Form Factor

My first impression of the Epic is that it feels massive and clunky. This model has a slide out keyboard (a district requirement) which makes the unit thick (1.5 times the thickness of my iPhone 4). I think the clunky feel comes from the fact that the keyboard tries to slide out a bit every time I put pressure on the side of the phone. I know there are thinner and smaller models out there but I don’t think I will ever find a phone that feels like the iPhone in my hand.

Text Entry

As mentioned above, the Epic has a slide out QWERTY keyboard. I was surprised at how quickly I fell in love with having physical keys again. They layout is nice although some of the keys seem superfluous (really, a smiley key?). The on-screen keyboard is much more of a challenge. Without the pop-up of which key my fat finger has hit, I have trouble typing with any efficiency. Swype is where things start to shine. I am very impressed with the speed and accuracy I am able to enter data. Just for giggles, I try to swype out theshanks.net and it gets it the first time. Finally, the voice control capabilities are leaps and bounds above the iPhone. This is where Android starts to shine and I can understand why there is so much hype on Android.

Camera

I love the camera on my iPhone 4, it is so good that my wife and I brought only our iPhone’s to Kauai to record our 10th anniversary trip. She took such great pictures with it that we blew them up and had them printed on canvas. People tell us they are amazed that they were taken with the phone. I haven’t had the opportunity to take many pictures with the Epic but the image quality looks on par. The lens is much bigger and the LED flash looks larger as well. I predict that I will be able to take pictures of similar quality to the iPhone but can’t comment yet. As far as accessing the camera, the Epic wins hands down. The dedicated camera button with half-push to focus takes me back to my Sony Cybershot days. I can’t tell you how many pictures I have missed while tracking down the Camera app on my iPhone and then waiting for the camera to start. There are a ton of options that are completely missing from the iPhone as well. Anyone familiar with a higher level consumer grade digital camera will be at home with the features and interface that the camera app has.

Apps

Apple has the clear win here due to quality control. I have only purchased one app so far and the experience was awful. My daughter dedicated her hard earned allowance to purchasing Asphalt 5 HD so she could continue after getting addicted to the trial. $5 later the app is installed and won’t launch at all. No support, just too bad, caveat emptor. There are also way too many app stores and payment methods, the whole process is chaotic to the first time user. Prices are everywhere, why are things $1.42 and $4.99 and anywhere in-between? Why does Asphalt 5 cost me $7.99 through the app, $4.99 on the Android Market and BOGO for $5 directly from Gameloft and includes Asphalt 6? It’s just too much effort to have to price shop for apps when Apple has set the standard.

Update: I contacted Gameloft and was provided a link to download a version specific for my device. Kudos for good customer service. Again, I don’t envy developers having to support multiple versions of their software.

I have several key apps that I depend on. Here is my take on making it happen on the Epic.

iHome – Alarm Clock

I wake up every morning to my iHome alarm clock, not the actual device, just the free app. It always works and works well. The main reason I use an app and not the built in alarm on the iPhone is that you can’t use full songs as alarms. My Epic has an alarm that will play songs built in but I wasn’t able to find a simple app that would do a nightstand dim clock. It looked like Night Clock would do the same thing but there was a warning about a complicated process to get the buttons to turn off on the Epic. I can’t imagine being a Android developer, so many different devices would be hell. I also did some research into a nightstand dock for charging. Good luck, there is exactly 1 for the Epic 4g and reviews say it sucks.

Waze – Driving Alerts

I use Waze for information on my route to work including delays, traffic and police traps. It’s available for Android and iPhone. That’s good enough for me. Android also kicks butt in the navigation department. Google Navigation is fantastic and very close to TomTom which I bought for near $100 when it was released.

Instacast – Podcast listening/management

I love listening to various podcasts on my drive and I like a no-brainer solution to getting new episodes, downloading them and never-ever losing my place. Instacast does this for me. It looks like DoggCatcher and Podtrapper will handle the same features but $6.99 seems steep to my Apple trained $0.99 brain.

