[mythtv-users] Australian HOWTO?

[Phill Edwards]

No worries Geoff - perfectly reasonable question. I have a 2.4GHz Celeron 
CPU, 256MB DDRAM, 80GB Hard Disk, 64MB NVidia GeForce 440 MX video card. 
Gigabyte mobo with on-board sound and ethernet, plus a TV Excel analogue 
tuner card. I bought all of this off eBay. I originally had an Avermedia 
tuner card but for some reason my PC won't even do a BIOS POST with it in so 
I had to buy the TV Excel one.

All of the hardware seems to work fine for the job so far (although it's not 
fully battle-tested yet). The TV Excel card seems fine but the remote is a 
bit ordinary so I may well invest in a serial IR receiver and hook that up 
to a universal remote sometime.

I have only just (as of last night) got it all pretty much working. From 
here it's going to be down to fine-tuning (I hope!) I used Fedora Core 2 
purely so that I could follow Jarod Wilson's guide and use Axel Thimm's 
rpms. I HIGHLY recommend this as it's probably the best documented, most 
supported solution. Before that I was a Mandrake man. It took me probably 
over 40 hours to get to this point. The main problems I had were:

- getting any sort of picture from the tuner card into xawtv (it was 
working, I was just calling xawtv the wrong way from the command line!)
- getting the remote to work (now working but not loading automatically on 
boot)
- getting the myth channel setup etc working. I had to hunt around for the 
right channel numbers to put into the setup.
- getting xmltv to work - not because of the patchy data but because I 
didn't find the docco all that clear on what to do.

It's well worth it so go for it. If you need any help there's obviously 
quite a few of us Aussies on this mailing list. I'd be only to happy to send 
you my channel settings for Sydney free to air and any other info you need.

What I'd do different:

- consider a DVB-T card (altho maybe not now given comments in this thread!)
- make sure I buy a tuner with a good remote as the remote is your keyboard 
to control everything so it needs to have lots of buttons which are friendly 
and easy to remember.
- I'm also going to buy some fanless cooling gear as the PC is too noisy to 
have on all the time in the lounge.

While we're on the topic of what's good for Aussies, I'd be prepared to set 
up a mailing list for MythTV Australian users. We could keep it private so 
that we could disuss certain options out of public glare as we have a few 
unique issues that seem to affect us only here in Australia. Anyone 
intrested let me know, and if we get a quorum I'll look into setting it up.

Good luck!
Phill

>From: "Geoff O'Callaghan" <geoffocal at optushome.com.au>
>Reply-To: Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
>To: mythtv-users at mythtv.org
>Subject: [mythtv-users] Australian HOWTO?
>Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 20:50:33 +1100
>
>G'day,
>
>Sorry if this is approaching a FAQ, but i'm a newbie with this.  What i'm
>looking for are any docs/howtos from an Australian perspective.  What gear
>have you purchased locally, what works, what's rubbish etc.  What would you
>buy 2nd time around.
>
>If it's too off topic or an often repeated request and don't feel the list
>needs any more emails like this, please email to me direct - i'd appreciate
>it.
>
>Cheers
>Geoff
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