{"id":400,"date":"2007-05-16T09:57:11","date_gmt":"2007-05-16T14:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/?p=400"},"modified":"2007-05-16T10:22:12","modified_gmt":"2007-05-16T15:22:12","slug":"mythtv-hd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/archives\/400","title":{"rendered":"MythTV: HD"},"content":{"rendered":"

A long while back I found out that mythtv supports capturing video over firewire. The idea is that as long as one has a cable box where the jack is turned on, it will spit out the complete video and audio signal for whatever channel you are currently watching, even if it’s HD.<\/p>\n

Although I didn’t think my current mythtv machine (Athlon 1700+) would be fast enough to play back HD, I could still use the firewire connection to change channels instead of my current unreliable IR method. I bought a cheap firewire card, and it worked. So I knew that, one day, I could upgrade the machine and get full HD.<\/p>\n

So recently, I dropped 350$ at newegg.com and bought:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
GIGABYTE GA-M61P-S3 Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 ATX AMD Motherboard<\/a><\/td>\n$84.99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+<\/a><\/td>\n$69.00<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
WINTEC AMPO 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800<\/a><\/td>\n$44.99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB<\/a><\/td>\n$129.99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

The upgrade was pretty smooth. Here are the steps.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Back up the old machine onto a firewire drive. (I ran into problems here because newer ubuntu kernels have problem with firewire, and the old VIA chipset has USB issues. Most people would have no trouble here.)<\/small><\/li>\n
  2. Rip out the guts of the machine, leaving only the case, power supply, and dvdr drive. (and one of the IDE drives which is 160 gigs and worth keeping.)<\/small><\/li>\n
  3. Install new mobo with CPU, heatsink, and RAM already attached. Connect the drives. (I had to buy a little molex to SATA power cable, but that was cheap. thanks microcenter!)<\/small><\/li>\n
  4. Also install old firewire card since mobo only has one connector.<\/li>\n
  5. Boot up, see if it works! (I ran into a snag here because I didn’t connect a secondary 12V power cable to the motherboard. The manual helped me figure this one out.)<\/small><\/li>\n
  6. Burn an Ubuntu CD, install. (So easy!)<\/small><\/li>\n
  7. Use synaptic to install mythtv, xine, mplayer, etc. (So so easy. The mythtv packages are very nicely done)<\/small><\/li>\n
  8. Set up new LVM for mythtv data, joining the bulk of the old 160 gig drive and the new 500 gig drive.<\/li>\n
  9. Restore mythtv database and mythtv data (it takes a long time to copy 240 gigs of data.)<\/small><\/li>\n
  10. Wrestle with firewire for a long time trying to get a signal. Peruse the mythtv wiki<\/a>, which contains good solutions.<\/li>\n
  11. Get little things working like lircd, mythweb, my xine script, and surround sound. (I haven’t got surround sound yet, it requires purchasing a little SPDIF bracket and a long toslink cable.)<\/small><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n

      It took a full, busy day, most of which was spent copying the old data and trying to get firewire to work. Everything else was pretty low-impact, including such previous headaches as installing mythtv and configuring mysql. It’s still way too hard for the average user, but at no point did I feel like I was breaking a sweat. I’ve spent a lot of time with mythtv so I know where a lot of the “unbreakme” buttons are. I know I have to set this up, or tweak that option… things that should be defaults but aren’t. I’d say 90% of the difficult stuff was because I was transferring old data and had permissions issues. If this was a new install, the only blocker would have been the firewire issue.<\/p>\n

      All in all, a day well-spent, and now I can record and play back native HDTV streams like they were youtube videos. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to spread hardware all over the floor.<\/p>\n

      <\/a><\/div>\n

      Did I mention this cost me 350$? Compare that to the competition<\/a>.<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A long while back I found out that mythtv supports capturing video over firewire. The idea is that as long as one has a cable box where the jack is turned on, it will spit out the complete video and audio signal for whatever channel you are currently watching, even if it’s HD. Although I … Continue reading “MythTV: HD”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}