When we moved to California, I sold my trusty old Yamaha home theater system, because I knew I was going to transition to HD after the move, and ol' Yama wasn't up to it.
Fast forward five months, and we're still pumping sound through the built-in speakers on the TV. I wanted a nice-sounding system, but didn't want to run speaker wires all over the room. Then I discovered this baby. 3 HDMI inputs, 4 digital audio inputs (3 optical, 1 coax), and one regular RCA analog audio input. Outputs HDMI video to your TV. Less than $300 on Amazon. Sweet.
We just took delivery on Friday, and setting it up was a breeze. I only hit one wrinkle: my mythbox outputs HDMI, but that is a video-only signal (I have a DVI-to-HDMI converter plugged into the box's video card). It doesn't seem possible for the CT100 to receive a video-only HDMI signal and handle audio separately through another input. Fortunately, my TV does allow for this. I cracked the manual and discovered that the advanced audio menu allows you to specify an alternate audio input for any of the HDMI inputs. So, the mythbox HDMI goes directly to an input on the TV, rather than getting routed through the CT100 like the other components. The audio signal is also routed to a TV input, and then sent back down to the CT100 through the TV's digital optical out. So, a bit circuitous, but it works!
Monday, March 16, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Eye Candy
Ok, enough complaining! Here's a couple of screenshots showing the fruits of my labor in getting my mythbox up and running.
My beautiful KDE 4.2 desktop, scaled down from the native 1920x1080 resolution:
And here is the MythTV main screen:
Ain't it purty?
My beautiful KDE 4.2 desktop, scaled down from the native 1920x1080 resolution:
And here is the MythTV main screen:
Ain't it purty?
MythTV can forget how to decode mpegs
Today I was surprised to find that my mythbox was unable to play back any of my recorded programs, including some of which I had watched as recently as yesterday!
By starting mythfrontend from a konsole, I was able to see an error message like:
Hmm, really? MythTV can't decode an mpeg file?
After some surprisingly futile googling, I eventually hit on the explanation: Last night, I had instructed my mythbox to record a movie on some channel that I apparently don't actually get. So the video file for this recording was somehow corrupt. Ok, so how would that cause mythtv to be unable to play the rest of my recordings? Is the corruption contagious? No, I think the answer is in the thumbnail preview shown for the selected video in the list of recordings. Since the invalid video was the first in the list, mythtv always tried to show its preview. Somehow, the decoder found this file so distasteful, that it refused to chew on any of my other mpeg files!
Anyway, I deleted the offending recording: problem solved. Since it would be nice if MythTV didn't choke up like this when given a corrupt video file, I filed a bug report describing the problem.
By starting mythfrontend from a konsole, I was able to see an error message like:
NVP: Couldn't find a matching decoder for: [path to mpeg file].Hmm, really? MythTV can't decode an mpeg file?
After some surprisingly futile googling, I eventually hit on the explanation: Last night, I had instructed my mythbox to record a movie on some channel that I apparently don't actually get. So the video file for this recording was somehow corrupt. Ok, so how would that cause mythtv to be unable to play the rest of my recordings? Is the corruption contagious? No, I think the answer is in the thumbnail preview shown for the selected video in the list of recordings. Since the invalid video was the first in the list, mythtv always tried to show its preview. Somehow, the decoder found this file so distasteful, that it refused to chew on any of my other mpeg files!
Anyway, I deleted the offending recording: problem solved. Since it would be nice if MythTV didn't choke up like this when given a corrupt video file, I filed a bug report describing the problem.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Make mythfilldatabase Run Automatically
Mythfilldatabase is supposed to run automatically, but it wasn't happening on my new myth-0.21 setup. I found the answer on this page: Although it is the backend that is in charge of running mythfilldatabase automatically, the checkbox to activate it is in the frontend config! I'm pretty sure that this checkbox was in the backend config in 0.20, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that it's now in the frontend. But, whatever. It works now.
Oh, and that page also pointed me to a perl script that will download icons for all of the channels in your lineup. Although, the name of the script has apparently changed, because it's called channel_icons.pl on my system. For some bizarre reason, the perl script was gzipped on disk, so I had to gunzip it before running it. Come on, people, it's only 21kB unzipped! I think my disk can handle it. Anyway, once I gunzipped it, I invoked it like:
Oh, and that page also pointed me to a perl script that will download icons for all of the channels in your lineup. Although, the name of the script has apparently changed, because it's called channel_icons.pl on my system. For some bizarre reason, the perl script was gzipped on disk, so I had to gunzip it before running it. Come on, people, it's only 21kB unzipped! I think my disk can handle it. Anyway, once I gunzipped it, I invoked it like:
perl /usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/ icons/master_iconmap/channel_icons.pl --find-missing --rescan. It worked like a charm, but I had to manually search for many of the channels.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)