I'll continue my FIOS speculation in the FIOS thread here:

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewto ... sc&start=0


Well my HDHomerun arrived Monday night! I installed it on a separate switch which only has my Myth box and the HDHomerun connected to it as well as an uplink to my main router. That way traffic between the HDHomerun and my Myth box won't effect the rest of my network.

I had it installed in minutes and started playing with the HDHomerun config GUI on my (Windows) laptop. I quickly verified that I was able to tune all my local digital stations on both tuners and then set my sights on getting it set up in MythTV.

To set it up, I stopped the back end and went into MythSetup and simple followed the instructions on the HDHomerun website. I then restarted the backend and ran 'mythfilldatabase' to get the new listing data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get it up and running in Myth (OTA, not QAM)

I then fired up the frontend to see if it worked and sure enough, all the digital stations were in the guide. The only other thing I had to do was go back into MythSetup and give the digital tuners a higher priority than the analog ones. Now everything that is broadcast in digital is recorded in digital unless there is a conflict.

HD looks absolutely amazing!!! I'm just blown away. My Myth box has now shown me just how bad the scaler in my TV really is. I can tell a difference between watching 1080i in Myth vs. watching with my TV's internal tuner.

I was pleased to find that recording 480i shows in digital vs. analog results in about the same same file size (~ 2 GB / hour). I guess that kinda makes sense since you end up with a basically 480i MPEG file either way. At some point I'd like to try recoding the same show in digital and analog and seeing how close they really are.

Also, for anyone who is interested a 1 hour show in 1080i takes up a little over 7 GB!

The HDHomerun has worked flawlessly since I plugged it in. It is truly an amazing device. Now I just have to re-train my viewing habits since I no longer have to be a slave to the TV schedule in order to watch my favorite shows in HD!

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

How's HD playback with your hardware? Did you have to overclock the CPU or use xvmc to get smooth playback? Are you using the machine as a combined frontend/backend (it looks like it but I don't think you say so explicitly)?

Some time has passed since your post, my hardware is similar to yours though a bit more powerful (2gb DDR2 800 instead of one, AMD x2 4600 EE instead of 3800, that and buying the M2NPV instead of the Abit are the main differences), I'm quite hopeful that I'll be able to do HD playback without having to enable xvmc, but was curious if you'd had any hiccups.

I've noticed that you say you're using an NEC DVD-RW in your mythbox, you might want to check out this thread, which has instructions on how to slow down your DVD drive to single speed for movie playback, it *should* make your drive pretty quiet:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... eedcontrol

It's the last post in the thread.


Thanks so much for keeping us up to date, it's definitely been valuable and should make my own Mythtv installation that much easier.

Thanks again,

d

I'm in almost the same boat as Martian (spec in sig), but trying to get QAM from Comcast (MA) cable. I hooked up an HDHomerun first time last night.

I did 2 things in advance: updated the NVidia drivers (and the Wiki), and updated to the 0.20-fixes branch of MythTV. I believe I needed that for HDHomerun QAM.

Whatever, I followed the instructions on the hdhomerun.com site, and it worked like a charm. Comcast must be broadcasting the metadata that they weren't previously, because I didn't have to do manual messing around with channel data to get the main listings working. However, there are some unrecognised channels which look interesting, and I may get somewhere by tweaking the channel ids.

One problem I did hit, was that my / partition filled up. I let KnoppMyth choose the partition sizes, and with all the messing around I've done, building the kernel and MythTV, I filled it up. With some tidying I now have 3.9G off the 4.7G used, and could free some more.

Another problem, is that when watching live TV exploring the channels, I had frequent frontend crashes.

CPU usage seems to be fine. My rrdtool graphs are nowhere near 50% so I'm not even saturating one core. Memory usage is always well under 50% too, so 1Mb is plenty.

... gotta look into transcoding to save reduce space requirements...

Playback is perfect, no skips, no jumps, silky smooth all the way! I've not overclocked the processor at all and I've not had to mess with the evil that is XVMC. Going HD was totally painless for me. It's almost scary.

To be honest the reason why I haven't posted many technical details is because everything is just working and I've been spending my time enjoying it!

Don't let my blissful ignorance stop you guys from asking questions though. I finally hit an experiment that worked and I want to be sure to share as much knowledge as possible.

Martian

_________________
ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)