I doubt I will be making the switch anytime soon but it’s good to get a feel for where the platforms differ. At this point I am very invested in the iDevices (2 x iPhone 4, an iPod Touch and an iPad 1) and have charging, media and docking solutions throughout the house and both vehicles. I have been working a little bit on getting my Linux based MediaPC to handle airplay and will try out the included AllShare to see if that will get me any further. Let me know in the feedback what you think or if anyone even read this. Sometimes it’s like posting into the nether. Thanks.

When I got home on Friday evening, freshly excited about the class, I grabbed the CUCM 7 media and fired up a new fusion VM. Settings are as follows:

1. If you have the iso, click Continue without disc and then select the disc image, otherwise insert the CUCM7 installation disc
2. The system will detect RHEL4 which is correct, press continue to use the disc, then continue again at the OS selection screen
3. Uncheck Use Easy Install (don’t we all wish), click continue
4. Click Customize Settings
   1. Sharing: Disabled
   2. Applications: Menu Enabled (don’t think this matters)
   3. Processors & RAM: 2 CPU 2048 RAM (this does matter)
   4. Display: 3D disabled (doubt it matters)
   5. Printers: Enabled, match default (doesn’t matter)
   6. Autoprotect: Disabled (doesn’t matter)
   7. Network: NAT (more on this later)
   8. Hard Disks: IDE Disk, 80GB, uncheck Pre-allocate disk space, check split into 2GB files (80GB is necessary, I think IDE is)
   9. Everything else, defaults
5. Start it up
6. Media Check: Your choice, I choose No and all was fine
7. vmware Found screen: Agree (a big thanks to Cisco for allowing this, they didn’t have to)
8. Product Deployment Selection: Cisco Unified Communications Manager – OK
9. Proceed with Install: Yes
10. Platform Installation Wizard: Proceed
11. Apply Patch: No (haven’t tried this yet)
12. Import Windows Data: No
13. Basic Install: Continue
14. Timezone Configuration: America/Denver for me
15. Auto Negotiation Configuration: Yes
16. MTU Configuration: No
17. DHCP: No
18. Static Network Configuration – This is where things get a little complicated. Start a terminal session and type ifconfig. Note the IP address for vmnet8. Mine was 192.168.223.1. This is the NAT network for Fusion. IP addresses .3-.127 are statically assignable. Thanks to Michael McLaughlin for this information. Note that if you do not setup the network correctly, the system will not install and will die with a Security configuration failed (1) error.
    
    1. Hostname: FusionCCM7
    2. IP Address: 192.168.x.3 where x is the third octet of the IP address you discovered in step 18
    3. IP Mask: 255.255.255.0
    4. GW Address: 192.168.x.2 where x is the third octet of the IP address you discovered in step 18
    5. Press OK
19. DNS Client Configuration: Yes
    1. Primary DNS: 192.168.x.2 where x is the third octet of the IP address you discovered in step 18
    2. Secondary DNS: blank
    3. Domain: cucm.local
20. Administration Login Configuration
    1. Administrator ID: ccmadmin
    2. Password: c123sco (a mix of letters and numbers is required)
    3. Confirm Password: c123sco
21. Certificate Information – Your locale information
22. First Node Configuration: Yes
23. Network Time Protocol Client Configuration: Yes
    1. NTP Server 1: 64.90.182.55
24. Database Access Security Configuration
    1. Security Password: c123sco
    2. Confirm Security Password: c123sco
25. SMTP Host Configuration: No
26. Application User Configuration
    1. Application User Username: ccmadmin
    2. Application User Password: c123sco
    3. Confirm Application User Password: c123sco
27. Platform Configuration Complete: OK

It took me about an hour for the full install and then I had my system up and running. Enjoy!

The other big feature of MythTV .22 is support for hardware acceleration on certain NVidia cards. I looked up VDPAU and selected the least expensive card that supported all of the features. I found a great deal on a  PNY VCG8600GXXB GeForce 8600 GT on NewEgg for a mere $25 after MIR.

