[tlug] MythTV Success

[David Van Cleef <d-vancleef@example.com>]

The proof-of-concept machine is trudging forward now.

I takyuubinned it home, and Kuronekoyamato must have had the Samsonite 
Gorilla in the back of the truck because the 6 year old HDD was dead as 
a doornail when it got here.

I retrieved another 6 year old drive from out of the junk bin and 
re-downloaded KnoppMyth and got the install going.  Upon hooking up all 
the wires I found out that the video jack on the wall was not threaded 
and only intended for crimp-on antenna cables and of course the only 
cable I had long enough to reach there had threaded connectors on both ends.

Incidentally I got in touch with the KnoppixMyth developer on IRC this 
week, and now in his CVS tree the install gives you the kakasi 
text-handling library and the japanese fonts to handle the japanese EPG, 
so now the japanese MythTV book is woefully out of date and the only 
useful thing it tells you is now no longer needed (what a waste of 2400 
yen).

The net result after I managed to rearrange some things so all the wires 
were able to reach was that I was actually doing tivo-style 
pausable/rewindable real-time TV, the program guide worked (sans nihon 
terebi for some reason).  Because the capture card had no hardware 
encoder and the CPU was rather slow (AthlonXP-1600+) frames were dropped 
and the video was jerky, but everything WAS working as promised.

Next step is to finalize my shopping list for the real hardware.  I'm 
likely going to go with a WinTV PVR-350 (Hauppauge seems to have changed 
their japanese distributor earlier this year and they're finally 
starting to show up in stores again - I'm sure there's a good story in 
there) card because that line is one of the most popular for MythTV in 
the US.  I'm told though that the Kurotoushikou card with the conextant 
chip now has drivers in the mainline ivtv driverset now.