Well I havn't posted here in a very long time, primarily because due to non-ideal circumstances I find myself living by myself in a part of the country without FreeviewHD (now that I finally have a TV worth watching it on too), and without a dedicated PVR. So I watch analogue TV using my desktop and MP and try to get DVB-S working.

However this did occasion the need for a new remote, and since the MCE USB remote I own doesn't seem avaliable anymoreI bought the Genius Remote 300 ($50 at TasTech). I am sharing my thoughts here in case others are interested as I havn't seen (granted I havn't looked hard) many comparable options to replace the Microsoft version.

The Remote 300 is designed as a Windows Media Center Remote and hence has all the buttons the MS remote does. However the layout is different and in my opinion unintuative. Most of the buttons are small and the logo's on the shortcut's (Live TV, DVD etc) very hard to make out. Rounding out the negatives the r (read the entire post)...

So since it is something that causes people trouble, on these forumns and others, i have created a page on HTPCnz for setting up guide data in NZ. It isn't complete yet, hopefully when done it will contain complete instructions for setting up, mapping and updating guides for all the major operating systems and PVR software. If those with some expertise on this, especially with GB-PVR and Windows Media Center could have a look and maybe add some detail that would be great. It could also do with an eye over the Linux instructions, I don't currently have a myth box in front of me so went on memory for the specific steps.

Finally I havn't quite figured out referencing on that site which means two things: I need someone to point out how, and guides I have copied from elsewhere (MP wiki, mythtvnz list, reven) have gone somewhat un-recognised. So if you see your handiwork there, feel free (of course you di, its a wiki!) to add a thank you note to yourself.

Hopefully othe (read the entire post)...

Well I have done a lot of work since my last post - end result: running MP1.0 RC3 having tried and failed with a full-time MythTV install.

Turns out the changes made to Myth came from the main devs, not Paul's source. However soon after the changes came in mythttv-fixes he updated his source so now it is built on the latest version of myth, with the loopfilter option in the GUI. So armed with an extra gig of RAM and a new WD 640GB hard drive, I did a complete re-install to Mythbuntu 8.04.1, adding Paul's PPA and setting up FreeviewHD+Prime.

And what did a find with more prolonged testing than earlier: the machine will hard lock after a period of time (up to 12 hours, at least with me) and watching true HD (with its higher bitrate) is very very borderline on my 5200X2, in fact there is occasional skipping. And forget any sort of background commskip, made TV unwatchable.

So after spending a long time moving files over a dodgy network, changing RAM config (read the entire post)...

Title says it all really, I can now watch TV3 in MythTV with my 5200 X2. There is a bit more to the story though:

Since my last post I went through, and with the help of a fellow TR member, enabled skiploopfilter and rebuilt from source. It didn't work so I basically left it. Came back to my test install today to have a fiddle with C, and thought why not, update the box and try TV3. And its works! And now in Playback Profiles there is a GUI option to enable skiploopfilter so it looks like Paul Kendall has updated his source (confirming that with him now).

Moral of the story, an affordable MythTV-based FreeviewHD PVR is now a realistic proposition without any changes beyond getting Paul's updates. A 65W 5200 or 5400 will do the trick, find a motherboard with the required (Linux-supported) video and audio outputs and you are good to go.

For me I have 2 more very busy weeks of uni before study leave (my last ever!), so won't be touching anything until the (read the entire post)...

I have spent this morning re-installing Mythbuntu onto a partition of my USB drive so this is just a further update on the situation for those who were interested.

Last time I put Mythbuntu onto the entire drive, rendering it useless (Windows can't see a ext3 partition) for data transfer etc. So I had to take it off, and this time I only used up about 18GB. Also used EasyBCD to have the boot manager on the SATA drive and don't have to plug the USB drive in to reboot the machine.

So after all the setup (Nvidia drivers, my version of lircrc, getting Paul's patches) got it all working like before. Unfortunatly TV3 is still the same, so now my mission begins to learn how to edit source code and rebuild mythtv so I can enable skip loop filter. If anyone here can help with that please leave a comment.

I did make one improvement this time around by using a new guide source from nice.net.nz. I have used Reven for ages (and will still use it on Windows) but his (read the entire post)...

