I was busy cleaning up the utility room and working out the remote and a few other things with mythtv.

Finally the utility room is clean and you can walk through it. I am working out a few storage ideas so the room will be organized also.

I have finished putting in a few jumppoints and cusomizing my lircrc file to use some of the unused buttons on the mce remote. Hopefully not to much will change when I get the 880. At least the mce remote I plan to use up in the bedroom will be ready to go.

I am having some problems with the xorg.conf file. I had 1024×768 working for a bit but now the screen is showing 800×600 again for some reason. After I get that figured out I will put in the twinview portion of the config and hook it to the tv to see how that looks.

I have not done to much as far as making changes to my myth setup in the past day or so.  Working on getting the slave backend to production status so I can move it upstairs to our bedroom tv.  I have to make sure that the tv will take svideo or video and audio from the pc though.  It is a really old tv and I hope it has video and audio in puts.

I have it finally acting as a slave backend all the way though.  I have been playing around with a few different mce remote configs also.  Think I will just customize the first config I started with and be happy.  Looks like the harmony 880 may ship today or tomorrow.  Hope to have it by middle of week next week.  Man amazon is slow to ship product.

Well got my box with my mce remote last night. Hooked it up to my fc6 box and rebooted. The thing just worked. I then went in to my main myth box and hooked it up. Did a manual modprobe and restarted lircd and then started irw. It was working. We were watching a show so as soon as that was over I logged out of X and back in and the remote was working in mythtv. Basic functions are working great. Now to make a few customizations for some of the bottons that are not in use. I am very happy with the purchase. I think the remote will work great on the upstairs tv also. Just have to program the tv power button and the volume buttons and I will be all setup up there.

I was able to watch Sundays episode of 24 last night. No problems at all and it was a great picture. I then watched last nights episode of 24. That was not as good. Only becuase commericals were not flagged so I had to skip through them on my own. Commercials flagging in myth takes a bit of time but man, it just works. It sucks using a wireless keyboard to control myth right now but I hope to have at least the mce remote working by this weekend. Well that is if they ship it in time. Ordered it on sunday through amazon, not sure when they will ship becuase it is actually shipping from pc universe. Amazon has great prices but they are not the fastest shipping stuff. I ordered the harmony 880 from amazon also. That is coming from amazon, they show it not shipping until the 19th for some reason. Oh well. I should get the two items I ordered from mwave tomorrow. I ordered 1gig of memory for the slave backend I hope to put in the bedroom and the 7100 nvidia I want to try in the main myth box. Those two items should go in very smooth. I will be interested if I will see any difference in playback and cpu usage when I switch from the 6100 with 128 meg onboard 512 shared to the 7100 with 256 meg onboard.

UPDATE: Just after I posted I got an email.  It was from amazon.  The mce remotes shipped monday.  They should be here tomorrow but it looks like they shipped out of IN, they are already on the truck out for delivery today.  I may have two working remotes later tonight if time permits.

Well the mythbox made it through the night without any problems.  We did not end up watching anything on it last night but it recorded a bunch of shows.  All were comm flagged this morning.  I almost have another myth slavebackend/frontend ready to go.  I will probably make it a slave tonight so I can use it to flag commercials.  More memory will be in later this week for the box.  I all honesty I probably can bring it upstairs and have it ready at the bedroom tv so when I get the mce remotes I can start using it up there.  The other linux box I have running dapper and it is a bit slow and needs more memory also.  It takes quite awhile to flag a sd program and way to long to flag a hd program.  But if it is doing nothing else, I might as well have it flag for me.

Since everything seems to be working so good with mythtv. I have finally decided what remote I want to use in the basement with the main mythtv box. I have ordered a 3 pack of the mce 2005 remotes off of amazon. I only need one and actually only want to receiver part of it. I figure I might as well get the 3 pack since I plan on putting another frontend together for the bedroom tv next. I now have an extra to play with if I need it and it really was free since the price of a 3 pack was the same as getting 2 separately. I plan on using the mce remote until the harmony 880 shows up. I have been thinking about getting a harmony remote and I really like how the 880 is setup. I almost went with the 550. I went through a setup on the 880 and it did everything I was looking for and jenny like that remote the best. I got the 3 mce remotes and the 880 for cheaper than retail on the 880 so I am happy. Still this project is getting expensive now. All because I did not want to have a monthly fee for the tivo series3. I think in the end I will be much happier and it will be cheaper than getting 2 tivo series3 units. And I can currently record 5 shows at a time. If I had 2 tivo3’s I could only record 4 shows from what I understand.

Tonight I checked mythweb and 4 out of 5 tuner are currently in use. I am not watching anything on it right now but it is recording 2 hd shows and 2 sd shows. Load on the server is .05 most of the time. It is using about 5% of the cpu. A slave backend is currently flagging another show for commercials. That box is pretty slow but I bet it will be finished in another 30 minutes or so. At 9pm we will watch a show that is hd. I will see then how it holds up to a pretty heavy load. At that time it will be recording 1 hd show and 1 sd show. I would think that the slave backend will be flagging commercials also.

I was doing some reading on xorg.conf files and I think I may have a winner now. I was amazed at what one line can do.

Option “UseEvents” “True”

That one line made cpu usage go from almost 100% on an athlon 64 3500 down to around 50% usage.

Here is what my Device and Monitor sections look like.
Section “Device”
Identifier “Videocard0”
Driver “nvidia”
VendorName “Videocard vendor”
BoardName “nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0163”
Option “Coolbits” “1”
Option “UseEvents” “true”
Option “NoLogo” “1”
EndSection

# Panasonic PT-AE900U Projector
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Panasonic PT-AE900U”
Option “DPMS”
HorizSync 30-70
VertRefresh 50-87
ModeLine “1280×720” 74.52 1280 1312 1368 1676 720 724 730 750
+hsync +vsync
EndSection

Also I enable deinterlacing with the following settings:

Go into Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback. Set the prefered decoder to libmpeg2, the deinterlace option should be set to One Field.

And as a extra, I also added this line to my xorg.conf file on my amd athlon 1700xp and I can now watch hd material on this box. Once I get more memory for it I think that will be a great box to put up in the bedroom to replace the replaytv up there. Just have to get a new box going for the frontend for the projector. Then I will have a dedicated server/backend and two frontend/slave backends. I think that will be a perfect setup. Currently watching House on fox and it is a perfect picture and I have about 40% cpu idle still.

Not really sure what did it but I have the xorg.conf file saved and the screen is correct on the projector right now. Think it had to do with the screen section in the org files. I just commented out all lines that I didn’t think I needed. Then the screen stopped scrolling due to being to tall. Now to tweak for performance. Just have the remote portion of the setup to go for functionality. After I have a remote working, then I have successfully replaced our replays with an hd dvr. Currently watching a live hd recording and it seems to be doing fine. Wish I could deinterlace. I may need a much faster processor to do that though.