[mythtv-users] MythTV on XBox

[Wouter Lagerweij]

(For some reason posting this went wrong, yesterday.
Sorry if there are any double messages!)

On Sun, 2005-01-09 at 16:28 -0800, Joe Votour wrote:
> > Hmmm... I'm interested... My crystal x-box is too
> > noisy. I'm planning on
> > slowing down the fan a bit, but if anyone knows a
> > better way.
> > 
> If you flash a modified BIOS, you can change the fan
> speed of the rear fan (although I've read that the
> regular XBox BIOS already sets it to 20% of normal
> speed).  However, I found that the GPU fan in the 1.0
> XBox (which I have) is the noisy one by far, I just

Thanks, this is useful information! I have never run my xbox using 
the regular MS bios, so it may be that I only have to change 
a setting for my modchip bios to get it to quiet down!
Since the Crystal xbox is a 1.6 model, it doesn't have a fan 
on the GPU, so I won't have to try that hardware hack. 
(Thank god! :-)

> > I've used xbmc for a while, and it works very well. 
> > There's even work going on in the xbmx forums for a
> > python script that
> > can be used as a (limited) MythTV front-end.
> > It allows one to schedule recordings, browse
> > existing recordings, and
> > even view them, as long as their in myth's mpeg2
> > format. (no mplayer
> > support for the mpeg1 and mpeg4 myth formats,
> > unfortunately.)
> > And lately, people have even been working on getting
> > live tv working!
> > (with the same mpeg2 caveat, so I haven't seen
> > this...)
> > 
> This would be absolutely awesome.  Perhaps a stripped
> down MythTV GUI that offers options that only really
> apply to the XBox, such as watching TV/recordings,
> DVD/VCD playback (if VCDs even work in your XBox,
> CD-Rs won't in mine, for instance).  I use dual
> PVR-250's, so I don't have a problem with the MPEG-2
> restriction (although not everybody is equally
> blessed).

The XBMC python script is now hosted on sourceforge ( 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmcmythtv ) so if you
want to give it a shot, that the place to go.
It's not very useful for me, yet, because of the mpeg2
restriction, but I just saw that there now is a mythstreamtv 
project, that might help out in that respect.

Playing DVDs, CDs, or video files and such is not implemented in the
myth script, since XBMC does those jobs very well on its own.

> One of these days I plan on making a stripped down
> theme that still looks good, but helps out with memory
> usage on the XBox for MythTV...  Well, I keep telling
> myself that, maybe I'll get to it one of these days. 
> ;)  In the case of the XBox, MythTV without Linux
> would really be good, if nothing else, but to save
> some RAM and maybe eliminate the hard drive swapping
> activity.  But, unfortunately, a huge task.

That might be nice. If I'm ever going to really use myth on linux on the xbox,
I'm going to at least flash a bios so it boots linux directly. At the
moment the boot time is my main reason for preferring a xbmc solution.

Wouter