On 1/6/06, Chris Ribe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If one was going to use a Mac Mini as a dedicated frontend, OS X would seem > to be the obvious choice for the operating system (I understand that Matt is > using Fedora for other reasons). Not only is it the only operating system > anybody has gotten Myth working under on that platform, but it is included > in the price of the machine.
Umm, no. I've had mythTV running just fine on my Debian Mini since I bought it, what, last summer? Works pretty much fine with 0.18.1. I tried mythMusic, and thought it unfortunately totally missed the point of the myth. So far as I could see, it could only encode and play music from the single machine, while mythTV encodes and plays anywhere on your local net. I want something that does that for music too, and haven't bothered with it since. WRT to the static problem mentioned, I've got two comments. First on the volume, the Mini's soundcard doesn't have a mixer, so there is no software volume control, hence it's all at one level. Second, I had the same problem, and I suspect it's an endian issue somewhere in the MP3 encoder myth uses, as I have the same problem when I try to encode the audio from my ConvertX to MP3. I've had to capture raw PCM this whole time, since that's the only audio I've been able to get working. Note that it's not MP3 in general, as I can play my mp3 files just fine with mpg123 on the Mini, and I've also encoded some with lame, and they were fine. There is one other problem with 0.18.1 on the Mini (and probably PPC Linux in general) that I worked around, and that's with the thumbnail previews. When they're on the backend crashes almost every time the frontend requests one. I turned off preview requests in my frontends, and it's been rock stable since. I've got hundreds of hours of recording on it. As for why use a Mini? It's because it's quiet, low power, looks good, has all the ports I need, and is pretty cheap too. I just upgraded the RAM from 256MB to 1GB last weekend, and now it can even run the backend, the frontend, and a regular login session with other pigs like firefox without bogging down like a dog into swap. Brian. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