When everything arrived, I set aside a full day for the upgrade. I moved the whole MythBuntu install onto a USB flash disk using Unetbootin, backed up the old database and the etc folder, disconnected the old HD and installed the new HD. Booting from the flash disk worked fine and I was quickly into the setup. Installation was a snap and recognized all of the hardware immediately, a task that has taken many weeks before. I followed the steps from MythPVR.com to migrate existing recordings to a new server. There is a comment at the end of the article that if the database is different enough, you should add a -f option to the import which did the trick for me.

I pointed the storage groups for videos at my already installed media drive (640GB) and then hot plugged in the old 500GB HD (love SATA), mounted it and then copied the recordings to the new recordings path. I launched the frontend and recordings were up and running. I was a little bummed that the video metadata didn’t come through but instead of going back to the original database, I used the included jamu script to gather metadata for all of my movies. It looked a lot nicer and the information was much more accurate and detailed than before.

I went into the Playback settings and set it for VDPAU+. The difference is amazing between the old video card and this one. It’s not just the VDPAU but having a dedicated card that seems to make the difference. The one major problem I did run into was pixelation of anything that was in MPEG2 format (recordings). I finally tracked down a thread that this is a known bug on certain motherboards and they are working on a fix. In the mean-time I have reverted to CPU Slim.

Overall I am very pleased with the new software and distribution.

################# SSL Certificate Warning ################

Certificate for hostname ‘myserver.example.com’, in file:

/etc/pki/tls/certs/myserver.example.com.cert

The certificate needs to be renewed; this can be done

using the ‘genkey’ program.

Browsers will not be able to correctly connect to this

web site using SSL until the certificate is renewed.

##########################################################

Generated by certwatch(1)

which leads me to believe my certificate has expired. I logged into my site and sure enough, it expired 30-days after I created it. I don’t think I have ever had a certificate with such a short life.

It looks like the genkey program for CentOS (and probably other distributions) has a default creation length of 30-days:

Usage: genkey [options] servername
–test   Test mode, skip random data creation, overwrite existing key
–genreq Just generate a CSR from an existing key
–makeca Generate a private CA key instead
–days   Days until expiry of self-signed certificate (default 30)

Also note the lack of a renew option, something you would expect to see since the message states it needs to be renewed. After searching forums and archives and getting a smattering of RTFM responses and dead ends, I dug into it.

1. Delete the old certificate pair in /etc/pki/tls/certs/ and /etc/pki/tls/private/. One ends in cert, one ends in key.

2. Run "genkey example.com --days 1825" (if you want a 5-year certificate).

3. Restart apache (service httpd restart)

That’s it. Truthfully, there is no renew anywhere, certificates aren’t really renewable, you just have to generate new ones each time.

I hope this helps those who received the cryptic message, you can finish your cereal and not be late to work today.

HPSwitching ZenPack

“How could that be?”, he asked.

“Well, Asterisk”.

I have been running Asterisk for about 6-months and wanted to give an update as to where I am today. I am now running 3-lines (home, business and other business) through Broadvoice and paying about $15/mo for all of it. The trick is custom ringing. Asterisk can interpret the custom ring and send the call to a different phone, create a different ring or even send it to a different voicemail box. Right now the home phone number goes directly to a voice menu that offers telemarketers option 1 (no, it doesn’t curse at them, it’s a pretty polite take-me-off-your-list-you-have-been-logged message).

Here’s how that works:

[from-broadvoice]
exten => 3030001234,1,Noop(Alert-Info -> '${SIP_HEADER(Alert-Info)}')
exten => 3030001234,n,Gotoif($["${SIP_HEADER(Alert-Info)}" = "<http://127.0.0.1/Bellcore-dr4>"]?jim_office,7200000000,1)
exten => 3030001234,n,Gotoif($["${SIP_HEADER(Alert-Info)}" = "<http://127.0.0.1/Bellcore-dr3>"]?otherbusiness,3030000000,1)
exten => 3030001234,n,Goto(incoming,s,1)

If they press 2, all the phones in the house (except my home office) ring with a double-pulse ring that my wife recognizes. No-answer goes to her very own voicemail box that lights the light on her good old Qwest Home Receptionist phone. Arguments over lost sticky notes with messages are a thing of the past.

