[plug] entertainment centre

[W.Kenworthy]

I have set up an XP entertainment system - the hardware was well worth
drooling over, the MS entertainment package was not.  It will also only
work within very tight HW specs. It was ok, and worked out of the box,
but myth is far more feature-full, especially with the number of add on
modules like weather, gallery, internet streaming and so on.

Myths downside: extremely complex, very time consuming to set up,
interface is a bit idiosyncratic, guide data is always problematic,
fragile ...

It does work, and works well if you throw enough cpu and disk space at
it.  Dont bother penny pinching, esp in cpu power, you will be
disappointed.  My slowest frontend is 1.2G P3M (laptop) viweing via
wireless - works well, but a 1.4Ghz athlon tbird powered backend was
always flakey - currently the backend is an athlon 64 running mostly
32bit code (myth wont do 64 bit yet I believe) Also dont skimp on
soundproofing and specing quiet power supplies and the like - the
backend will be running 24hrs a day, and if you have a quiet room, it
will soon tee people off.

Myth is best used as a VCR substitute - apparently the Americans have
cable TV so saturated with adds and they cant understand why the rest of
the world loves to channel surf - there have been some very acrimonious
debates with the devs (mostly yanks) standing firm on the point that
channel surfing is useless, "so we wont be making it easier - piss off"
- they certainly have not been polite about it.  So myth can take
between 10 and 30 seconds to switch channels depending on a number of
factors.  There is a workaround by substituting an external TV viewer
for the inbuilt myth one, but this has a downside for integration.

As you can imagine, most Aust families I know wont like it because of
this so for us myth is really only used by me, my older son to record
his sports events (foxtel) which he views on windows using windows apps
via a samba share or streamed to his browser.  The rest of the family
mainly yell "can you come in here and put the bloody TV back on
something I can understand ..."  Even putting in a remote controlled
video switch didnt help as it just made it more complex :(

Future plans are to put in IR transmitters so I can control an external
STB and the FoxTel STB, and add another Fusion DVB card (these work
well)

Oh, and dont underestimate the wow factor when guests drop in!!!!

BillK


On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 20:50 +0800, Alex Polglaze wrote:
> G'day All,
> 
> I am interested in setting up a new computer to become an entertainment 
> centre, record TV, hold all my cd's and behave as a juke box when 
> required etc., etc..
> 
> When I spoke to my computer supplier today, he suggested that I wait 
> until next year to get the new Windows Vista his reply is below.
> 
> > You'd be best to purchase a PC with Windows Media Centre on, or wait
> > till early next year when PC's with Vista home Premium will be available
> > ( new version of windows )
> > The media centre functionality is the bit that is designed for
> > entertainment
> I don't really want to go the Windows route, so I was wondering just how 
> advanced Linux based equivalents are and what are the pitfalls using 
> this method. I know BillK has a pretty impressive set-up as far as TV 
> goes from reading his posts.
> 
> Anybody else doing/done this sort of thing?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> 
> Alex
> 
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