From the category archives:

Media center

The problem with Digital TV

August 21, 2009

The problem with Australian Digital TV or at least, using a media center in Australia is:

The standard def and high def channels are almost the same, but not quite. The high def channels have subtly different programs such as special documentaries.
The EIT is a mess - spelling mistakes, program name changes (series premire, [...]

Read the full article →

Playlists with MythTV

March 22, 2009

I’ve been wanting a way to use playlists on my media center either from within MythTV or with any other player. The reason is I have a bunch of short videos (music and documentaries) that I’d like to be able to play consecutively.
It turns out to be a case of just RTFM. You can create [...]

Read the full article →

Podcatching solution

March 17, 2009

I’m getting closer to a podcatching solution with gpodder. Gpodder is a simple and easy to use podcatcher - and importantly, it can be invoked from the command line in a non-interactive mode. This is important because of my internet plan - I get twice as much download quota on off-peak times as I do [...]

Read the full article →

Mplayer sound via SPDIF

February 21, 2009

I recently lost sound via mplayer on my MythTV mediacenter. This affected any of my video collection that weren’t DVD iso images since mplayer was the configured player for most types. At first I thought it might have been related to doing a system update, but now I think it was related to my tinkering [...]

Read the full article →

Memory upgrade for media center

February 15, 2009

I’ve noticed that my MythTV (Mythbuntu 8.10) machine was using 100% of its 1G and swapping. (Incidently, I was running the Blootube widescreen theme, and just switching to the MythCenter theme resulted in a snappier experience).
So, I went to buy more memory - and found that 1G cost AUD23 and a 2G stick was AUD45. [...]

Read the full article →

Printing after upgrading from Mythbuntu 8.04 to 8.10

January 18, 2009

I’ve just noticed printing not working on my mediacenter. Its not something I do often, so I assume it stopped after the upgrade.
There was no printing configuration under settings, so I installed:
sudo apt-get install system-config-printer-gnome
This gave me UI feedback that the printer was not working.
I could see an error in /var/log/cups/error_log:
E [18/Jan/2009:00:47:46 +1100] Filter “rastertogutenprint.5.0″ [...]

Read the full article →

MythFrontend for viewing media over the network

December 22, 2008

I’ve installed MythTV frontend on my laptop so now I can view TV and recordings, and play music across the network. I had to change the backend setup to serve from the ip address instead of ‘localhost’, and I also changed bind-address in /etc/mysql/my.conf to use the ip address. I’m not sure if I had [...]

Read the full article →

Rename mythtv recordings

August 1, 2008

The files Mythtv records are saved with a timestamp as a file name, making it pretty hard to figure out which file is which.
To easily identify the files, you can use mythrename.pl - I couldn’t find it in my Mythbuntu installation, so I had to download it from http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv/contrib/user_jobs/. It ran okay, without any dependency [...]

Read the full article →

Media center with MythTV

July 23, 2008

Last November I upgraded my desktop PC. Recently I’ve repurposed it as a media center running MythTV (and also for print serving/file serving etc).
The hardware is as follows:

Sonata III 500 W case
Gigabyte GA965P-S3 motherboard
Core2 Duo E6550 CPU
Gigabyte 8400GS Nvidia video card
WinFast DTV1000 digital tuner card
320MB SATA disk
Kingston 1Gig DDR2 800MHz memory

Since then, I’ve added a [...]

Read the full article →