This weekend I spent some time upgrading the house MythTV box. I pulled the old WinTV card that had been my only tuner card and installed a Hauppage PVR-500. Yes, it's got a MCE (Media Center Edition) designation, but it works fine in linux. PVR-500 short notes: dual tv tuners w/ dbx stereo, dual hardware-based mpg2 encoders, fm radio tuner, and a $140 price tag. It took way longer than I thought it would to wrangle the ivtv drivers to play nicely with the rest of my system. A HowTo at ivtv.org and another specifically geared towards a knopmyth install were a huge help. If it helps, I ended up happily running with firmware 0x02050032 if that helps anyone at all.
I decided a few months ago during a reinstall to use Centos as the base for the Myth install. I wanted something that wouldn't age out from under me and become unsupported as my FC2 install had done, and Centos promised the long-term version stability of the Red Hat Enterprise products without the support options or the cost. Other than the fact that there's not a lot of docs out the with Centos-specific instructions on how to do things, it's been great. Ok, not having v4l as a standard kernel module pushed me off towards the centosplus repository, but that's been good so far.
Task #2 was adding 250G of additional space to the LV set that /home lives on. That doubled the space for MythTV recordings. Of course, it also doubles the failure rate, but all th music and picures live on back-ups anyway. Worse-case I'll have to reinstall the os and MythTV, and download or re-record all the shows that we've got stashed on there. That was amazingly easy to do. Repartition the volume as linux lvm, prepare it as lvm volume, add it to the volume set, expand the logical volume, and resize2fs the filesystem out to use all the new space.
As I was fetching links and checking urls to write this, I discovered that version 0.19 of MythTV had been released earlier today, so that's been downloaded and is compiling as I write. I'll post back with news of my success, or of the new and exciting things that I've learned getting it all to work.
-Bill
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1 comment:
Ok, much as I'm glad to have two tuner cards, I'm annoyed that 1) they don't have close-captioning, because 2) something is wrong because a bunch of my shows lost sound at some point in the recording. GRRRR!
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