled with remote server from each of the three TVs in my house? I suspect the media server choice will be driven by the front end/back end software so a suggestion on that would be helpful as well. If possible, I would prefer an appliance type media player (Dlink, WDTV2, Linksys,,) as they are small, do not require booting and are quite.

MythTV seems to have all the right elements (front end/back end server, etc.). I am just unclear if the media players can be used to control and schedule events as well as playing back recorded/live content.

Thanks in advance for taking your time to respond and letting me pick your brain.
Bill

So what "network based media player" are you looking at? A commercial product like Popcorn Hour? I think products like those would "see" Myth recordings and video via UPNP but I don't know smoothly the two would mesh. I'm sure people are doing it with a PS3 or using something like xbmc as a frontend to Myth. But I'm certain a commercial product client will not give you DVR functionality.

I have been running Myth for years now and my setup is similar to what you want to do. But to do it and to have the full control of the media system in my home I built all the clients and server. As they say though, "With great power comes great responsibility."

The clients are diskless which simplifies them and saves a few dollars. My guess is that you will have to spend a few dollars more if you go this route.

If you do go with myth, I suggest trying LinHES, mythbuntu or mythdora instead of just building from source. Each one of those distros have communities that are very helpful and the distro eases your task. I use LinHES.

So it really comes down to how much work you are willing to do. For me it is fun (mostly). :)

In our theater room I run a Myth frontend, can play DVD, play all other media from Myth (including bluray rips) and control the lighting. All with one remote. It's pretty sweet. :D

The Myth backend would manage the dual tuner (Silicon Dust) and subscriber based capture device (Hauppage).

As to client access I run the Myth frontend on my remote hosts, and stream video over the LAN. No one does it like me though (through a reverse SSH tunnel), and you may prefer a less involved method. You'd need at least thin-client computers at each TV.

Yes, I am coming to the conclusion that a thin client will be needed. This means sourcing boxes, remotes and fan less CPU and DSP Video cards which is "doable". Each of these could run the Myth front end.

It just kills me that all (or at least most) of those media player/extenders are nothing but Linux thin clients with all the fans/remotes/nonvolatile code issues sorted and all the codec and playback stuff handled. They are literally the appliance box I am looking for; they just need to have a way to load and run Myth.

For those thin clients you'll probably be looking for a mini-ITX mobo with the Nvidia 9300 or 9400 IGP, and a small Silverstone box. tux might have mobo recommendations, but I'd stick with Gigabyte or Asus.

For the server you'll need a microATX, at least a 3GHz CPU, 4GB RAM. and at least 2TB storage.

I can't get over how things have escalated. My very first Myth frontend box was an old socket 462 Duron 1600 overclocked to 2000MHz with 256MB ram. And my first backend was my old socket 754 A54 3000+ running at 2GHz controlling 4 ATSC PCI tuners. IOW's, what you want, and what you really need are 2 different things.:-)

For a new build, I'd suggest a 45W cpu like the Athlon II 235E or 240E. And they are overkill. Boot the frontends off $8 USB flash drives. A $59 mATX GF8200 board for them. Case and the rest of you choice. I'd use the ECS GF8200A for the server, with sub $100 X4 cpu of your choice.

I can't get over how things have escalated. My very first Myth frontend box was an old socket 462 Duron 1600 overclocked to 2000MHz with 256MB ram. And my first backend was my old socket 754 A54 3000+ running at 2GHz controlling 4 ATSC PCI tuners. IOW's, what you want, and what you really need are 2 different things.:-)

For a new build, I'd suggest a 45W cpu like the Athlon II 235E or 240E. And they are overkill. Boot the frontends off $8 USB flash drives. A $59 mATX GF8200 board for them. Case and the rest of you choice. I'd use the ECS GF8200A for the server, with sub $100 X4 cpu of your choice.

Nice!
Thank you.
The box is sounding like the right price. Where does the processing load land on the playback side, the main processor or the video section?

I've been doing a bit of google work and VERY NICE ADVICE.... THANKS.

Myth on Linux is looking like it will be a good bit of work to set up but should be well worth it. Any advice on the whole thin client booting to USB stick and running Myth front end apart from starting with a Myth/Ubuntu distrobution? It seems like you've done a fair bit of this so any words of wisdom would be nice.

This guys blog describes a small frontend build. If there isn't enough info there for you, email him and I am sure he will provide you with more info and answers to any of your questions.

http://pdavila.homelinux.org:8080/blog/?p=349

Nice!
Thank you.
The box is sounding like the right price. Where does the processing load land on the playback side, the main processor or the video section?

