[mythtv-users] Cheap Possible Frontend

[kanetse@gmail.com]

On 5/10/06, Andrew Hutchinson <ahutchinson.mythtv at googlemail.com> wrote:
>  Why don't you guys just buy Xbox's and then soft mod them?  You can get an
> Xbox on eBay for under $100 and they seem to be about the same speed or
> maybe even faster than the ones you are talking about.
>
>  Add to this the fact that although ugly, they don't look half as bad as a
> normal computer and they are really not that noisy..

As someone who is currently using an XBox as the primary frontend for
a MythTV-0.19 setup, I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with it.

1) The XBox has a lot of trouble decoding MPEG-2 streams if you want
to use time stretching feature on recordings made on a PVR-250.  I get
all these pre-buffering pauses if I try to use my default setting of
1.5X.  My other remote frontends don't have this issue.

2) Updating the XBox to the latest release of MythTV is extremely
difficult, because there is no repository like atrpms available.  So
you're pretty much limited to compiling it yourself, or sitting there
with an old copy of MythTV.  I'm stuck with MythTV-0.19-121, which has
a bug with not being able to detect the commercial flagged in
real-time.  If I could only get XFedora working on it, then I could
make use of atrpms.

3) The XBox doesn't have the horsepower to do HDTV, which has
basically prevented me to going to an HDTV configuration.

4) The 6mm fan isn't exactly the quietest fan out there; eventually I
had to replace mine with an 8mm fan.

Anyone know how I can overcome #1?  Plus, where are the updated repos
for MythTV for Xebian?  I'd love to get my XBox running as smoothly as
it did under my MythTV-0.18/bt8x8 configuration.

Thanks!