Smart Home Media Project – Phase II – Hack That Xbox
Yes, I will now be referring to these efforts as the Joseph Baxter’s Smart Home Media Project ™. There’s no way I’ll be able to resist coming up with some sort of logo for that, I’m sure. So, now to the part that, quite frankly, spooked me a little. Yeah, the Myth stuff was fairly hard, and my Linux knowledge is somewhat lacking, but it was just computer stuff. Nothing really too far outside of my comfort level. But this – hacking an xbox? That’s something only DJ Micro can do! Well…it turned out to be far easier than I thought. The hardest part is actually getting all of the ingredients together. The hack itself only took 10 or 12 minutes. So, here’s the list to follow my...
MythTV – Final Wrap Up
I’m very happy with MythTV up to this point. It is no where near as fragile as I feared it might be–in fact, it seems to be quite robust. A recent power outage knocked its pins out from under it, but by the time I checked, the machine was already back up and running. Part of that is the BIOS setting “Last State on Power Restore,” but if the software wasn’t up to the task no hardware setting is going to help. Which reminds me, I need to get a separate UPS for all of these machines that will form the backbone of my home network. I found this website for refurbished APC units, that has great prices, but will add shipping charges. However, for the savings on some of the larger models, those fees would be negligible. For the 300VA...
MythTV is UP AND RUNNING! Changing Channels via Serial Cable
It is official – I am a MythTV user. Well…let’s ammend that: I am in the possession of a fully installed and functional MythTV backend server. There were two things wrong with the Channel Changer program: I didn’t know that the current directory is not in your path. SO–just because you are in the same directory as a binary file, it can still be “unfound.” When I typed in /usr/local/bin/channel to define the path explicitly it worked–I should have tried that. I probably would have, but I was pressed for time that day. Once I could get the channel binary to work, then I faced a different issue. By using the -p switch on the channel changer program, the individual serial ports can be...
MythTV Makes Me Cry – Motorola DCT2xxx Serial Port
It shouldn’t be this hard. Unlike peeling an onion, I feel more like I’m slicing a bushel of them. <sniff> Ok, I’m better now. I was just feeling a little fragile there for a moment… Allow me to make with the status. First, the Cable box is connected back up, along with a serial cable to COM1. Inside MythTV Backend Setup, I set the input pretune to channel 4 (which is what the cable box requires). Going just that far, I can start the Myth frontend and watch Live TV, but I have to change the channel manually by pushing the buttons on the front of the cable box. Ok. So, obviously I need something to send a signal out COM1 and into the Motorola serial port that tells it to change the channel. Doesn’t...
MythTV – Storage Groups and Linux Hard Drives
Last night completed the second to the last step of my Mythbuntu adventure: Adding in the second hard drive. Well, this would all be easier if I wasn’t trying to do it so low rent. Right now in the Myth box there is only 512MB of RAM and two 40GB Western Digital Hard drives. After everything is setup that only gives me about 65-ish GB for video recording. Not alot, but not great either–right around 40 hours of recording space. So, I should get a larger hard drive… Well, when I do, I’ll have to repeat this same process. Obviously, first one has to install the hardware and make sure that the BIOS can see it. If you don’t have this, you don’t have anything. Now to the Linux part: Partition –...
Myth Works! All the Weather, All the Time
I found it. And was subsequently able to record over 12 Gigs of The Weather Channel! Yippie! (That was just the channel I left it on for testing.) Ok, here’s how it went down: I finally swallowed my pride and dug through the mythtv-backend.log. Well, actually, I opened up a terminal, switched to Myth, tried to watch Live TV, and then used “tail /var/log/mythtv/mythtv-backend.log” to see what just happened. Much easier than “digging.” Anyway, I got the following junk: 2008-06-20 12:52:10.501 TVRec(2): Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV 2008-06-20 12:52:10.531 TVRec(2): HW Tuner: 2->2 2008-06-20 12:52:10.797 SampleRate: Attempted to add a rate 32000 Hz, which is not in the list of allowed...
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