Ultimate PVR?

[Shane Hathaway]

Michael Halcrow wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 01:00:24PM -0700, Shane Hathaway wrote:
>>Are you using Gentoo?  Gentoo smooths out the rough edges in MythTV,
>>because the types of tweaks I've had to do don't lend themselves
>>well to a binary distribution.
> 
> 
> Would it figure out on its own that I have both a pcHDTV-3000 card and
> a PVR-250, and then automatically use the more compatible tveeprom
> modules that ships with the kernel instead of the one that ships with
> the IVTV driver, otherwise it will default to the better tested (for
> the PVR-250) tveeprom shipping with the IVTV driver? Forgive me for
> being a bit skeptical on that point. If Gentoo does get that right by
> default, then I will be impressed.

No, but once you've selected the right USE flags and stability options, 
choices like this persist across upgrades, and that's the real time 
saver.  I had a similar problem, and in this case, I only needed to 
choose the development version of IVTV rather than the stable version, 
by putting "media-tv/ivtv" in /etc/portage/package.keywords.  The 
development version builds only the ivtv module, while the stable 
version builds many modules that conflict with 2.6.15.

> Honestly, if I were to want to rebuild my machine to use 64-bit
> binaries, I would be very tempted to make the switch to Gentoo. But as
> long as I'm in 32-bit land, it's going to take a lot to get me away
> from Debian w/ Marillat.

I'm not going to say you should switch to Gentoo.  Use what's 
comfortable.  Personally, I find Gentoo quite comfortable.

Incidentally, I recently switched my desktop to 64 bit after running 32 
bit for a year.  Everything is as stable as before AFAICT.  Only one 
slight problem: I have to run a 32 bit browser to visit 
homestarrunner.com and video.google.com, because the Flash plugin is 
only available in 32 bit.  I'm waiting for Gnash.

> Yup; that's exactly how I have mine set up. Of course, with a few
> hundred gigs of disk space to spare, it would take more hours of
> television to fill up my partition than time I have outside of work
> and grad school to watch anything.

The time stretch playback feature helps.

> And MythTV can be configured to stop recording once the free space in
> a partition reaches a certain low-point.

True.  I haven't tried that option.

Shane