MythTV

Our basement remodel is done. We've got an awesome family room with bamboo flooring (bought at half price at the Habitat store - environmentally friendly!), recessed dimmable lighting (using CFL's – also environmentally friendly), and all the wires for speakers and such run through the walls! I also just ditched Comcast for Dish. I ordered a second Dish receiver just for the MythTV box.

Now I have the perfect place for my MythTV! I've purchased updated hardware for it and its going to be a really awesome family entertainment computer.

I've replaced my old MythTV guts and used it for the playroom/living room MythTV box. It still works great for all the basics, but it just wasn't going to cut it for my plans for the new MythTV box. It is going to be running all of our daily file and media server needs. I'm going to shut down our old file server to save the electricity. All of its functions (mostly file sharing and backups) will move to the new MythTV.

So once you have your MythTV setup and connected to your TV, how do you continue to manage it with just a remote control? Well there are lots of options. There is the obvious solutions like VNC. VNC is nice, but it can be cumbersome, even on a local network segment.

But for things that don't require a "desktop" I like to use X over SSH. It's faster and more responsive than VNC. One of my favorites is when I have to run mythtv-setup. It works great using ssh. To run it remotely from my Mythtv I run the following

ssh user@mythtvbox -CX mythtv-setup

The "-C" turns on compression, which generally speeds things up. The "X" tells ssh to forward an X Windows session for the app to your desktop. It works really nicely. 

You can even do this with the mythfrontend as well. Its just faster if you have some configuring to do than to run around and plug in a mouse and keyboard and sit on the floor 3 feet in front of your 50' LCD TV. But don't expect to be able to stream video that way! :)

I've been working on my MythTV quite a bit lately. With the new baby, my hobbies have taken a turn towards things I can work on in short hour long chunks :). I've been having this weird problem with changing channels. When the channel changes, the auto-detect feature for Progressive or Interlaced video would incorrectly choose Progressive. I am using the PVR-250 card. It has RCA, COAX, and S-Video inputs. For some dumb reason I was messing around with using the RCA input. It turns out that anytime the cable box menu would appear on screen during the channel change, that the auto-detect would detect progressive and not interlace. All I had to do was use the COAX connection and it stopped having that issue.