More Mythbox

My evenings tinkering with the mythbox have been fruitful.

It turns out that the tuning issue was a problem in MythTV. It wasn't storing the channel characteristics properly. Some fixing in phpmyadmin and we're up and running.

I also had problems with suspend to ram when I got around to trying that. It was pausing at resume until I pressed a key. Apparently there was some problem with the timer code, that's fixed in 2.6.23-rc9.

I also found that I'd broken the poor, neglected checksumming support in TuxOnIce (again), resulting in a hang when doing the atomic copy. I'll commit a fix in a while.

So, now the only things I need to do on the mythbox are wait for the support for the remote control, do a backup and finish sorting out the intricacies of watching TV again post suspend-to-ram. Or at least that's all that occurs to me right now :)

Colour TV Output Howto

There are lots of records of people having trouble getting colour TV output. Having just gotten it going, I thought I'd provide an additional pointer to the solution that worked for me:

http://wiki.openchrome.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=TVOut tells you to just include the following settings...

Section "Monitor"
       Identifier   "Monitor0"
       HorizSync    30 - 50
       VertRefresh  50.0 - 50.0
EndSection
Section "Device"
       Identifier  "Card0"
       Driver      "openchrome"
       Option     "ActiveDevice" "TV"
       Option     "TVType" "PAL"
       Option     "TVOutput" "S-Video"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
       Identifier "Screen0"
       Device     "Card0"
       Monitor    "Monitor0"
       DefaultDepth     24
       SubSection "Display"
               Viewport   0 0
               Modes    "720x576" "720x576Noscale"
       EndSubSection
EndSection

Progress on the mythtv box.

The MythTV box is up and running. I'm reasonably happy with it, but still have work to do.

The harddrive controller's power management routines don't seem to be up to scratch - after the atomic copy when hibernating, no more data gets written. I'll have a closer look when I find some time.

The Digital 4 tuner didn't work until I tested it in another computer, running M$. Maybe I didn't hold my tongue right :). It's now working okay (bar the remote - the maintainer says he knows how it works but hasn't found the time yet to write the code). Being out in Cobden, the signal isn't magnificant. I have a Winfast DTV 2000H as well - I should compare them. Failing that, I have a friend who runs an aerial business; maybe I'll have to pay him to take a look at the reception.

Did I mention the configuration before?

- Morex ProCase Mini-ITX 2699 black, 60w Ext PSU, 1xRiser card
- Via EPIA Mini-ITX M/B LN10000EG w/1G C7 nanoBGA2 CPU, DDR2 RAM
- FusionHDTV DVB-t Dual Digital 4 TV Card, Two Channels, PiP, Power Up
- Apacer DDR2-667 PC2-5300 1.0GB, CL5, 64X8 RP
- HDD SATA, Samsung SpinPoint, 250GB, 8MB 7200 SP2504CN
- Wireless networking via a DLink G730AP (powered off USB port)
- Creative 2.1 Speakers
- Mythbuntu (I discovered there's a Fedora MythTV later)