Difference: LaborIntensiveTv (32 vs. 33)

Revision 3319 Dec 2005 - TobyCabot

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META TOPICPARENT	name="WebHome"

Most folks buy their TV's at places like Sears or Best Buy, and there's a lot to be said for plunking your credit card down and driving home with a functional television set. But that's not my style. I've been using a Commodore 64 color monitor hooked up to a VCR since the late 80's and it's worked great. On the other hand, VCR's are going the way of the dodo and a 13" television with weak mono sound isn't much fun so I should probably upgrade.

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2003-09-16 - Turns out sound was more complicated than I thought. Mythtv always records and then plays the recording back; that's how it can do things like pause and rewind "live" tv. So you need to set up the sound card so it is recording the Line input but it must be muted. The biggest hassle was figuring out what the different features of the SoundBlaster Live card were and how they worked.

Changed:

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< Here's a dump of the card with a working config:

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> Here's an amixer dump of the card with a working config:

mythtv-mixer.txt: soundblaster live mixer configuration

All of the pictures had strange jagged lines when things moved. It turns out there's an option to "de-interlace" the video on the client side. It crashes on the PII machine but works fine on the PIII.

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2005-11-20 - The laptop that we watch TV on had gone funky - the display works fine but the backlight would switch off after a couple of seconds, which makes it hard to watch. Luckily, my Dad came through with an LCD panel (and a 2nd-hand computer) for my birthday so now I've got the laptop working with the external panel. It's not as easy to do as I thought it would be. The issue is that the Radeon chip in the laptop treats the panel and the external VGA adapter as two independent displays, so you need to do a little X.org configuration hacking to get the primary display on the external panel. The key (for me) was explicitly specifying a wide range for the VGA connector's clocks so that X would allow it to run at 1280x1024. After that, X looked beautiful but mythtv and xine didn't work. Turns out that the "Xv" interface that X uses to display video only works on one display or the other, and it works on the internal panel by default. So you need to use the xvattr tool (http://freshmeat.net/projects/xvattr/) to switch Xv to use the external display, e.g. xvattr -a XV_SWITCHCRT -v 1.

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> 2005-12-19 - moved the tuner card and 200GB disk from phoenix to sandcastle, and am in the process of getting everything working again. I didn't take good enough notes last time so I'm having to re-figure-out more than I'd like. So far it's been pretty easy - I needed to enable recording on the line input using amixer sset Line,0 mute cap.

META FILEATTACHMENT	attr="" comment="soundblaster live mixer configuration" date="1064114309" name="mythtv-mixer.txt" path="mythtv-mixer.txt" size="10482" user="tobyc" version="1.1"

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