MythTV Update

Well, I've learned something these past couple days. A 926 MHz Celeron (actually, overclocked from 600 MHz) is not as good as an 800 MHz P3.

I do have MythTV up and running, installing it was a breeze through apt-get, setting up the MySQL database was painless (thanks to the HOWTO). The MythTV configuration script wasn't that easy to navigate through (since you can't see the pointer and have to use the keyboard), but nontheless easy thanks to their GUI.

So I tried it out and... wow! A picture with sound (before, the only way I could get sound was by going into gnome-alsamixer and adjusting the "Aux" switch of the sound card), which was nice. But... 4 seconds later, pause for two seconds, then 4 seconds of play, pause... you get the picture. It's better than 600 MHz (that was like 2 seconds, pause...) but definately not suitable for live tv viewing. That wasn't my entire goal for this, because I want the system mainly to record shows. I used the guide (very nice guide) to find a show that I wanted and hit space (god I need a remote...). I told it to record that episode only, and I came back once it was over (with the GUI frontend closed). I opened it up, and went to recorded shows and, sure enough, there it was. Full description and everything, which is nice. I hit space to play it, and it was playing fine for the first few minutes, and then it started pausing.

At this point, I can only assume that it's the fact that I'm running Gnome in the background that I'm having problems playing recorded video. Later tonight, I'm going to try it with no WM or DM running (ie - in 'failsafe terminal' mode) and report back on that.