User:Northern Man

Over 7693 recordings served, and running for 4 years 7 months 6 days 20 mins.

Main MythTV System

The Hardware

• ASUS P4V8X-MX
• Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
• 1024 MB of Ram
• Antec Fusion Black 430 Case, with LCD
• Zalman CNPS7700-Cu CPU cooler
• Enermax low noise power supply ( The Antec power supply was noisy, recycled this one from a previous case
• NVIDIA GeForce 6200 Video Card
• Kworld ATSC 110 Capture Card
• Hauppauge HVR-1600 Capture Card
• LG 50PG10 Plasma Display
• Yamaha HTR N5060 Receiver, with 6.1 speaker system
• Homemade Serial Receiver with recycled EchoStar Remote
• 750 Gb of Storage ( 500Gb + 250 Gb drives )
• Tripp Lite OMNI 1000 LCD UPS

The Software

• Heavily modified MythBuntu 8.04.1 OS
  • Only piece remaining of original install is the splash screen on startup
• MythTv 0.21
• Xymon Network Monitoring
• MediaWiki for storing configuration information
• NUT for monitoring UPS

TV Sources

• Channel Master 4221 UHF TV Antenna
  • Channel Master CM 0068DSB VHF/UHF/FM Spartan 3 Outdoor Pre-Amp
• UHF Yagi antenna, cut out of a Radio Shack antenna Model: VU-190 XR I had lying around
  • Channel Master CM 0068DSB VHF/UHF/FM Spartan 3 Outdoor Pre-Amp

Both antenna's are mounted on a chimney mount, and the Channel Master is pointing at the CN Tower, while the Yagi is pointing at buffalo. With this setup I currently receive 18 HDTV Channnels, and 1 SD channel. TVO Ontario is the only GTA TV Station not broadcasting in digital yet.

Mplayer Config

One of the things I have never been able to find is a really good mplayer config file, that works really well with my setup. So after alot of tuning over several months I have come up with this config, which I feel works really well for me, YMMV. I have this in my ~/.mplayer/config file.

# Write your default config options here!

#General setup
fs="yes"
zoom="yes"
quiet="yes"
nojoystick="yes"
cache="8192"
sws="0"

lavdopts=threads=2:skiploopfilter=all:fast=1

# Audio options

ao="alsa:device=spdif" #audio out
ac="hwdts,hwac3,"
mixer-channel="Master"
srate=48000

# Video options

vo="xv" #video out
zoom="1" #Allow sofware scaling if you use x11 for vo from the commandline
noaspect="1" # disable predefined aspect ratios ( XVID )

#Display

double="yes" #double buffering(recommended for subtitles)
monitoraspect="16:9" #Use for a widescreen laptop so keeps 4:3 content from stretching
aspect="16:9" #Use for a widescreen laptop so keeps 4:3 content from stretching
framedrop="1" # For slow machines

#subtitle code

#set this if you haven't copied your preferred font to ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf
font=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/impact.ttf
ffactor="10" #black outline
sub-bg-alpha="0" #background color ala closed captions
sub-bg-color="0" #black to white
subfont-text-scale="3.7" #truetype font scaling
subfont-blur="1" #Slight blur

#This sets the postprocessing into overdrive using all possible spare cpu cycles to make the movie look better
autoq=100
vf=pp=de,hqdn3d
subpos="90" #By default subtitles are too low
subalign="2"
#turns off xscreen saver...sometimes
stop-xscreensaver="yes"