Archive for November 27th, 2005

Posted on November 27, 2005 - by jono

MythTV works!!

Today I spent a couple of hours before my band practice working on the MythTV box. Today I managed to tweak the grandiose piece of joy into a state where it actually records TV shows. Yes, now the MythTV box works as expected, and my tests with Eastenders and Diagnosis Murder reaped great rewards. In addition to this, I also got the LCD screen on the case fully working, and my remote control is now complete. I felt the kind of joy that sometimes inspired a man to have an intimate moment with himself.

Actually, I must confess, the remote control works, but a cheated a bit. Looking at venky.ws, it seems to be a huge pain in the arse to get the directional pad on the remote control working. The other buttons work fine, and they are mapped into MythTV fine, but to make the directional buttons work you need to apply one of a number of patches, none of which seem to work 100% correctly. I am sure Venky will have all this sorted out soon, but until it is stabilised, I cheated by making some lesser used buttons (such as the Windows key) map to the Up, Down, Left and Right buttons. Does the trick, and I am happy with that.

So, what’s left? Well, I still need to get sound in TV working, but I suspect this is an option to select which sound driver somewhere. Sound works fine for everything else, so I guess it should be a doddle. I also need to get TV out working, but there seems to be plenty of documentation out there for this. The only other thing I want to fix is to get MythGame working, but it seems the Breezy packages for this are buggered.

I tell you, although its quite a bit of work to get going, building a MythTV box gives you that kind of satisfaction that I suspect Woz experienced when he presented his latest computer at the Homebrew Computer Club. Sure, its not comparable in terms of geek cred, but I am incredibly excited that I have a home entertainment system that (a) runs on Ubuntu and (b) I can tweak to infinite proportions.

Now, some of you MythTV nutters may be able to help with something. Earlier I had the idea of creating a MythTV module in which you can easily run another (non-MythTV) application. As an example, I would love to run Doom III on the box – but I don’t really want to plug in a keyboard and press Alt-F2 to run the program. I really want to have a nice large icon that I can select with my remote control and then play Doom III with my joystick. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? It seems a fairly simple concept, and it would be so handy to have a bunch of non-MythTV things that I can run as easily as selecting a MythTV component. Oh, and I know at least one of you is going to suggest Freevo as I can hack it in Python – well I have settled on MythTV, so don’t plonk that in the comments box.

In other news, yesterday I mixed some of the LUGRadio Live 2005 recordings. I did the Intro, Rufus Pollack, Mark Shuttleworth and the Mass Debate. We need to consider how we are going to release these as I don’t think we can bang them into the LUGRadio mirror system. I think torrents are the solution here, so I will need to run it past Omahn.