tensixtyone

I’ve been quite busy over the last two weeks, catching up on home projects and other things. After a few quick fixes and features sent over to the LottaNZB guys I was added to the development team, which is quite a change for me considering the last project I was on was over 4-5 years ago. Anyway, it’s been good to get my Launchpad user ID” back in use as the LottaNZB project is hosted on their services.

As well as LottaNZB, I’m also adding to the Python bindings for MythTV. At the moment the existing bindings only support simple operations and I’m expanding it out to abstract out most of the major concepts within the DB, for example channels and programs. Hopefully, they’ll provide useful in the future when I need to do a channel rescan.

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I hate adding channel icons, in MythTV is one of my pet peeves. Since the last time I rescanned it has improved a little and the uk_rt XMLTV grabber now offers up lyngsat logos for the channels Radio Times cover.

Knowing of the impending doom, this time I tried to avoid it. I’ve now created a PHP script which will look through a data file, download the channel icons to the required path, and spit out a SQL script. At the moment it is very simple in that it doesn’t connect to MythTV and check what channels you have, it just blanket downloads all that it knows about.

I’ll get round to posting it in the next few days.

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I’ve been running my MythTV box for a few weeks now and its slowly getting bogged down with numerous recordings that I want to keep, Non auto-expiring recordings are taking over the majority of my hard drive and I need to setup a system of getting them off the box and onto DVD.

MythArchive, i hear you scream, unfortunatly i’ve not got a DVD-R drive in the Myth box. So which method to use? MythTranscode or Nuvexport? My previous experiments with Nuvexport have outputted low quality rubbish no matter what settings i’ve been using, I must be doing something wrong. MythTranscode on the other hand seems to convert my DVB Mpeg2 recordings to Nuv format with little size difference.

I’ve hunted around previously for settings and processes but got nowhere, can anyone advise me on their setup or point me the in the right direction? All my recordings are from pure DVB sources so i’m working with MPEG2 files.

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Over the last two weeks i’ve been consumed with the need to setup a MythTV box, PVR and TiVo-esq features bundled with the power and verciticy of Linux, yes I know that reads like some marketing document but I don’t care. Jo was totally bemused as to what I was doing, all she could see what the several hundreds of pounds of hardware purchasing.

My old mobile sold, as did a few pieces of idle electronics from the house, and from nowhere I’d managed to drum together £200 for the inital parts. CPU, Motherboard, 1.5Gb RAM for £70 from eBay, Nvidia FX 5200 for £14, 200GB HDD for £22, also eBay. Chieftec Case from my local Freecycle and various other parts from my electronics “stash”, Throw in a DVB-T, DVB-C and analogue tuner and i’ve got a MythTV box ready to go.

So, was it worth it all? I’d say so. While I only have one tuner its still a very flexible platform. Myth’s recording logic is very good, especially when combined with reliable listings such as Radio Times, the box can detect programs for the next 14 days and schedule in times to record the program you’ve selected, avoiding conflicts wherever possible. This small feature alone is enough to use MythTV, while other software probably supports it as well this is the first PVR/DVR system i’ve used.

As for the PAF, Jo has said its around 7 at the moment, which is good for a system which has its little quirks and crashes every so often when recording programs, mostly due to corrupt feeds.

More will come with experience.

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