The Treehouse Blog » mythtv

MythVideo Thumbnails

balleman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:45:33 +0000

After having been embarrased by seeing Windows Media Center have thumbnails of all video content, I found this script to populate the thumbails in MythVideo from within the video. A lot more useful for me than the manual IMDB lookup process that I think MythVideo has natively. Definetly spruces up the MythTV box!

PVR remote upgrade

balleman — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:33:40 +0000

I’ve had a Logitech Harmony 550 for a few months now, but I’ve only used it to replace the remote for the TV and receiver up to this point. More recently, but still awhile ago, I bought a serial IR receiver (yeah, should have make it myself, but was lazy). This evening I finally put the pieces together and got MythTV working with it. Fortunately, someone already has a decent remote template and config files for the Harmony which I put to use. Between the Harmony and the receiver, it works at almost any angle, so I’m not losing as much flexibiltiy from my RF-USB remote as I thought.

PVR-500 w/ Samsung tuners – FC5 to FC6

balleman — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:41:21 +0000

When I purchased and installed my PVR-500 this fall for MythTV stuff, it had very poor signal quality. I attributed this to my cable provider, and bought a ridiculous +24dB amplifier from WalMart to rectify the problem, which it did. After upgrading the box from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6, the reception on the box was awful. I confirmed that the change in kernel from 2.6.17 to 2.6.19, or the accompanying changes to the ivtv driver were the cause. After some research, it turns out that I have an “evil” Samsung tuner card, and that in 2.6.17 the internal amplifier on the tuner is not activated by the Video for Linux drivers. So, my original amplifier purchase was to compensate for a software problem. After removing the amplifier (not just turning it off as I had been foolishly trying as a test), the reception was mostly better. Some channels are better than before, but some are worse, and overall I think this was not a good change. However, there is no software setting for enabling/disabling the internal amp (apparently no good reason to turn it off), so I’m going to go with the internal amp instead of maintaining a custom kernel on the box, which is always a pain.