one monkey typing

Today's Woot! is a Pinnacle HD card for $20. It'll receive over-the-air and cable clear-QAM signals. Since there's nothing to this but recording the already-encoded MPEG2 signal to hard drive for later playbac, and this card is supported by Myth, I grabbed one. I do intend to get HD working with Myth eventually. It'll only work for local stations, not our satellite, but that's OK. This is pretty much going to go onto the todo heap for at least several months.

I'm not sure that my current box is even fast enough to decode and display HD anyway. It only has to do 720, so maybe.

Last night the MythTV box just went bonk. The database is gone, it boots but won't start the frontend, it will run setup but the key configs are so screwed up that I can't navigate the menus. I have no idea what happened, but I have been suspicious of it for a while; for the last few months it's been doing questionable things; mainly it's been recording stuff that I know damn well it's already recorded, saying it hadn't. The kids say it's been deleting stuff, but the ones I've investigated have been proper (the shows were configured to auto-delete when space got low).

I think it's time for a rebuild.

I've got a spare 250G in my personal machine that's currently just got a big ole' TC volume on it. I'm burning the stuff off that onto DVD to clear it (got another 20 DVDs or so to go) and then I can get started on a fresh Myth build. The drive that's in there is still OK so I haven't lost any video files, I'll mount them in the media area and we'll plow through those in the next few days.

Woohoo! Thanks in the end to some help on KnoppMyth forums, I've gotten the Myth box ready to go. That is, all the software is working. Right now the drive is in a cruddy little box, because the good box has a higher end video card than I have drivers for. I could fix the drivers but honestly I'm not that into it. The machine is a PITA to work on due to having a TV as a monitor.

I have a new video card coming which should work fine, then I can clean up the pile of computer bits lying all over the place. Also at that point I'll need to copy all the ancillary stuff that I had running on that machine; there was some stuff in the web server and a bunch of scripts for pulling comics, and a javascript reader I was working on.

In the basement, I got all the luaun plywood down on the floor last night before bed. Next is drywall, then patching the seams on the floor with levelling compound, then laying the tile, then we can move some of the stuff in and set up preliminary working areas while I continue to work on putting up the island table between the support posts and build the cedar closet. And at some point we'll be building cabinets. We may have a ceiling at some point but at this point I'm not really sure. We certainly need better lighting, but the ductwork is already low enough; putting in a ceiling would lower that at least another 2 inches.

OK, I spent about 6 hours last night (probably as many DAYS in previously failed attempts), and I FINALLY got a working MythTV configuration.

I don't like it. ( reasons why )