MythTV install workshop?

[Colin McGregor]

I spoke to David Patrick down at Linuxcaffe this
morning, and we are going to go with a KnoppMyth
install event starting Sunday November 5th, 11:00 AM -
to say 3:00 PM. This will be at Linuxcaffe 326 Harbord
Street (nearest subway stop is Christie, about a 10
minute walk away). The focus of this will be to do a
hands on event, doing actual installs. Now here is
hoping that we don't get say 50 people showing up at
this as Linuxcaffe is a small place... If you do want
to be at this installfest please e-mail me so if it
looks like we will be short on space we can start
making alternate plans.

When it comes to PCs to be used for the install, you 
will want to bring a PC with these sorts of specs (or
better):

- PIII 750 MHz (better recommended)
- 256 MB RAM (more recommended)
- 80 GB hard drive (can be done with 2 x 40 GB drives
but MUCH more is strongly recommended)
- DVD or CD-ROM reader (DVD recommended).
- 1 or more Linux support TV tuner cards (ideally the
ones supported under the ivtv drivers see:
http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page)
- Video card (ideally one that can do mpeg decoding,
such as a Hauppage PVR-350 or the nVidia 5200 (or
better) video cards)

Of further note, in last week's "24 Hours" newspaper
there was Factory Direct coupon for the Adaptec
AVC-2410 PCI TV tuner card ($29.99 with coupon, limit
2). I bought one last weekend, to go with my Hauppage
PVR-150, this card gets along very well with
KnoppMyth, does hardware mpeg encoding and comes with
a remote control. In other words an excellent deal,
and well worth grabbing one/two if you can. 

Only issues I have seen with the Adaptec card centre
around the remote. There is no LIRC definition file
that I have been able to find on-line yet (so, I am
part way through creating my own...). Not thrilled
with the button size on the remote (the buttons are a
bit small for my tastes). Being a factory refurbished
unit there are no batteries included with the remote
(no big issue, the unit takes 2 standard AA size
batteries). As pains go these are NOT serious as you
can get a replacement remote for under $10 (or if you
want more bells and whistles there are the Logitech
Harmony remotes, some of which run into the hundreds
of $, but come with goodies like colour LCD
screens...).

In case anyone is wondering why one might want more
than one tuner card inside a PC, let me point out that
there are times when two (or more) shows come on at
the same time that you want to record... Further,
there still seems to be issues with using TV tuner
card that use the ivtv driver and ones that use the
v4l driver, so when buying 2 (or more) tuner cards
stick to one type (i.e. like the Adaptec AVC-2410 and
Hauppage PVR-150 which both use the ivtv driver)...

Any questions?

Colin.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists