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 – 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 –...
MythTV Update – MPlayer works, IRC Support isn’t, and Wireless
Just a quick update: I can watch TV through MPlayer now. Now that I have all of the IVTV drivers installed correctly, it is a simple matter of opening a terminal and telling MPlayer to access that device: mplayer /dev/video0 But I still can’t get LiveTV inside Myth. And when I tell it to record, it starts a .NUV file, but the size never grows (stays around 9K or 12K). So, in other words, Myth simply isn’t accessing the PVR-350 correctly. Naturally I tried to get on IRC for some help, but in the mythbuntu channel there were 40 people all idling–no one responded. In the main mythtv channel a user named “dustybin” responded and was helpful, but had never used a PVR-350 or Mythbuntu. During time I was working on this,...
New House Blues (MythTV, FreeNAS, and PFSense)
It has certainly been a busy month. We just moved to a new house–which wreaked havoc with my technology. What kicked it all off was that we couldn’t get a line-of-sight with DirecTV. So, that made me switch to Cable TV. And if I’m going to switch to cable, I can save money and get higher speeds on cable Internet (fortunately, I canceled my Dry Loop DSL the day the turned it on, so no charge). Funny thing is, I was more prepared for this move than I ever have been. I had everything scheduled well in advance. Unfortunately, it all either didn’t work, was ignored, or had to be changed. Even the trash service didn’t process my change request. The whole thing has put me two weeks behind on a big announcement...
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