I'm trying to decide if I want to fully invest in building a mythtv system for my home. For starters I've loaded knoppmyth on a spare PC and wanted to see how the playback of recorded TV shows and other videos felt.

I installed R5A16 on a P4 2.4 with an ATI All-in-Wonder 9700 card. I know that this is not a supported tuner, but as a plain video display card it seems to be working. Utlimately I will have one or two HDTV cards for tuning but for now I just want to try it tuner-less.

My question: how do I copy some trial videos to the system?

So far:
I've setup SAMBA and can copy files from my Windows box to myth
Copied various video files to myth/video and myth/video/motion
Copied an MP3 file to myth/music
Copied a JPG file to myth/image_cache

What am I leaving out?

Ideally I'd like to copy some myth native formatted TV shows (guess that I could download these somewhere for eval purposes) to the box to try it out.

The question is what are you trying to accomplish? The box should be able to handle most anything you throw at it... I however would be worried about it's performance w/ HD content. I do believe you can find sample HD files at pchdtv.com. If not, Google is your friend.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I want to get the feel for what it feels like to run mythtv. Background: I've been a TiVo user from the time TiVo first shipped. Recently I bought an HDTV and ended up with a Motorola 6412 DVR box for HD and digital cable. It sucks as a DVR. It's so bad that I'm thinking about switching to DirecTV so I can get a TiVo that does HD. But, right now I'm leaning towards building a mythtv system(s).

My current project is to just get it up and running on one system just to take it for a test drive. At this early stage I'm not worried about setting up any tuner cards. I just want to see what playback is like. I figured this should be easy to do, just need to find some video content that I can throw on there.

I downloaded http://pchdtv.com/downloads/tst.tar (which they say to rename to tst.ts, which I did) and copied it to myth/tv, myth/video and myth/video/motion. From the mythtv front end program I select "Watch Videos". All I see is "video/". If I try "Watch Recordings" it says "Sorry, No Recordings Available".

Is there something simple I'm missing?

I'd greatly suggest reading the MythTV docs. You simply need to place the video in /myth/video, then have the video manager scan for videos. In addition, you'll need to configure the video manager to handle .ts files (or just rename it to .mpg as it should just be an mpeg2 file).[/list]

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

OK, I can see the videos listed now. But I still can't play them. I can hit "I" and then select "Watch This Video", but nothing happens.

I've tried looking at the docs at mythtv.org and can't seem to find anything related to this, except for a list of keyboard commands, which helps some.

OK, I got the test video to play. Had to change the command line:

I figured it out after a couple of things. The first key was in this document that I found by searching here for mplayer:
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... llAndsetup


After fixing the path but still no help I tried to run the video from a command line and noticed this error:


Looks like '-vo x11' did the trick.