[mythtv-users] Suitable laptop/notebook with nVidia out via HDMI?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2016 17:30:50 -0800, you wrote:

>I'm starting to think about replacing my old Lenovo M58P with something 
>else for my combined MythTV front end and back end. As I was sitting 
>there looking over at the collection of hardware the other day, it 
>occurred to me to wonder about using a somewhat recent laptop or 
>notebook for the job. I see that there are laptops with nVidia video 
>hardware, but my initial reading has shown me that there are gotchas. 
>One of the search results I found was http://blog.langfinger.org/?p=203 
>which says, "... Nvidia does not support the Linux platform officially 
>yet ..." So I see that it's not as simple as asking if the laptop has 
>HDMI out from an nVidia graphics chip.
>
>Has anyone tried using a laptop as a MythTV front end and back end machine?

Yes, I have been doing this for years, on my old Asus laptop and now
on my MSI GT70.  I chose my laptops for MythTV compatibility - the
GT70 has 3 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2 and 1 x eSATA ports, and a pretty high
level Nvidia card, along with Intel video that is also MythTV
compatible (although I did not know that at the time I bought it).  It
was quite expensive (just under NZ$3000), but most of that was for the
massive screen size (17"), fast processor (quad core, 2 threads per
core), and 12 Gibytes of RAM.  It is a "gaming" rated laptop.  There
are much cheaper alternatives if you do not want such big
specifications.  In fact, the Intel builtin video is almost as good as
the Nvidia - less configurable, and only able to do low level
deinterleaving, but the display is quite acceptable.  The drivers for
doing that came along about six months after I bought my GT70, so I
did really need the Nvidia card when I bought it.

I have two DVB-T USB tuners I can use on it, using its USB 2 ports -
in Mythbuntu 14.04 LTS, the tuners do not work properly on the USB 3
ports.  I have an eSATA drive mount for one external hard disk (1
Tbyte), and I use my Stardom eSATA / USB 3 four drive mount on a USB 3
port.  The Stardom is normally connected to my main MythTV box on
eSATA using a port that does drive multiplier, and has three huge
drives in it for my videos, music and pictures collections (6 Tbyte WD
red, 8 Tbyte Seagate Archive (SMT), 4 Tbyte WD green).  The fourth
slot is used for a recording drive - at home, it is another 6 Tbyte WD
red, but when I go away, I swap it for a 3 Tbyte WD green that is used
for recordings on the laptop, and leave the 6 TByte WD red on a USB 3
mount on my home MythTV box.

While I can record using the laptop, and it is a full backend /
frontend setup, I normally just copy recordings to its recordings
drives from my main MythTV box for me, and from my mother's MythTV box
for her.  I use Mythexport "On the go" mode for doing that.  I have
found that quite often, when I am away, wherever I am staying (eg
motel), the available TV aerial does not have tunable signals on it,
as it uses some sort of community antenna and distribution system.  So
it is better to have the TV I want to watch already with me.  And if I
need to use the laptop in Windows, I can not have it set up to record
in MythTV.

With the 17" screen, it is fine for two (or even three) people to
watch from a couch with the laptop on a chair in front.  Smaller
screens would likely only work for two or even one person at once.  I
have a piece of particle board I cut to put under the laptop so it
will sit flat on a chair - without that, the vent holes under it tend
to get blocked.  I cut the board to be a bit wider than the laptop so
I have a place to put the cables and USB tuners safely without them
getting bumped by people.  It also allows me to place one of the USB
tuners so that its IR remote port is facing the right direction for
use with its remote control.  It is a Hauppague HVR-900r2, so it has
an excellent full feature remote, with mostly the same buttons on my
home remote.  To round out the equipment needed to use the laptop, I
have a socket strip and extension cord.  With the laptop and two
external drive mounts, I need three sockets to plug them all in, and
the positioning of the laptop on a chair in front of a couch is
usually well away from the nearest wall socket, so an extension cord
is often necessary.

The speakers on the GT70 have just enough volume to be able to be used
for watching TV, as TV sound is usually recorded at higher levels than
it should be for best quality (it will be clipped if it ever is
recorded at max levels, and is normally compressed to prevent that).
For music playback from quality CD recordings, the volume is too low,
so I have to use my headphones for that.  I have tried to get my
mother's Logitech UE Boom Bluetooth speakers to work with it, but the
current 14.04 Bluetooth drivers do not work.  I prefer my headphones
for music anyway, as they are audiophile quality Sennheiser HD600s.

The other problem is the display - the laptop's LCD is fixed at 60 Hz,
so recordings or video that has other frame rates gets displayed with
a bit of judder.  Unfortunately, New Zealand is a 50 Hz country, so
that means most of what I play on the GT70 has that problem.  If I
connect an external display or TV that can do other frequencies, the
video cards handle that and I can get judderless playback.  This is
likely to be a difficult problem to overcome as most laptop displays
now seem to be fixed at 60 Hz.  My old Asus laptop was able to do 50
Hz for me.  However, if you are in a country that uses 60 Hz, it
should be fine to have a 60 Hz laptop.

Getting Mythbuntu to work on the GT70 was not too difficult - most
things worked with the standard Ubuntu drivers and settings.  When I
first got the GT70, I just copied over my MythTV partition from my old
laptop, and I found I had to uninstall most of the customisations I
had done for it and go back to the standard settings.  There were two
exceptions to that.  First, the Ethernet port did not work with the
standard drivers.  I had to recompile them to add the new hardware ID
for the variant of Ethernet hardware being used, but after that it
worked fine with no other modifications.  That change is now part of
the standard drivers, so I no longer need to do that.  I think I had
to update 14.04 LTS to 14.04.2 LTS (Hardware Enablement Stack upgrade)
to get the updated driver.

The other incompatibility was the backlighting for the keyboard.  It
is run from a USB port, and eventually I found someone who had written
USB software to run it on a different MSI laptop, but which also
worked on the GT70.

There is one bug in the Mythbuntu audio that I have not yet found a
fix for - to get the speakers to work in Mythbuntu, I have to plug in
and unplug the headphones, after boot is complete.