[mythtv-users] MythTV as a DVD player

[Seth Daniel]

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 02:09:10PM +0100, David Watkins wrote:
> Oh and my computer DVD drive was rather louder than my son's remote
> control helicopter, until I found a firmware patch to reduce its speed
> from X52 to something reasonable for lounge use.  I'm not sure if this
> is a general problem or not.


For anyone who is curious SVN trunk Myth contains the ability to control
the speed of the optical drive.  The only problem I had with this is
that some drives are apparently not supported (in my experience that
means at least some SATA drives).  This isn't a Myth issue, but a driver
or, perhaps, libata issue.  I replaced my SATA drive with the same model
PATA drive and everything works great.  Myth will dial the speed down to
12x (the actual value is configurable, from 2x - 12x.  I think the
current default is 12x) and it's very quiet.  This feature was added
back in late January of this year (2007).  I don't know if 20.1 contains
this change.

Some options for those who don't yet want to jump on the SVN trunk
bandwagon:

1) 'eject -x' can change change the speed of your drive (eject -X lists 
   the speeds that are available)

2) cdrom_speed (http://dmpc.dbp.fmph.uniba.sk/~krivanek/cdrom_speed/).
   A very simple C program that will allow you to change the speed of 
   your optical drive.  It uses the same ioctl(2) that myth uses.

3) there are numerous sites that supply patches for the firmware of 
   various optical drives. 

-- 
seth / @sethdaniel.org
Never underestimate the power of a small, tactical nuclear weapon.