A few months ago I stumbled across an article about MythTV and started doing research on hardware components to purchase to get a system up and running (this sounded like a cool project). I had some past Linux experience (basic) so I tried to be careful in picking the hardware. I wanted my box to go in the living room and be able to link up to my current 54g router in my office as there is no hardwired LAN in my living room and wiring to it would be painful. So here are the components I selected (and bought):

Athlon XP2600+
ASUS A7V8MX-MX
Samsung 160GB 8MB ATA/133
DVD+RW Optowrite 12X
DDR333 512MB PC-2700
SMC2802W (54g card seen on prism54.org)
Hauppauge PVR-350
Antec Aria Case

I found a guide for MythTV on Fedora Core 1 but the 54g card I chose needed a minimum kernel level for the 54g patch so I then jumped to Fedora Core 2 and figured I would go that way. I got pretty far on the install until the modprobe.conf differences from modules.conf ... after much time hacking I admitted defeat and found this SageTV program. Great support for the PVR-350 TV OUT ... was up and running very quickly. I setup PC Anywhere on it so I can tweak when out it the living room - no monitor, TV OUT can't show XP screen on 350.

However, maybe my expectations were too much from using TIVO for the past year. Here are my issues running SageTV:

1) program crashes approx once a week. I accept this for a java program of this type running under XP. But given my TIVO has never crashed this is pretty lame.
2) closed caption data is not piped thru ... TIVO seems to have this figured out and my TV picks up the caption data from the sound somehow and all is good. I saw that SageTV had some beta hack such that the user could extract captions after a show was recorded (same with the post-processed commercial skip) but this too is lame.
3) I think the 30s skip function is more usable under TIVO than the 2.5s +/- 10s skip under SageTV. No slow motion feature under SageTV like TIVO to fine tune after an overshoot on attempted commercial jump.

So these are my issues - base functionality stuff.

Today I ran across the KnoppMyth project and it seems like it may be the way to go for the path of least resistance. I would like to try it out sometime but for those using it would my issues 1, 2 & 3 go away? I suspect I will still have issue with the 54g PCI card - considering buying a wireless g access point and plugging that into the RJ45 port on motherboard. Fedora core seemed to have an easy way to dual boot windows and linux (auto grub config) ... is there a good guide for this under KnoppMyth? I don't want to toast my XP/Sage just yet until I have something to replace with. For those using the Aria case I would rather not even open it - everything is tightly packed into place. Thinking partition magic to get back 80G of it and using that for the KnoppMyth install. Any help appreciated.

knoppmyth on a supported platform will not crash every week. The only time mine is ever restarted is when I decide to muck with something and reboot it. My box regularly stays up for two months or more at a time with no problems.

I don't use the closed caption stuff, so I don't know much about it, but I believe that it grabs it from the stream somehow and pipes it to a vbi interface, however since you are using the pvr350 you will have to upgrade the ivtv driver from what comes with knoppmyth to get this functionality.

not sure if there is slow motion in myth or not probably. I know there is a configurable skip forward and backwards. defaults to 30s forward and 5s backwards. and there is fast forward and rewind. I'm sure there is slomo, but I don't use it.

As for the dual boot knoppmyth cannot easily be dual booted. It was designed to be a stand alone settop box with only knoppmyth on that box. You can do a search of the forums to see the possibilities. I believe some people have made it work by swapping hard drives and such, but it's not easy, and that is not planed to change as far as I know.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

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thanks ... maybe I'll try to use Norton Ghost to backup the current XP image to DVD somehow so I can revert out if necessary.

BTW ... is there any hope of getting the prism54 driver working with KnoppMyth ... couldn't find the version of the kernel it was using from the help pages

From prism54 readme:

General minimum requirements:

* Kernel >= 2.6.5
* Kernel >= 2.4.23

knoppmyth R4v4.x has kernel 2.4.25 with some patches, so should work. you would just have to download and compile the drivers, because they are not included with the distrobution, but the kernel sources are if you need them.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets