[mythtv-users] Thermaltake DH101 case

[Ronald Frazier]

> http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1319&ID=1426

I have that case and it is really nice as far as construction, layout,
design, etc. The exhaust fans in back are a bit small and thus noisier
than your typical 80mm or 120mm fans (I modified the wiring on mine to
run them at a lower voltage, thus quieter).

As far as the LCD, that's an iMon display (and it is the LCD version,
not the VFD), and theres a lot to say about it. On the upside, it is a
pretty cool layout for the display with all the icons, progress bars,
ability to display arbitrary graphics in the center, etc. On the
downside, I find the contrast of the display is kind of sucky (as you
brighten up the text, the background also brightens too much), and
from 6-10 feet away sitting down, I find it very difficult to read the
text that is on it.

As far as support goes, there is no official support or even protocol
documentation from soundgraph. When I first bought mine (about 2 years
ago) people had reverse engineered it and written lirc patches to
support it, but then soundgraph released a new version with the exact
same functionality but different internal workings, so the device had
to be re-reverse engineered and the patches be rewritten to support
the new version as well. Those patches have made it into the main lirc
tree about a year ago.

As far as the remote support goes, it is a windows media center style
remote, which means that although you can use the included remote in
linux, and the IR receiver may work with other windows media center
style remotes (likely but I can't promise), it most certainly will not
work with all remotes (of the dozen or so remotes I own, the included
one is the only one it works with). So if you have a preferred remote
that you already like (as I do), you may need an external IR receiver.
 That's the path I had to take, since I'm not very thrilled with the
layout of the included iMon PAD remote (it has a lot of functionality,
but the organization isn't super convenient for use, IMHO).

As far as the buttons and volume knob on the front panel, those too
function through lirc as regular buttons, so you can do anything with
them that you could do with a remote. However, if you wanted some sort
of fancier interface where the buttons bring up status info on the LCD
or something, you would need a custom application to do that.

As far as tying the LCD into mythtv, when I first got involved, it was
just supported as a generic LCD, which meant you got no advantage of
using the icons and such. At one point, I though I recall reading in
the forum here that somebody had made a patch which was supposed to
add support for the icons, but I never looked into it so I don't know
where that went. I was working on my own custom application, and I had
released a working initial version and was close to releasing an
update, but then I got sidetracked, and then myth 0.22 came out and my
app stopped working reliably with it, and with all the other problems
(limited IR support and poor readability from a distance) I sort of
lost the motivation to fix it when it didn't turn out to be a simple
fix.

---
Ron Frazier