MythTV Trial
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT
Several weeks ago, my Windows Media Center started having problems. TV playback would stutter and the CPU was pegged at 100%. After looking for solutions on the web, I deinstalled all codecs and then reinstalled NVidia PureVideo. Now TV and DVD’s wouldn’t play at all! Since I was tired of continually hassling with Media Center, I decided to finally give the Linux based MythTV a try.
To make the installation easier, I hooked up a new hard drive and tried the combined MythTV Linux packages. I first tried KnoppMyth. While the setup ran okay from the disk, when I rebooted it got stuck at a black screen. Rather than futz around with this, I moved on to the next package MythDora.
MythDora worked better and I was able to install it and get to the point where it saw channels with my FusionHDTV3 card – after a long process of figuring out I needed to use the DVB drivers for this ATSC card! However, it wouldn’t talk to my Hawking USB wireless ethernet adapter, and there didn’t appear to be drivers on the disk for it. It was also having problems with the drivers for my NVidia 8400 so the playback was really slow. Ok, time to move on again.
Finally I tried the MythBuntu package. This worked quite well seeing the USB wireless ethernet right away and after a reboot, directing me to install the NVidia open source drivers. However, when I tried installing Flash into Firefox (to watch TV shows from the web site) I found out that Flash doesn’t support the AMD64 version of Ubuntu that I had installed. Ok, fine. I reinstalled the i386 version of MythBuntu and the Flash installed into Firefox. However, on ABC the playback was very jerky, redrawing the screen slowly in bands, especially in full screen mode. And on NBC, it wouldn’t work at all since they have their own player that only works on Windows and Mac.
Other problems with MythBuntu were the following:
- On startup, I had to type in the password for the keychain so it would get the wireless WEP key. I also had to unlock the secondary hard drive that stored all the files because it was formatted with NTFS
- The MythTV interface was designed for geeks and not easy to use.
- Most HD shows played back in an area smaller than the full screen and showed the black jaggy line at the top (that carries the teletext).
- The keymapping was a mess. There were three ways of jumping forward in different amounts, and the keys worked differently depending on whether you were playing a movie, DVD or TV.
- When watching movies, it didn’t remember the last position you were at, but instead started each time at the beginning.
- It didn’t support my AVerTV Combo PCI-E card, so I could only record or watch one channel at a time.
- It didn’t hibernate or go into standby.
Now with a sufficient amount of work, I am sure I could fix most of the things in the above list, but I was still stuck with not being able to TV online, which is really helpful when it misses a show, or there are too many on at the same time to record. So rather than keep futzing with MythTV, I have decided to go back to Media Center and see if I can get the codecs working again.