19 March 2005 - MythTV
Topics
MythTV (by Ron Blanchett)
Attendance
29
Presentation Resources
Meeting Announcement (txt)
Presentation Slides (html) (sxi)
for Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150, 250, 350, & 500 cards
Chris Kennedy's site with updated IVTV cards and resources
Air2PC HDTV card that also supports QAM (US HD Cable)
Meeting Notes
Our presenter was not here yet when the meeting started, so we started right in with a Q&A session. There were questions about dual-booting Linux and XP with Grub, and other stuff I can't remember. It was a good Q&A. I read the news, distributed about 10 free CDs (KnoppMyth and Knoppix 3.8-CeBIT), and some O'Reilly books.
Our presenter, Ron Blanchett, was ready to start by 3:00pm. By that time, 28 people were in attendance (including a surprise visit from Kevin Otte!). He started with a slideshow presentation (OOo format), which will appear on this page soon. That ran until 3:25 and then he switched over to his Myth box for a demo...
The demo used a very nice AMD64-based system with a Hauppauge card and a pcHDTV card. Unfortunately, the 64-bit support in MythTV is only preliminary, so many parts of the system simply did not work. Still, you could get a feel for the system and how it works. We managed to watch a few minutes of "I, Robot" (with no audio) and hear a little of an audio CD being played. We got to see the Weather module in action, too. I booted up a KnoppMyth CD on my laptop and went into "Frontend" mode and connected to Ron's demo box over the network. This allowed for a basic demo of the frontend-backend separation, but again many things just didn't work due to the 64-bit backend.
The presentation was pretty much done by 4:30pm, at which point people just started talking and working on problems and whatever. I'm really glad there was time for this.
I asked what presentation we should have next... *crickets chirping* There was a suggestion to have a Samba presentation. This would be good, since sharing files and printers with Windows systems is something that most people have to deal with, even at home. Still, I think that perhaps the constant "presentation" meeting content is losing its appeal. We need to break it up. I think it's time for an installfest. I'll look into the practicality of it for our April meeting.