I've been doing a bit of google work and VERY NICE ADVICE.... THANKS.

Myth on Linux is looking like it will be a good bit of work to set up but should be well worth it. Any advice on the whole thin client booting to USB stick and running Myth front end apart from starting with a Myth/Ubuntu distrobution? It seems like you've done a fair bit of this so any words of wisdom would be nice.

Video load depends on how you set it up. If you use VDPAU there's almost no load on the cpu, and all is on the GPU. I haven't tried that yet but will when I upgrade all my boxes to 0.22. if you let the cpu do the work, any X2 cpu is capable of doing HD and HD pip with plenty left over. One of my frontends is running a 45W X2 BE2300. It's only 1.9GHz and doesn't have a problem at all doing all the work. In fact i doubt it even runs at full speed. I just watched HDTV on my X4 system and the ondemand speed only moved to 1.3GHz for a second or two. Mostly stayed at 800MHz. Core usage never reached even 100% of the total of 400% (100% per core).

If you're setting this up from scratch, I'd say use Mythbuntu 9.10. It's still in RC state now, but should be released very shortly. A 0.21 distro will not be compatible with the new 0.22 mythtv, so avoid using the older release. When you build the frontends, do not install a hard drive if you want to boot from flash. Might cause problems during install or later. Ram prices have doubled lately, So you can easily get by with 2GB. Be sure and assign a static IP for your server. I use statics for the frontends too, but that's just because I don't like dhcp and I always know the static IP. All my remotes are custom, but I'd suggest getting a supported remote/receiver if you want easy. Unless you've worked with lirc, remotes can be a pita to get working if you stray from the norm. And it doesn't help that Mythbuntu changes the way it uses config files from one distro to the next. Mythdora had the best automated remote support last time I checked, but since I have to replace the config files anyway, it doesn't bother me.

One note on the GF8200 chipset. It runs hotter than hell (even when not being used for VDPAU). Under normal use on the GF8200A MB it ran at 70C and really freaked me out when I first booted the machine. I hear it can run fine a lot hotter than that, but I screwed a 60x25mm fan on mine and lowered the speed to 1800 (as low as that fan would go) and temps dropped from 70C to about 40C. I didn't bother doing this on the frontend box and haven't had a problem with it, but thought I'd mention it. And I assume you know you can use the PCIe video card slot with a PCIe tuner card if you want. Think I'll stop this book now.

Please do not stop and thank you for taking the time to write what you have so far. You all have been way down this road and your advice is amongst the most helpful I have found.

I have not played with any of the options apart from WMC on my wife's HP touch screen thing. I found it interesting that I could peal back 18" of bare copper on a piece of coax, shove it into the side of the all in one display, tape the bare copper on one of the windows in my house and start recording HD over the air. It is a little back woods but I was curious to see how the whole scheduling and recording content thing has progressed. The simplicity and success with that little test is what started this whole thought process.

Given that I have no idea where I will land on the software side and that the UI and related back end functionality is the most important element it seems like I need to keep my options open. The goal is to replace the plethora of cable/Sat DVRs (depending on who is offering the best deal at the time) with a central server and a box per TV. I've been around the block to know there is no way to know where I will land on software so proprietary hardware should be low on the list (SageTV HD STB extenders or Windows Media Extenders). If you end up having a problem (or your wife is annoyed) with the software, the hardware is rendered useless and this is silly as most of the cost is in the hardware.

So, my gut (and good advise from you guys) tells me to build the least expensive STB with the most embedded functionality, ability to boot from USB and ability to run Linux and Windows to have the most options. I have no desire to tinker on an ongoing basis so building an appliance type STB has great appeal. If I can get the generic STB remotely close to the cost of the traditional media extenders and I stay with Linux then I can prioritize the software options and start looking at them one at a time. Myth will be high on the list but I would love to find a software options review with the depth that RENETHX shows in his hardware posts.

When first testing my latest (now production) system I evaluated both Mythbuntu and LinHES.

Mythbuntu has a GUI that one can use to set up your thin client(s). It gives you the option of creating a USB boot image. Mythbuntu uses the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project).

LinHES has a simple script you run to add a new client that boots over the network. You just set your client BIOS to boot via the network and thats about it. Your backend has all the bits to boot clients over the network.

My point being, thin clients working with myth is not hard to do.

I'm not sure what others use for their remote, but I use http://www.irblaster.info/ which is a serial receiver. Nowadays serial ports are disappearing from motherboards. So if you do go with some sort of serial IR receiver just be aware.

