[mythtv-users] Misc problems, ideas and general thoughts

[Jonny B]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:11 AM, homer <homer39 at bigpond.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>        I've been playing around with MythTV for a while now and although I've
> had my fair share of problems, I think I have just about got myself a
> pretty sweet system.
>        Just a quick run down on my setup:
>        ASRock P2i65G mother board with 2gb cpu (could be better)
>        2Gb ram (does the job nicely)
>        1x 120GB hdd (for the system)
>        1x 80GB hdd (for the video capture)
>        1x 640Gb external USB hdd (for backup)
>        Fedora 9 (fully updated)
>        1x DVT1000 (remote not set up... too lazy)
>        1x bttv card (for foxtel/austar)
>
>        I'm using my Myth box as my local network server aswell, (eg wireless
> broadband through Tel$tra, samba, apache, squid etc)

First, I would replace your BTTV card with a PVR. I had a BTTV
Hauppauge WinTV-Go Plus. It worked out really well initially, but came
with the unfortunate side effect of being unable to record and
playback at the same time (due to CPU usage, software encoding and
decoding...) I've now got a PVR150 in it's place. Works great.

Next - you should have put the system on the 80 gig and used the 120
for recordings. More realistically, the 640 should be used for
recordings. If that isn't acceptable, 1TB drives get cheaper everyday.
$109 for a Hitachi on many online sites. I found western digital green
power 640 gig drives for $69 a piece (got 4 of them now) on newegg.com
a month or so ago.

Fedora's constant forced upgrade cycle also annoys me a bit. I used
fedora 3, 4 and 6, and then switched to opensuse 10.3. The 10.3 switch
was almost 2 years ago now (maybe it has been 2 years...) and I have a
suse 11 frontend, but the backend remains stable and up to date with
10.3. I think that's more a personal issue than an improvement though.

>
>        Had tried a DTV2000H rev j but compatibility issues forced me to buy an
> older card and recycle my bttv card for Foxtel/Austar.  Was hoping to
> only need the one capture card but hey, what do you do?

Put as many capture cards as you can in. I currently have 2 Pinnacle
PCTV HD cards and a Hauppauge PVR150 in my master backend, and the
Hauppage WinTV-Go Plus (bttv) card is currently in my frontend solely
for infrared remote functionality. Once I get a NFS export issue
ironed out (I can only seem to export read only, so I can't have the
frontend run a slave backend, because it can't write to disk) I will
be putting it back into service with a PVR150 or 500 (not sure, I've
got bids on both... if I win both, they'll both go in).

>
>        The problems I'm having at the moment are probably very trivial to most
> people but they are driving me insane.
>
>        1) viewing/recording in MJPEG mode is unwatchable (ie: plays 1 sec out
> of every 5)
>        2) viewing/recording in rtjpeg mode is perfect but results in 2gb files
> for 30mins of normal viewing
>        3) sound through bttv/Foxtel/Austar ok, but still a little crackly even
> with mp3 setting on high( value=0)

First, I would not record in MJPEG. The first thing I did was set my
default recording profile to use xvid with bitrate around 900-1000. I
don't recall my MP3 settings, but I think they were in the 0-1 range.

Replacing this bttv card with a PVR will also clear up a lot of this,
because right now you're doing software encoding. The PVR does this
all on the card, and just exports a MPEG2 file to disk. With default
recording settings, I get about 1gb per hour.

>        If I had a choice of only 1 problem to fix, it would definately be #1.
> I (at some point but no idea how to return to this mode) had it
> recording/playing fine in mpeg mode which was good because an episode of
> the Simpsons came in at about 500mb.

Look into MP4 formats, if you insist on using the BTTV card. Mine was
a trooper... I actually had 2 of them running at one point (one in the
master, one in a combined FE/BE) and they worked great for 2 or 3
years. The software encoding was what was getting to me... I wanted
more tuners, and didn't want more systems.

>        As I have mentioned in another thread, I think it would be cool if
> while in normal viewing (eg Watch TV) that the system could break the
> files up into 30 minute blocks and delete those that are older than say,
> 2 hours.  This would prevent the hdd from being filled up when left on
> "Watch TV" for hours at a time.
>        Just got word that MythTV is supposed to do this but for some reason it
> is not working on my system,

I believe that myth also has a function to kick you out of live tv if
you haven't done anything (changed channel, paused, rewind/ff, etc)
for a certain amount of time. I don't know why it's not breaking the
files into chunks for you though.

>        Generally, I think that MythTV is a very cool system and if I had the
> time would love to contribute to the source code.
>
>        If anyone has any thoughts on how I could improve my system, I would be
> very grateful.
>
> Thanks,
> John

As I stated many times in my above reply, I believe it's the bttv card
that's going to be giving you the most headaches. By investing in a
PVR150 (I got one for $26US shipped 2 weeks ago off ebay) you will be
solving most, if not all of your encoding/recording problems.

~Jon

~Jon