Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kazan on April 16, 2006, 09:21:35 pm

Title: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 16, 2006, 09:21:35 pm: [woot i'm unmonkeyed! thanks guys]

When my fiancee and I quit EQ we had some extra hardware that was going inactive - so I built a mythTV (http://mythtv.org) box (i'm not quite finished - i have to pieces coming from digikey i need to construct an IR receiver to be able to use a decent remote)

she was like "ehh" about it, until she saw it in action. It rocks.

my setup
AMD Sempron 2500+
1GB DDR333
15GB system drive (Fedora Core 5)
2x80GB LVM video storage
1x BTTV878 based tuner (Kworld VS-TV878RF)
1x Hauppage PVR-500 (Dual Tuner, dual hardware MPEG2 encoder board)
Turtle Beach Riviera (sound card)
Radeon 9600SE 128MB

rigged directly to TV

Recording the MLS games that aren't showed online FTW!
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 17, 2006, 01:00:24 am: We've got a MythTV box too, this year.

Strange, really. Jon's been working on it since the summer and it still doesn't work... I wonder if he'll fix it before the end of the Uni year.
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 17, 2006, 08:52:06 am: i set mine up in less than a week, what is he having problems with?
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 18, 2006, 01:03:25 am: Damned if I know. I think he's still working on the 'additional gadgets', such as a homemade remote control for it.

Then there are the hardware faults it's had since the beginning. Isn't it amazing how many ways a hard disk can fail?
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 18, 2006, 08:18:15 am: PEBCAK
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 19, 2006, 01:07:55 am: I doubt it.

I'm supposed to be the Linux freak in this house... Maybe I should have a look at it?
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Fury on April 19, 2006, 01:37:46 am: I fail to see the awesomeness in this if it takes up to a week to set it up properly. Installation aside, setting it up shouldn't take longer than a few hours, and certainly not take all day or longer. But I guess it is to be expected from software that someone has been working on his spare time for four years and it is still in its beta stages.

Meh, should I need something like MythTV, I'd buy OEM WinMCE and be done with the whole setup in one or two hours. MythTV being free and all is nice and makes you feel l33t but its waste of time IMO.
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 19, 2006, 06:57:37 am: reason it took me a week

A) i had hardware on order
B) i didn't do it all in one sitting
C) i compiled instead of installed from RPM

i could have it up on 30 minutes if i wanted to install from binary - I also initially tried setting it up under ubuntu and gave up on that becasue that distrobution is a scuzzy slimeball mess

Fast setup steps:
Build System (30 minutes if all parts already present)
Install Fedora Core 4 or 5 (about 30 minutes if parts already present)
yum update (get your system up to date - this will be the longest step due to downloading)
setup Fedorafaq.org repositories including atrpms (*shudder* i hate atrpms but it has the binaries of mythTV for FC)
yum install mythtv-suite
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 20, 2006, 01:01:22 am: I think our PVR uses Gentoo. It was a stage 3 install, though, so Jon has no excuse for not having ours working properly by now.
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 20, 2006, 08:14:44 am: yes he does - gentoo is crap

the last circuitry componants i needed to build my IR receiver arrived last night - so now i have remote control
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 21, 2006, 01:07:22 am: What's wrong with Gentoo?

I run it on four of my five Linux machines. It was a damn sight easier to get working than Red Hat, Slackware or Debian. Portage certainly seems to have fewer problems resolving complex dependancies than Apt does.

OK, so Gentoo requires an extra gig or so of disk to store files during compilation, but none of my boxen have disks below ten gigs anyway.
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kamikaze on April 21, 2006, 01:37:42 am: Gentoo is also far less stable than Red Hat, Slackware, or Debian.

Portage isn't very polished either. It's implemented in python (unless they've finally made that switch to C++ they were always planning) and as a result is slow and unwieldly. I've also yet to see any decent package management interfaces (e.g. Debian's aptitude or synaptic, Slackware's pkgtool) for Gentoo.

On the other hand, Gentoo's etc-update can be a nicer way of handling configuration file conflicts than in Debian with dpkg.
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Scuddie on April 21, 2006, 01:50:16 am: Shhh! Be careful when slamming Gentoo! Lord knows how many of Maeglamor's minions may be listening... :nervous:
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 21, 2006, 08:00:23 am: Quote from: Descenterace on April 21, 2006, 01:07:22 am
What's wrong with Gentoo?

having to compile everything under the sun, missing packages that are hard to time, etc

Quote from: Descenterace on April 21, 2006, 01:07:22 am
I run it on four of my five Linux machines. It was a damn sight easier to get working than Red Hat, Slackware or Debian. Portage certainly seems to have fewer problems resolving complex dependancies than Apt does.

that's odd since i can have a Fedora Core 5 machine from parts in boxes to fully running linux box in 45 minutes - less than half the time spent compiling Gentoo when you're using every binary package available

like a bunch of the debian based distros they also push ancient versions of various critical system componants (like pam - debian based distros are still pushing .77 when current is .99 and <.79 doesn't support critical functionality)

plus all that recompiling is BAAAAD for a production system ( a mythTV box connected to your TV should be considered such) - it's unsuitable for servers, work development systems, mythboxen, etc.

Downtime is a BAD thing

nvidia and ATI do not officially support gentoo as well

Quote from: Descenterace on April 21, 2006, 01:07:22 am
OK, so Gentoo requires an extra gig or so of disk to store files during compilation, but none of my boxen have disks below ten gigs anyway.

10 gigs? if i install everything in fedora it's less than 3gb
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 22, 2006, 04:26:38 am: I've not had any problems with Gentoo yet, stability or otherwise. Sure, Portage is a little slow, but any major updates on any distro take a long time. I usually just leave the machine overnight.

My only real complaint is that a lot of the ebuilds explicitly prevent 'make' from parallelising with -j1. This means that two processors don't help much.
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 22, 2006, 07:35:41 am: a lot of things don't compile faster with -j1 on multiprocessor systems, and infact sometimes can be corrupted with it
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 23, 2006, 05:01:03 am: Well of course things don't compile faster with -j1. That limits the build process to doing one thing at a time, which actually eliminates the corruption problem. My point is that it'd be nice if builds that can do stuff in parallel did so, because my MAKEOPTS specifies -j at the moment.
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Kazan on April 23, 2006, 10:10:04 am: i had that flag confused - it's the parellelising that can break stuff
Title: Re: MythTV rocks, you should use it
Post by: Descenterace on April 24, 2006, 12:41:42 pm: Only if the makefile was constructed by someone who thinks 'multithreading' behaves the same way on single- and multi-processor machines, or if it wasn't meant to be parallelised.

In the latter case, the -j1 switch should be in the ebuild.

On the other hand, Open Source is about as good at doing the Right Thing(TM) as commercial software houses, with the difference that you're not paying anything for the crap.