Todd Coffey

From MythTV

Mail: tsc at ecoffey dot org

I have really enjoyed playing around with MythTV and my system has evolved with the development of MythTV. I started in February 2003 with a 1G Duron machine, 8G hard-drive, ATI TV Wonder and GeForce2 MX400. I quickly realized this was too slow for the quality I desired, so this machine turned into an Athlon 2100+, 120G HD, ATI TV Wonder setup which then morphed into a backend frontend system with the 1G Duron as the frontend. Then I got another ATI TV Wonder card for the frontend and another 120G HD put together with LVM on the backend so I have 190G of space for recordings. Now I'm seriously thinking of getting an Xbox as the frontend and turning that machine into a dedicated NFS server for MythTV due to frame-drops when deleting large files with MythWeb. And the saga continues... Its been a fantastic hobby that my family can love.  ;-)

I would like to see more documentation about how an average user can make contributions to MythTV. [ You're welcome to come help us out with the User Manual -- Bay Link (2004-09-20T16:41:48Z) ]

Thank you Isaac! Your hobby has spawned a myriad of other hobbies and created new wealth and happiness in the world!

Update (09/19/04): I've had blooming contrast problems with the ATI TV Wonder card in my backend since I had a MB go bad, so I finally decided to ditch it and find another. I replaced it with the Hauppauge 401 FM card and to my amazement, not only did the contrast problem go away, but so did all these little analog tuning issues that I had always assumed were due to the LONG cable between the cable wall port and my main backend server. This makes me seriously question whether these same tuner artifacts in my frontend machine are due to the crappy ATI TV Wonder card. But now I'm back to two tuners and the main one is fantastic! Oh, and BTW, 0.16 installed flawlessly and has some very nice features which I'm starting to try out.  ;-) Big thanks to all the developers!

Hi :) - If you're having problems deleting files try using the xfs filesystem. It's the suggested solution for this issue. -- David Greaves

An excellent suggestion, thank you for bringing this to my attention. Now I just need to figure out where to move 150G of recordings so I can reformat that partition. Looks like its time for one of those 200G hard-drives... :-) -- Todd Coffey

Nah, this is what you need : LVM on RAID, 1Tb - droool! ;) -- David Greaves

(BTW, it's good practise to 'subscribe' to your homepage - that way whenever it changes you get an email.)

Update (06/02/05): I'm starting to dislike Gigabyte MBs! I've had two now that failed. The first had the onboard video fail and after a reboot it wouldn't come back up.  :-( The second (due to emergency repair issues, I had to get another), had the onboard audio fail and I had to replace the audio card.  :-( And I think its very misleading that the SoundBlaster Live 24bit cards (ca0106) say they're supported by alsa, but the mic/line-in doesn't work on these cards!  :-( (I now have a used SoundBlaster Live emu10k1 card) Well, I've upgraded to 0.18.1, and its working very well. My next two purchases will be: 200G+ HD and PVR500 card. As to LVMRaid, have you looked into EVMS? Supposedly you get all the benefits of software raid with LVM and you get automatic bad block detection. -- Todd Coffey