So here’s the first thing, the TV tuner driver installation. This page is a godsend and according to the article, the latest firmware from linuxtv.org gets rid of the hanging problem.

(fast forward 3 hours)

And I’ve found out that it seems to have done just that, I’ve had it going for about 3 hours now and it hasn’t frozen at all, awesome stuff. installing the tv tuner driver was a breeze with the above site and I didn’t hit a single glitch. I’ll probably get stuck back into it tomorrow and sort out the VFD, which doesn’t work at all, and configure the remote. Which it does recognise, but the buttons are just all wrong. But it’s starting to look pretty good considering I’ve really only spent an hour or so on it.

So a while ago I dove into the world of Linux based HTPC’s, namely, MythTV. I have all the hardware. a Silverstone LC20 Media case with Soundgraph iMon Pad remote control and VFD display. I run o’ the mill MSI motherboard with an AMD Athlon X2 4000+ CPU, 512MB of RAM, 250GB IDE Hard drive and a Hauppauge Nova T-500 Dual HD digital TV tuner. For the record. I DID get it all working, everything, the remote, the VFD the TV tuner, it was working quite well. But there were issues, both due to drivers and my laziness. The TV tuner driver wasn’t super good, after a few hours it would simply hang and not pick up any channels anymore, and the remote wasn’t particularly good because I never really got around to configuring it properly. Back in the day I went for Mythdora, probably the simplest Myth TV distribution out there. It uses Fedora, which was new to me, yum installs and whatnot. I had to do a whole mess of things just to get the TV tuner going and the VFD, I had to download drivers, make, build, all that fancy Linux stuff that I have never really bothered to learn. This time, I’m going for another recently released package, Mythbuntu, which is like Mythdora, but based off the Ubuntu distribution. It seems to have a much bigger community so I’m hoping driver support and general setup support is a bit better.

So I’ve just started to run the Mythbuntu installer CD now, and I’m going to post everything that I do, mainly for my own reference if anything, and it may help others along the way. The standard install process for Mythbuntu is incredibly easy, put in the CD, run the “install Mythbuntu” icon and follow the Wizard, which is what I’ve just done. The iMon PAD remote was in the list of supported remotes, which is nice, whether it works or not is another question. My first place of business though will be the TV tuner, which apparently has much better support in the latest kernel, but we’ll see.

So I got my copy of Leopard Friday arvo at around 6:30, started installing at my mate’s house in Melbourne at around 8:30, went out on the town, got rightly pissed got back around 2 and we spent till about 9am playing with Leopard anf reformatting my Macbook rather than sticking with the general upgrade. It was a fair nerd session, justified though due to the amount of cigarettes and beer consumed throughout. I’m pretty bloody impressed with it, the showed off features that most know about are all good; Quick Look, Spaces, Cover Flow, the new Dock, it’s all very pretty. Time Machine has annoyed me a lot though, only through the fact that I can’t use my iPod as a backup device, which is just silly, I can only assume that someone will release a fix for this. The new photobooth stuff is rather fun, there’s some nice new screensavers, iTunes comes with some extra visualisers, which I think were already there in the same version on Tiger but I never noticed. It’s definitely spaces that’s the standout, I use to use Virtuedesktops in Tiger but this is much smoother and the way the desktops change is much more stylish, and it works seamlessly with Parallels. Definitely worth the buy.

ABC News has recently revamped the design of their site some time in the last month, and it’s very impressive, a smooth, clean design with really easy access to every news article, audio, video and podcasts, they’re now using a flash video player for their video news bulletins which can go full screen (like, really fullscreen) and it allows youto build your own playlist of news items. There are full site preferences to change your audio and video formats if you want, change the site to fixed width or variable and set the state you’re in. They’ve really hit the nail on the head with this new design, I can’t think of any other news site (as in, TV/Newspaper/Radio based news sites) across the world that even comes close to what ABC News has put together here. Other news providers could definitely take a leaf out of their book. Hell, even all their images for their stories are significantly larger.

So last night I was up till all hours messing with my MythTV media box again. This time trying to sort out my iMon Pad remote woes. While doing this I managed to patch, compile and install a linux app for the first time. It’s actually less brain hurty than I first expected, and the install of the patched driver for my remote worked quite well. It’s now a matter of getting the remote config to work well with MythTV, currently the D-pad is pretty much useless. The reason for this is the remote pad is designed to be used as a mouse, so it sends signals like a mouse, very rapid pings, as opposed to a standard remote button. I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. For now I’ve configured different keys to work as a d-pad, which is perfectly acceptable. So the remote works, the DVD player/ripper works, the tuner works, TV-Out framerate is tops, the EIT tv guide is acceptable for now. So, tonight I will be removing my set top box and DVD player from their place above the TV, and replacing it with my Mythbox. It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve still got things to do to it, but it’s working, yay. And I just remembered I need to get the wirelress card working first, damnit. Well, almost there.