It would be cool if Myth supported changers. Has anyone heard of someone working on this. I've only been able to find a few dead end threads asking about it.

Linux support would have to be available before Myth can support them. Have you looked to see what the sate of that is?

The only "changers" I remember seeing asked about were DVD changers. There isn't really any point for Myth to "support" these devices since there's nothing Myth can do with their video output. You may as well program a remote control to "integrate" the changer with Myth.

Myth *IS* a DVD changer. It stores the DVDs internally on a hard disk and plays them on demand. Having a box with 400 DVDs hooked up to Myth doesn't add any value, it only confuses things.

I am not aware of any DVD changer with digital outputs. Even if there were, I question what value it would be in a Myth system.

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I had a thread on this and really haven't gotten very far either (more like nowhere). The idea was to plug the SVideo out on the MegaChanger to one of the PVR250s in my backend. Obviously, the Macro would have to be disabled for a usable picture. Anyway, control was going to be an issue, but I think I got around that since I have a whole bunch of RS 15-2117 remotes with the RF built in. I could put the receiver on the Changer and all my remotes in the house could control it. The other option was to figure out how to use the Sony digial input for control of the unit, but that's outside of the scope of my knowlege.

The upshot of all this would be that I could have one location for at least 300 DVDs in my movie collection (yes all orig) and launch them from anywhere in my house. The biggest downside is that only one TV could play from them at a time. The funny thing is that I really wouldn't even need to have pause, rew, ffwd for the changer since Myth would cache what I was watching. I could just do that through the ring buffer.

I also realize that I could encode them all to Divx and put them on my server, but I've had mixed results with doing this. I just encoded 50 or so and about 10% have either graphic distortion or sound sync issues at some point in the movie. What a PITA.

Anyway, that's where I left off.
Gonz

Think about it, DrGonzo -- to make your idea work, you would have to ENCODE the movie while playing it, using the MPEG2 encoder in your PVR-250 card. Then you would DECODE it at the frontend. You would have similar generation loss to your Divx encoded movie, plus your PVR-250 couldn't be used to record TV while you were playing a movie. This doesn't make sense to me.

Far better to just find a way to control the changer using some kind of RF remote control, then mesh the Myth box and the changer together using different inputs on your A/V system. A programmable remote could make it all appear "seamless".

I had the 400 disc changer for a week but I just couldn't fit the beast into my home entertainment center. Those things are HUGE -- especially front to back. Oddly enough, it's what got me interested in Myth to begin with. I thought, "there's got to be a better way to serve DVDs."

BTW -- if you got a large enough hard disk, you could just duplicate the entire DVD (chapters, menus and all) and play them with no generational loss. Count on about 6+ Gbytes per DVD for storage requirements. Transcoding to highest quality saves about 2/3 of the storage - about 2G per disc.

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We could probably go back and forth about the quality of Divx vs. MPEG Enc/Dec with Myth, but personally I don't see the quality loss on my Myth setup that I do when I convert DVD to DIVX. I could probably crank up the quality, but that wouldn't necessarily clear up the audio sync problems I've had in the past. If you do know of a simple/bulletproof 1 click converter that goes from DVD directly to Divx I'd be interesting in hearing more about it though. As for using up a tuner, I have 3 in my backend and it's rare that all three would be in use.

I'm not sure what you mean about trying to mesh the changer and Mythbox together using AV? How would I watch DVDs from the changer on any of the other TVs in my house? The goal was to share the changer through Myth over Ethernet so I could be anywhere and select from the 300 movies in it.

As for ripping them to ISO and throwing them on HD, even if I average 3.5 gig after shrinking them down, I'll still need a TB for the 300 movies that the changer would hold. I happen to have that on my server, but lose 250G to RAID 5 so not really an option there. heheh

The only thing keeping my from attempting it right now is a lack of time, and also that I'm not sure how well navigation of menus would work with the ringbuffer lag.

Thanks for the input though. I'm always interested in hearing ideas on the subject whether pro or con.

Later,
Gonz

BTW, you're right about the size of the changer. I can't fit it in any of my entertainment centers. The thing is a total pig!

:double post