I have written up the story of my 3rd annual Superbowl Commercials
party, this year featuring MythTV driving to different HDTV displays
on two floors. It also includes some broadcast flag info.
The blog introduces it at:
http://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000178.html
and the full story with photos is at:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/superbowl-commercials.html
(There's still some chance of an Associated Press story on this, since
the idea of using a PVR to skip the show and watch the commercials is
quite against the normal image one sees.)
On this list, let me add some Myth related technical notes
a) This was my biggest stress test of Myth, having a backend record
HDTV and two frontends playing the recording while it is still on in
independently, all in HD at 720p. I don't know if it would have worked
at 1080i, fortunately Fox is 720p. The HDTV and projector were both
native 720p anyway.
Generally it worked quite well, no major problems.
b) The remote frontend was poor at fast forwarding compared to the local
frontend. I was not using NFS mount since I have been experiencing
NFS problems and the Myth protocol streaming generally works fine. FF was
very jerky. We mostly used 10x, 20x and sometimes 30x speed. I think
even the most recent CVS has some improvements on this.
c) As has been noted elsewhere, there is only one bookmark per program, not
per frontend, so when the folks upstairs set a bookmark in the Simpsons
episode (they got far ahead of the downstairs by skipping the halftime)
it caused the downstairs folks to think it has missed recording it.
d) During my first test of dual watching, I managed to crash the master
backend with only this diagnostic:
2005-02-06 01:11:14.294 Slave backend: myth has left the building
Mutex destroy failure: Device or resource busy
However, it never repeated this problem and so I can't give much more
information. This was CVS from about Feb 1.
e) You have to relearn your reflexes about commercial skipping to do the
reverse. Having a fast-forward-compnensator that only applies at the high
speeds and not at the 5x speed would be a big plus for quick repositioning.
f) A lot of the commercials were in HDTV, or at least widescreen, quite
a bit different from regular HDTV watching.
g) I deleted the game by reflex too, earlier than I wanted. I notice in
CVS plans are already underway for deletes to just mark items as ready for
delete when space is needed, which will allow undo, which is great.
h) Generally people were quite impressed with Myth and the fact that it
was free. Being able to call up firefox in the middle of the game to
watch the godaddy ad also impressed people
i) The minor bug that causes the OSD to display the program as much longer than
it is after it has finished recording during semi-live watching (ie. watching
a show that is not finished recording) was noticed by the partygoers, that's
about the only one that was noticed, along with jerky FF over ethernet.
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