Over this weekend I have had a chance to properly try out MythTV with Freeview so here is an update on where I am at for now.

Firstly I did a major hardware swap, moving my Antec PSU, 3800 and Nvidia 8600GT to my main box in return for a cheap X-Power PSU and 5200 X2. The X2 provides more grunt for software decoding H.264, enough to work in Windows but not myth as will be seen.

So with Mythubuntu 8.04.1 + latest upgrades, including from Paul Kendall's repository, I monitered the CPU usage over SSH whilst testing out the channels. I got around 40%-70% CPU overall, obviously the SD channels where lighter on the CPU than HD with TV3 causing the max load.

However despite not maxing out the CPU TV3 was unwatchable, freezing for half a second every 1-2 secs. This is a problem a few others with similar CPU's on the mythnz mailing list have and the solution is changing the 'skiploopfilter' settings, I think forcing myth to drop frames rather than lag. However w (read the entire post)...

I have noted earlier in this blog that Mythtv does not work with FreeviewHD due to lack of audio support. Well thanks to work of Paul Kendall (see his site here) and others it is now possible to use Mythtv as a HTPC delivering FreeviewHD. There are a couple of caveats to that of course; a powerfull CPU is required as there is no hardware H.264 accelration, and you have to be prepared to do a little bit of extra work in setting the machine up (not much different with fiddling with codecs with MP or GBPVR though).

So to test it all out with my machine I downloaded the latest version of Mythbuntu (8.04.1) and installed it onto my external hard drive. There are then a few step I had to go through before I could run myth-backend setup:

1) After restarting from the CD to the hard drive, I added the following line to the bottom of /etc/sources.list (open terminal, type 'sudo nano /etc/sources.list'):
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/paul- (read the entire post)...

I think I have gone on about MythTV enough, what about the other major open source media center application, which has many of the features of myth and the added bonus of being Windows-based and hence a lot more familiar territory for most people?

I have run Mediaportal 1.0 for a couple of months now, it's currently at RC2 and has been pretty good. You may have noticed my HTPC system isn't exactly top of the line, a single core and 1GB of RAM means Vista doesn't run very smoothly. MP can be sluggish, I think the remote lag has been fixed, but often loading a channel and setting up a recording can be slow. The worst problems come when recording 2+ shows, especially if some are HD, and watching another at the same time. The show I'm watching will skip or pause, I don't think the hard drive is fully up to the task.

Now plenty of people of these forums already run Mediaportal but there also seem to be plenty running GB-PVR and MCE and to be honest I'm often not sure (read the entire post)...

OK so I have already talked here about why I prefer mythtv to MediaPortal, it's not an exhaustive list but I think it makes a pretty compelling argument for Mythtv. However what makes an even stronger compelling argument for MP is its support for NZ's DVB-T broadcasts, and hence I use it. The latest from the mythtvnz mailing list is that Freeview HD is now working well in myth with the patches from pkendall, so hopefully it is just a case of getting the updates to ffmpeg etc into the main mythtv 'trunk' (is that what it called?) and we will be away!

Anyway I should get to the point of this post. I want to list a couple tips I picked up for improving mythtv here, as I alluded to earlier, myth does require more work than MP or GBPVR but it's worth it:

1) Adding FM radio. I have no idea why this isn't included by default, it can't be hard and all other major HTPC programs have it. To get it in myth requires a bit of a hack, the setup instructions are here. As they no (read the entire post)...

I have always intended on keeping track of the power consumption of various iterations of the media center, and to this end I bought one of those $20 warehouse power meters a few months back. Here are some plower figures, I will eventually update the sidebar info with this.

The original media center, with 1 TV card and on-board graphics idled around 50W, and used about 60W under load (which was generally less than 50% CPU, it didn't have much of a workout with a hardware MPEG2 encoder TV card). I think it maxed around 80W.

The current iteration, with the 2 cards and the 8600GT now averages at 88W (average from 94 hours running), this is all-inclusive and incorporates restarts. The peak value is 140W, that is a startup load though, it uses about 100W playing back TV. Idles somewhere around 80W.

The machine runs 24/7 currently as it has all our shared music, plus file syncing between desktop and laptop and daily backups. Plus I don't have the time to setu (read the entire post)...