Marshall's Weblog » MythTv http://www.mickelson.org Embiggen Your Mind Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:13:36 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 MythMusic, Mac OS X, and iTunes http://www.mickelson.org/2006/11/07/mythmusic-mac-os-x-and-itunes/ http://www.mickelson.org/2006/11/07/mythmusic-mac-os-x-and-itunes/#comments Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:02:26 +0000 Marshall http://www.mickelson.org/2006/11/07/mythmusic-mac-os-x-and-itunes/ Tonight I set out to sync my iTunes library up with MythTV. I have been wanting to create some playlists on the Myth box, but I find the playlist “editor” (if you can even call it that) for MythMusic just a bit kluggy. I found the script that is embedded in this post which will take an iTunes xml database file and create corresponding playlists in the MythTV database, but in order to try it out, I needed to update the Music folder on the Myth box with the music on my Powerbook. Enter this nice tip. I simply mounted the Myth box on the Powerbook, tweaked a few parameters in the rsync command and off it went.

Update…
I had to modify the original script for Myth 0.20. You can find my updated script here. (Right click and choose Save As…)

]]> http://www.mickelson.org/2006/11/07/mythmusic-mac-os-x-and-itunes/feed/ 3 MythTV: Episode III – Revenge of the Myth http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/16/mythtv-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-myth/ http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/16/mythtv-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-myth/#comments Sun, 16 Apr 2006 06:07:49 +0000 Marshall http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/16/mythtv-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-myth/ Well, today was a looooong day of configuring stuff. I got around to purchasing a wireless keyboard and mouse as well as a S/PDIF cable to connect the DVD drive to the soundcard digitally. I embarked on what I figured would be the most difficult and time consuming part (and what I think was the most important part) of my MythTV journey, configuring the sound. I have a good digital receiver and I wanted DVD’s to play at 5.1 surround or AC3 or DTS, whatever the DVD disc supported. After hours or reading forums and blogs around the net, I came to a point where I thought I had everything configured. So the next thing to do was to attemp to hook the Myth box into the stereo and TV. As soon as I turned it on, I saw the computer POST on my TV. All was going well so far. I started up X and attempted to play a DVD and got no sound, so I went into alsamixer and started messing with some settings until the DVD was playing through my stereo system. Something was still wrong though, I was only getting 2 channel audio. I quick Google search landed me with this command:

mplayer -ac hwac3,hwdts, -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv %s

mplayer was now sending AC3 audio through the pass-through in the sound card and the receiver was chewing it up and spittin out 5.1 glorious channels of dolby digital sound!

All fine and dandy, right? Wrong. I wanted to use xine for DVD playback as it supports DVD Menus and mplayer does not. Another quick Google search (there were countless ones today) and I had a command which would work with xine — except it didn’t. After reading about audio all day, I knew I had to putz around with my xine config and possibly my /etc/asound.conf file. 2 hours later, here is what I came up with:

asound.conf file

pcm.cmipci {
        type hw
        card 0
}

ctl.cmipci {
        type hw
        card 0
}

pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave { pcm "spdif" }
}

.xine/config

audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through

The xine config file tells it to pass all audio through to the receiver. Now I can launch a DVD using this command:

xine -pfhq --no-splash dvd:/
]]> http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/16/mythtv-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-myth/feed/ 2 MythTv: Eposide II – Attack of the Masked Packages http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/14/mythtv-eposide-ii-attack-of-the-masked-packages/ http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/14/mythtv-eposide-ii-attack-of-the-masked-packages/#comments Sat, 15 Apr 2006 04:18:34 +0000 Marshall http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/14/mythtv-eposide-ii-attack-of-the-masked-packages/ Spent the day compiling Gnome and a few other things. I ran into a little snaffu when Mozilla wouldn’t compile. It would crap out complaining that it only supports 32 Bit ELF files. Turns out I had a mysterious x86 USE flag littering my make.conf file. After I deleted it, all compilations went fine. Next up is the MythTV build. Version 0.19 is masked in Portage so I set these options in the /etc/portage/package.keywords and 0.19 was on its way.

media-tv/mythtv ~amd64
x11-themes/mythtv-themes ~amd64
media-plugins/mythbrowser ~amd64
media-plugins/mythvideo ~amd64
media-plugins/mythnews ~amd64
media-plugins/mythmusic ~amd64
media-plugins/mythgallery ~amd64
media-plugins/mythcontrols ~amd64
media-plugins/mythweather ~amd64
www-apps/mythweb ~amd64
]]> http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/14/mythtv-eposide-ii-attack-of-the-masked-packages/feed/ 0 MythTv: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/13/mythtv-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/ http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/13/mythtv-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/#comments Fri, 14 Apr 2006 02:37:14 +0000 Marshall http://www.mickelson.org/2006/04/13/mythtv-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/ So I finally broke down and purchased the parts to build a MythTV box. I got a nice Antec Overture II case and an Athlon64 3000+ to power it. Assembling all of the pieces took longer then I thought as I had to remove the motherboard twice, once to attach the processor fan correctly, and the second time to install some risers so that the board was the correct height to install the PCI card. I am installing Gentoo on it as we speak. Kernel config took a long time as I had to make sure that all of my hardware was supported. Once completed, the kernel compile took all of 5 minutes!!! I remember back in the day when this would take over an hour. Ah, the good ole days of linux. Have I awakened a sleeping giant? What adventures await around the next corner? Stay tuned for the next episode of MythTV, The Revenge of the Myth, or Oh Boy, Time to Emerge It.

Update: After 3 kernel recompiles to rid myself of framebuffer support and to add support for my SATA drive (doh!!), I can now boot into the command line without needing the Gentoo boot CD. Hurray!!

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