[mythtv-users] vmware and per-program commercial skip

[Chad Coulliette, Ph.D.]

Has anyone tried running mythtv inside of linux vmware client, running a windows xp host?  Should that work, or would there be problems with various drivers? 

I liked the idea that Jeff suggested earlier for a per-program commercial skip.  A while back, Chris suggested putting a small box up in the corner that displays the length of the predicted commerial break sounds great. And, somehow allow the user the turn auto skip on and off sounds good.  Several people have mentioned (and so did some other people in various threads) that auto commercial skip works great on some shows and not so great on other shows.  How about combining Jeff's and Chris' suggestion? For example, how about letting the user decide on a per show basis which of the shows should use auto skip and which should display the counter, or no skip at all.  The defaults would be set in the main menu, and that would apply if the user did not enter anything on a per show basis.  But, if they specified no skip on CSI, then it would do that.  Or, if they specified mid level (the new grey box you described) for Enterprise, then that would override the default.  There are different ways the user could enter this information.  On the list of recordings, it could have a small dot, for example, green, red and yellow, for auto skip, mid skip and no skip, respectively.  The user could change the skip setting on a per show basis there.  Or, perhaps it could also be done from the TV guide screen.  There are already red dots on the guide to indicate when a show which shows will be recorded once (single dot) or daily (two dots).  Possibly, the color of the dots could be change to green, red, or yellow, based on the commercial skip method chosen for that show.  

It would also be great if the data for skipping per show was saved on the backend, so that it could be used no matter which front end was used.  The only problem with this is if different users typically use a different front end (like in each bedroom), then they would be changing each others skip settings per show all the time.  Well, ultimately there would need to be a way to enter your user name so that the data base would change over to your skip settings when you watched.  UltimateTV allowed users to enter their names on the TV guide so that they can completely customize the guide on a per user basis, even filtering which stations they want to see in the guide, so having a per user set up or data base for various settings would not be that far off from currently available technology. 

BTW, this may not be the best place to ask this question, but since there are a lot of linux guru's out there, and I was doing a new linux installation specifically to have a better place to run MythTV, I thought maybe I could ask you guys.  I have been trying to install Redhat 9.0 on a box I just built with an MSI 875P Neo mobo, 3.0 GHz P4, 2GB SDRAM, an 80 GB IDE drive, and  2x160 GB SATA drives in RAID 0 via the built-in Promise Fastrak 378 RAID controller.  But, no matter what options I seem to choose, during the very first step of the install, when linux is just booting of the CD, it gets to the disk check, and then fails as it tries to read the what I believe is the SATA drives.  The only chance I have to enter anything or change any options is at the initial "boot:" prompt.  I tried entering "noprobe", but the same problem still occured, so it is not just a hardware probe problem.  I am thinking that Redhat 9 must not have included support for SATA drives, or else no support for the Promise controller.  I thought Promise Technologies had released Linux drivers (binary, no source) for most of their controllers back in July... I saw some annoucement to that effect.  But, when I looked on their support/download web page, the Promise 378 was not even listed on their devices.  Any suggestions?  Does any distrobutions (Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Gentoo, etc.) have built-in support for SATA drives and Promise controllers?  More specifically, a Promise SATA Raid 0 disk config?

Thanks for your help.


Chad




    
 
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