[mythtv-users] Lots of bits and pieces...

Tupshin Harper tupshin at tupshin.com
Sat Jun 21 16:40:58 EDT 2003


Working on getting my ideal myth setup going, and I have a variety of 
comments and questions, so I'm going to lay them out all together 
instead of sending mail after mail

1) Went to Fry's this weekend because of specials on two things of 
interest to Myth folk. Got a Maxtor 160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive. 
Normal Fry's price: $199, in store price, $159, $70 mail in rebate, for 
a total cost of $89. Also got a PNY GeForce4 440 MX with tv-out, 
normally $89, in store $79, and $40 mail in rebate, for a total cost of 
$39. Two great deals. Outpost.com(Fry's online site) is offering the 
same rebate on the drive, but charging $169 instead of $159, but at $99, 
post-rebate that's still a great deal.

2) GeForce4 440 MX card works great, except for non-optimal 
over/underscan. Yes, it's configurable in the driver, but only a single 
setting effects vertical and horizontal, and there is no offset 
adjustment for either axis. I get essentially the same issues whether I 
drive it at 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768. For me, it's either too 
short, or too wide, though not by a huge amount. I'm aware of Myth's 
overscan and offset settings, but I haven't had a chance to tweak them 
yet. I'm not sure at what level they function, and whether they affect 
the output of the interface as well as the output of the video. Can 
someone provide a semi-technical description of what these settings 
actually do?

3) Does anyone know of a good source for a cheap atx case that can 
easily hold many (10+) 3.5" internal drives? Those are basically the 
only requirements, with cheap being quite important.

4) Since front-end almost, but doesn't quite, work acceptably over 
802.11b wireless, I'm curious if anybody has opinions on how well it 
could work over 802.11a/802.11g.

5) Adjusting settings through mythfrontend seems to somewhat randomly 
work or not. Sometimes it won't work the first time, and will the 
second, other times, I can't get it to work at all, and I've had to edit 
the db directly. Any idea why?

6) I haven't tried the CVS version yet, so this may be addressed there, 
but are there plans to organize all plug-ins configuration options 
within a single setup interface? Right now, you can configure some stuff 
from the top level setup, others through setup with the plug-in's 
screen(e.g. mythvideo), and mythweather and mythgallery are odder still.

7) If there is a problem with mythfrontend, mythbackend can refuse 
future connections. One example is if my audio is misconfigured on 
frontend machine, it can cause mythfrontend to segfault, after which I 
need to restart backend. Is this backend issue a known/resolved problem?

FWIW, I'm running debian sid on front and back, with the 0.9.1-1 debian 
packages.

-Tupshin



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