hrm. still not getting any love with firewire capture in mythtv. mythbuntu autoconfigured everything for me but i’m still unable to access my sa 4250hdc. one issue was that my mythtv user wasn’t part of the ‘disk’ group, and w/out that i’m not going to be able to access /dev/raw1394.

unfortunantly i’m still going to have to figure out what’s up with my serial ir blaster…. i just saw this pop up in /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log after i restarted the backend :

2008-02-22 20:32:54.401 FireDev(001BD7B3BACC0000): The Scientific Atlanta 4250 HDC is not supported by any MythTV Firewire channel changer.At the moment you must use an IR blaster.
2008-02-22 20:32:54.410 SetLastChannel(2): cleared: no

boo! ignore the rambling after the fold…..

(more…)

i finally got around to backing up my old mythtv install, and i grabbed the latest test mythbuntu to play with. the setup was really straight forward, although the installer didn’t want to create a partition on a new sata drive i installed prior to the fresh install.

hopefully the lirc install/config was as easy as it appears, it listed a few options under the serial uart ir blasters… scientific atlantic cable box was one of the options so i’m hoping it works. the firefly remote wasn’t listed but there were options for snapstream x10, ati/nvidia x10 kernel space, and ati/nvidia x10 user space. i chose the regular x10 option.

Mythbuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 now available

Today we are introducing second Mythbuntu 8.04 alpha image. With this release, we are providing mirroring on sponsored mirrors rather than a torrent only release.It is very important to note that this release is not compatible with Mythbuntu 7.10 or any other MythTV 0.20.2 based distribution.

Changes from Alpha 1:
Lirc
* Rudimentary transmitter selection support is available for all devices but the pvr-150.
* Include support for lircrc files that are generated to ease the editting process.
* Include support for lircd.conf files to nicely organize lircd.conf
* Customizable options for remotes not included.
* DKMS support. If you have modules that get upgraded after 8.04 comes out, you can patch them via lirc-modules-source manually, or grab a lirc-modules-source from a future Ubuntu/Mythbuntu testing release and simply install it without any manual patching necessary.

Themes
* All themes are modularized into their own packages, so systems can be further streamlined
* Community themes. All of Justin H.’s wonderful themes have been included by default.

MythTV 0.21
* This release is based on the release-0-21-fixes branch which was created recently to prepare for 0.21′s release. Please report all bugs that you find related to MythTV 0.21 to the upstream bug tracker at http://svn.mythtv.org

Resolved Issues:
* Most of the bugs that were reported about the 7.10 release have been resolved. Please refrain from using non-alphanumeric characters for passwords in the installer however, as some issues are still pending with that.

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We appreciated all comments from the last release and would love to hear what you think of this release. Please make comments to our mailing list, on the forums (with a tag indicating that this is from 8.04 or hardy), or in #ubuntu-mythtv.As previously,
If you encounter any issues with anything in this release (including ubiquity), please file a bug on launchpad:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/mythbuntu/8.04/[here]

i’m sure i’ll find some bugs, i have a mythbuntu 7.10 cd just waiting for another fresh install if mythbuntu 8.04 doesn’t want to play nice. 2 months till the final 8.04 release and then the final mythbuntu 8.04 should be out. i’m hoping firewire works better in this release.

the install just finished, just waiting for it to boot (hrm. why does lirc like to hang on boot?)

i think my current mythtv box is a little long in the tooth. it’s fine for a mythtv frontend, but as a back end it’s just not cutting it anymore…. time to start researching a new mythtv backend. the asus p2-m2a690g looks like an interesting case for a mythtv backend/frontend

the case itself is $185 (#) adding 2gb of mem is $65 (#) 2.6 5000+ brisbane ($99 #) another the interesting part of the box is that it has hdmi out.

there are a few places online that presell these with linuxmce or mythtv installed so it might actually be a viable option.

i have a few lists of ‘known good’ htpc/mythtv hardware that i’m going to have to pour through… if i’m going to build a box i might as well research what’s out there.