Thanks, Andrew, that links to good Ubuntu pages and Ubuntu looks like the way to go for entertainment systems. That page also has instructions for a mac mini which would make a nice computer for a living room front end. Ubuntu is a good way to go for this kind of thing because they are free of insane US laws that prevent distribution of several key packages.
Anyone interested, and who missed Carl's demonstration, can start with Ubuntu's consice description of what MythTV can do for you here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV This is overkill for me now but it's what my wife and I will set up in our next house and what I'd recommend to anyone with enough money to make things work. The feature that convinced my wife is parental control over cable TV. We'd like to have channels like Discovery but refuse to grant most cable advertisers access to our kids. We also don't want our kids surfing the sewer of other stuff cable has. Myth looks like it has enough control - we will decide what it records and it has ad blockers. MythTV will be working before we subscribe to cable and I should have the money to do that soon enough. What I have working now is adequate for broadcast TV and our small media collection. Detailed Debian MythTV instructions can be found here but I don't recommend them: http://clauretano.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/guide-mythtv-frontend-on-debian-testing-lenny/ The author got things working but I'd rather have the "point and click" experience he says Ubuntu gave him. That can't happen for a US based distribution. The simpler system I made is now tested and reliable on Lenny. The first system I reported worked on an install that was still mostly etch and did not work after a full dist-upgrade to Lenny. With a little more work, I figured how to make vlc work my tuner card, so I no longer need to call xawtv. I made a shell script for recording shows from each channel I'm interested in and I call them with a cron job set up with kcron. For instance, this script records things from PBS: #pbs_record.sh #!/bin/bash -m # records WLBP, channel 27 for durration minutes. # use: pbs_record.sh show_name show_durration # Reception is reasonable. # The show is saved as "show_name-date.mpeg" name=$1 durration=$2 date=$(date +"%Y_%m_%d") cd /home/willhill/movies export DISPLAY=:0.0 && vlc v4l:// :v4l-vdev="/dev/video0" :v4l-adev="/dev/dsp1" :v4l-norm=1 :v4l-frequency=549250 :v4l-caching=300 :v4l-chroma="" :v4l-fps=-1.000000 :v4l-samplerate=44100 :v4l-channel=0 :v4l-tuner=-1 :v4l-audio=-1 :v4l-stereo :v4l-width=640 :v4l-height=480 :v4l-brightness=-1 :v4l-colour=-1 :v4l-hue=-1 :v4l-contrast=-1 :no-v4l-mjpeg :v4l-decimation=1 :v4l-quality=100 --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp1v,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mpga,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=display,dst=std{access=file,mux=ts,dst=/home/willhill/movies/new_show.mpeg}}' & sleep $durration\m killall vlc mv new_show.mpeg $name-$date.mpeg #end pbs_record.sh Wikipedia has a list of US broadcast frequencies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_broadcast_television_frequencies Kcron is simple enough to not require instructions. It is pure point and click. The Debian administration manual has a good overview of cron jobs for anyone who wants to know more about how it works. http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/56 We all got to watch Nature's Artic Bear show last night. One of the usual kid dissasters happened during the broadcast at 7 pm, so we watched the recording from a thumb drive later. Elizabeth, my six year old girl, said she'd love to be able to watch Cyberchase on her EEE. She is at school when that program comes on, so I've started recording it for her and I'll teach her how to get it off our server using konqueror and a thumb drive. It's funny how there's more broadcast than we care to watch even though we only get two channels. A large, well tagged video collection might actually be educational. Imagine that. On Monday 18 February 2008, Andrew Baudouin wrote: > You need the multiverse repository. > > http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Ubuntu_Installation_Guides > _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://mail.brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
