[mythtv-users] fc4.ppc, Mac Mini and MythTV

Brian Edmonds mornir at gmail.com
Sat Jan 7 05:21:42 UTC 2006


On 1/6/06, Chris Ribe <chrisribe at gmail.com> wrote:
>  If one was going to use a Mac Mini as a dedicated frontend, OS X would seem
> to be the obvious choice for the operating system (I understand that Matt is
> using Fedora for other reasons).  Not only is it the only operating system
> anybody has gotten Myth working under on that platform, but it is included
> in the price of the machine.

Umm, no.  I've had mythTV running just fine on my Debian Mini since I
bought it, what, last summer?  Works pretty much fine with 0.18.1.  I
tried mythMusic, and thought it unfortunately totally missed the point
of the myth.  So far as I could see, it could only encode and play
music from the single machine, while mythTV encodes and plays anywhere
on your local net.  I want something that does that for music too, and
haven't bothered with it since.

WRT to the static problem mentioned, I've got two comments.  First on
the volume, the Mini's soundcard doesn't have a mixer, so there is no
software volume control, hence it's all at one level.  Second, I had
the same problem, and I suspect it's an endian issue somewhere in the
MP3 encoder myth uses, as I have the same problem when I try to encode
the audio from my ConvertX to MP3.  I've had to capture raw PCM this
whole time, since that's the only audio I've been able to get working.

Note that it's not MP3 in general, as I can play my mp3 files just
fine with mpg123 on the Mini, and I've also encoded some with lame,
and they were fine.

There is one other problem with 0.18.1 on the Mini (and probably PPC
Linux in general) that I worked around, and that's with the thumbnail
previews.  When they're on the backend crashes almost every time the
frontend requests one.  I turned off preview requests in my frontends,
and it's been rock stable since.  I've got hundreds of hours of
recording on it.

As for why use a Mini?  It's because it's quiet, low power, looks
good, has all the ports I need, and is pretty cheap too.  I just
upgraded the RAM from 256MB to 1GB last weekend, and now it can even
run the backend, the frontend, and a regular login session with other
pigs like firefox without bogging down like a dog into swap.

Brian.


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