[mythtv-users] Sell mythtv "set-top" boxes

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Mon Jun 2 11:04:56 EDT 2003


At 06:06 PM 6/2/2003 +0200, Ben Bucksch wrote:
>Ray Olszewski wrote:
>
>>We seem to get a thread like this about once a month. Three comments:
>>
>>1. There is already a database of hardware/software configurations 
>>available.
>
>I found that database to be so terrible to be usable. Not enough 
>information, too unstructured.

As I said (but you deleted), "Its format does not include everything I'd 
like to see". I'm hesitant to be too critical of the work done by 
volunteers, especially work I am unwilling or unable (since I don't have 
the upstream bandwidth to set up a Web site here) to volunteer to help with.

[...]

>>I'd love to see Victor describe here the 4 Myth boxes he built, 
>>especially his "best (bang for your buck) system [for] around $350 retail".
>
>yes, but it's only useful with the software config and necessary steps to 
>build the whole system from scratch.

No. Perhaps *more* useful that way, but hardly "only". I would benefit from 
just a hardware list, perhaps augmented by any *unusual* requirements it 
imposes (e.g., need to compile into a kernel support for a rare ATA chipset).

[...]
>>intended use (mainly timeshifting versus mainly long-term storage), and 
>>physical integration with the rest of the user's home-media setup.
>
>I don't see how that massively influences the choices, apart from the case 
>(->mobo) maybe, which could be made explicit as well.

Amount of hard-disk storage. Whether or not the box includes a CD or DVD 
writer. Actual quality of the captures. One-host system or separate backend 
and frontend. Possibly multiple frontends for multiple TVs. Maybe WiFi 
versus wireline networking. Probably more.

>What would have helped me terribly already would have been an advice for a 
>good and well-supported tuner card. I see other people are having massive 
>problems with tvout as well, so add gfx card in the recommondations. The 
>prices don't vary much there, neither does the intended use have much 
>influence, only the country, so that could be of good use.

I agree here. There is a lot of inconsistent information floating around 
about TV out and about the quality of various vidcap cards. Part of the 
latter is due to vendor slipstreaming, like Hauppauge's recent change away 
from a bt878 chip in the WinTV Go. Part of the former is imprecise 
designation of card make and model; another part is vague "it worked for 
me" reports unaccompanied by configuration details (these are especially 
confusing when they turn out to involve familiar chipsets in laptops, where 
TV out is much simpler to enable).

[some good hardware details snipped - Thanks, Ben.]

>>keeping any distro up to date
>
>Can't that be solved by basing on an existing distro and using its update 
>mechanism, getting the packages from the real distro? The real work 
>specific to MythTV is just the config, and there are rarely security bugs 
>in there.

In general, I don't know the answer. I know it would not work reliably with 
Debian, the only distro I am sufficiently familiar with to allow me to 
consider this question in detail. There are three reasons why I believe this.

1. With Debian, you need to pick either Stable (Woody) or Unstable (Sid) to 
sync with. Stable achieves stability by being woefully slow to update to 
current upstream versions of packages (this is an ongoing lag problem with 
xine, for example). Unstalbe is ... well, unstable. It is what I mostly use 
here (everywhere except on my router, actually), so I am used to, every so 
osten, upgrading, then finding that something important has ceased to work. 
Usually, the solution is to wait a few days, and it gets fixed. But that 
would be pretty distuptive for naive users of MythTV.

2. Debian excludes a lot of software that does not meet the DFSG guidelines 
for free software. lame and some video codecs fit in here, as does mplayer 
(last time I checked) -- you can get this stuff, but it comes from 
unofficial archives that are not part of the Debian project. And, on top of 
that, there are things like the nVidia proprietary driver, which you have 
to get from nVidia and you (often) have to compile locally.

3. Debian also lacks some stuff for no particular reason, perhaps just 
because it is fairly new and no maintainer has signed up for it yet. There 
is not much that falls into this category, but the ivtv stuff is an example.

You mention a Debian config. (Woody or Sid?) Perhaps you would consider 
taking the time to turn it into an install script that a user can run, 
right after doing a minimal Debian install, that would --

         (a) install all the Debian stuff the system needs (including 
anything from unofficial archives);
         (b) install all the Myth Debian packages;
         (c) load anything else needed (e.g., the nVidia stuff, or the 
Matrox stuff, maybe the ivtv stuff);
         (d) run a configuration script that set up anything that the 
package scripts do not cover (e.g., all the stuff for handling TV out, 
compiling the alsa modules ... there is probably a lot of kernel-level 
stuff here).

While this would not be as all encompassing as a custom distro, it would be 
a good implmenetation of your suggestion of "basing on an existing distro". 
Properly implemented, it would set up a system for maintenance with the 
apt-* tools, a nice feature. The next step ... making a customized Debian 
install iso (or floppy set) would be fairly easy once the install script 
itself were written.

Perhaps someone who knows Makdrake or Red Hat or [fill in the blank] well 
can comment on whether this approach is more feasible using a different 
distro than Debian.
[...]
>Well, if it helps anyone, I guess I could post my Debian config as well as 
>the list of installed packages. That's a backend only, though, with a 
>single saa7134 (PAL) card.







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