Video Server

[Peter Kahle]

Drew Taylor wrote:

> On Dec 7, 2005, at 11:46 PM, Peter Kahle wrote:
>
>> On the subject of cables, I bought a S-Video cable this weekend to  
>> go from my Epia MII-1200 to my Panasonic
>
>
> Peter,
>
> Could you elaborate on your Epia setup? In the past I had thought I'd  
> use an Epia, but last night I looked at the Hauppage MediaMVP with  
> the idea to use it instead. It's only $90 from newegg, so that  
> certainly makes it very attractive if it will work. The custom  
> firmware does support basic myth operation, but I don't know if that  
> includes playing ripped DVDs (either native or compressed with xvid).
>
Not much to elaborate on. I've been tinkering off and on for a year, and 
I'm just getting the frontend set up in the living room.  I'm using the 
1.2GHz epia MII in a Silverstone LC-09[1] case, with 512 MBs of memory. 
It's a front-end only box at the moment, but the reason I went with the 
MII is the availability of firewire. I have designs on setting it up as 
a backend hooked to my HD cable box. The system has no storage, instead 
booting MiniMyth[2] over the network. Actually, that's not true, it 
usually has a small USB flash drive with SYSLINUX[3] hanging off the 
back as a fallback boot device because sometimes the PXE bootloader on 
the network card simply exits without trying to boot. Though that hasn't 
happened since I went to MiniMyth. The network consists of two Linksys 
WRT54GS routers, both running OpenWRT[4], one in client mode, bridging 
the ethernet connection in the computer room over the WPA-encrypted 
wireless connection.

MiniMyth is solid. I was trying to install KnoppMyth[5] on a 2 GB USB 
flash drive and having all sorts of problems, but in around 20 minutes I 
had MiniMyth up and running, once I had the network configured. Over my 
wireless link, it does take a few minutes to load the 1.2 MB kernel and 
50 MB root filesystem, but I expect that, and once I get a powerstrip 
(in the mail) I plan on leaving it on pretty much all the time. It's 
front-end only, but I'm considering trying to add a backend as an 
"extras" functionality. Whatever I do, it'll only be tinkering for the 
moment, because my network is definitely the weak link.

The only task left to get a fully functional system is adding a remote 
receiver, and getting it configured correctly. And getting the signal to 
the HD-3000 card improved, or buying a desktop antenna and switching to 
OTA.

As for your question, it looks like the hacked MediaMVP can play native 
DVDs, but with problems[6]. I also see that the MVP doesn't seem to have 
a floating point unit in the processor[7], so it's likely to be fairly 
limited. I only ever use MythWeb for scheduling recordings, so the 
restrictions wouldn't bother me much, but they might be limiting to you. 
I may actually pick up a MediaMVP to play with some if I have some time 
to spare. I only installed OpenWRT on the routers a couple of weeks ago, 
but I'm really impressed with how well it works, so I'm all about the 
custom firmware.

Hope that answers your questions, if not, feel free to ask again.

P

[1] http://www.silverstonetek.com/products-lc09.htm
[2] http://linpvr.org/, but see 
http://linpvr.org/dnload/releases/0.18.1.8/ for the latest release.
[3] http://syslinux.zytor.com/
[4] http://www.openwrt.org
[5] http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html
[6] http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=faq#q11
[7] http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1396202&forum_id=501875