On Woot! a few years ago I bought about a half a dozen TiVo peanut remotes for like $20. One of the reasons I think my family has taken to myth is because at each TV/client in the house, it's the same remote, same interface and only one remote for them to learn to use. They can do everything with one remote - DVD, recordings, videos, music, photos.

Setting up the remote can sometimes be a pain but I guess I've done it so many times now that it seems easy to me. Lirc comes with a program called "irecord" were you can define the remote button presses interactively and save the proper config file for lircd. It's really not that hard but I must admit the process sometimes made me say naughty words. :D So even if it's a not a "supported" remote, you can still get it to work in most cases.

To sum up...setting up thin clients is pretty easy on Mythbuntu and LinHES. And think about what remote you will need for the thin clients.

The goal is to replace the plethora of cable/Sat DVRs (depending on who is offering the best deal at the time) with a central server and a box per TV.

I've never had cable or sat so my experience with it is just from what I've read over the years, and the few times I've helped friends with it. DVB-S tuner cards support FTA sat straight from the dish afaik. Other than that, options are very limited for things like directtv, dishnet, etc. You will have to get their signal from one of their boxes and use a serial connection or ir blaster to control the channels. Same goes for cable except for analog feeds and clear qam channels. So if you want to record encrypted digital from cable or sat, my advice would be to forget it unless you just want analog and/or clear qam.

I've never had cable or sat so my experience with it is just from what I've read over the years, and the few times I've helped friends with it. DVB-S tuner cards support FTA sat straight from the dish afaik. Other than that, options are very limited for things like directtv, dishnet, etc. You will have to get their signal from one of their boxes and use a serial connection or ir blaster to control the channels. Same goes for cable except for analog feeds and clear qam channels. So if you want to record encrypted digital from cable or sat, my advice would be to forget it unless you just want analog and/or clear qam.

Not a lot of choices as you say. In my case I do record from 2 satellite boxes using component-to-HDPVR at 720p. And do change channels via serial-to-usb cable. It works good. :)

I've never had cable or sat so my experience with it is just from what I've read over the years, and the few times I've helped friends with it. DVB-S tuner cards support FTA sat straight from the dish afaik. Other than that, options are very limited for things like directtv, dishnet, etc. You will have to get their signal from one of their boxes and use a serial connection or ir blaster to control the channels. Same goes for cable except for analog feeds and clear qam channels. So if you want to record encrypted digital from cable or sat, my advice would be to forget it unless you just want analog and/or clear qam.
Actually there is a very good solution for Dish, which I've used for a year, called the R5000-HD. It's a kit for the ViP211 that taps into the guts of the receiver and sucks out the unencrypted, non-transcoded HD transport stream like a vampire, straight from Dish's $50k compression engines just as God intended. Expensive, and you have to compile a patch into Myth, but marvelous and top quality.

I've been wrestling with the whole subscriber capture problem. Using a generic capture approach like the Hauppage unit gives you the most flexibility when it comes to subscriber service as you are not invested in once piece of hardware. The R5000 on the other hand keeps you from having to digitize component out to get your digital data.

Has anyone worked with both side by side such that you can provide a quality comparison for them?

From an integration standpoint (into Myth, SageTV and MCE), do both approaches integrate well? The R5000 seems to tap into the IR system as well for directing the STB channel changes. I assume the Hauppage unit does the IR dongle.

I could provide a sample show, but it would be almost a gig. And for the best comparison you'd need the same show side-by-side in HD. Yes the R5000 has a wire soldered to the ViP's IR pickup for direct control.

I will caution you though,that the Myth patch for R5000 is not being worked on anymore. Alan's tired of the nasty Myth dev political climate, and has a better life to live anyway. So it may be that at some point it stops working, although he's still using it so may actually update in practice.

I'll probably go the SageTV route for simplicity as I really hate the idea of dealing with Windows in an appliance application.

What is your opinion on the quality difference between the R5000 and Hauppage approach?

Never saw Hauppauge, but I'm recording and viewing the pure digital transport stream with no trans/decoding. As good as is possible.

Obviously subjective but I think the Hauppauge HDPVR quality is very good. Is it as good as my OTA sources? It's very close - probably because my locals have lots of sub-channels.

Until I got them a few months ago, I was recording via svideo - so compared to that a MAJOR upgrade. So I'm happy with them.

I can make a short recording if you want...

In the main HTPC forum, in the 160-page long HD-PVR thread, there are links to samples.