Option 3 belongs to me and rings with a 3-pulse ring on every phone including my office (yes, I am that important), no-answer goes to my voicemail box which I am then emailed the attachment directly to my mobile smartphone where I can listen to it immediately.

Option 7 plays the traditional carried away by monkeys and weasels have eaten the phone with a bunch of monkeys screaming. It records the incoming audio to a wav file which I review from time to time so I can hear the callers reactions (no one except friends know of option 7).

My home office line rings in my office only. Pickup groups are great here because I can pickup any other phone in the house and dial *8# and it intercepts the call on that phone. The call detail recording is nice for my consulting business because I have an accurate record of all calls made and received. I paste that data into blinksale.com and there is no question about billed time.

I have call parking enabled so I can just hit flash 700 or #700 and I am read back which number they are parked on (always 701). They get a nice music on hold while I go do what I want or move to another phone. I can also transfer to my mobile for heading out the door.

Broadvoice is nice because of their BYOD (bring your own device) plan which is basically $9/mo. They port your number so you don’t lose your existing numbers. I have confirmed that they are the cause of my echo problems that happen from time to time. I use Voipjet.com as an alternate provider for outgoing calls and anytime I get echo, I can call the person back using voipjet (I dial 9 before the number to switch providers) and there is no echo. I would use voipjet exclusively if they could do number porting.

Once I explained all of this to the fellow from Comcast he was drolling to go home and try it himself. He thanked me for my time and wandered off to the next house. I have a feeling he wasn’t as enthusiastic when he knocked on the next door.

Could anyone else provide me this kind of service for this price? Nope. Asterisk Rocks.

Once the DVD’s are copied into their individual episodes, it’s time to hit them with AutoGK. AutoGK is a simplified version of GordianKnot, a very feature rich utility for conversion. AutoGK dumbs down and simplifies the interface and works great for doing this. Follow step 4 in the in-depth guide above to use AutoGK for the final conversion from DVD VOB/IFO to an AVI. I selected 350MB for my final file size of a 45 minute episode.

Now that you have all of your episodes in avi format, it’s time to move them onto your Myth box and into the menu system. I created a directory structure under the main Myth Videos directory of Series Name\Season X\Series Name S0XE01.avi.

I modified a script by Steve Adeff called ragetvgrab-0.5.pl. The original script was supposed to insert video files and their meta-data into the recording table so that series would show up in the recording table. I didn’t have a lot of luck and preferred for these to show up in the MythVideo section. Here it is RageTVGrab Script (Video Metadata Edition). Basically you can just run it with the full path to your avi/video file:

./ragetvgrab-videos-0.1.pl -F /storage/videos/Voyager/Season\ 5/Star\ Trek\ Voyager\ S05E25.avi

This will prompt you with the meta-data collected from the ragetv site to verify accuracy. Hope this works as well for you as it does for me.

If you want to do an entire directory at once, you can use some bash magic:

IFS=$'\n' # If your files have spaces or odd characters in the name, set this first
for file in `ls -1 /storage/videos/Voyager/Season\ 7/`; do /root/ragetvgrab-videos-0.1.pl -i -F /storage/videos/Voyager/Season\ 7/$file; done

Setting IFS will keep the for from splitting on the spaces. Make sure the paths are correct.

If you end up with odd chars in the title, you can clear them out with a little mysql. Go into mysql and run the following command:

 UPDATE videometadata set `plot` = replace(plot, "’", "'")

How about that “change layout” junk that they are adding now, easily fixed

UPDATE videometadata set `title` = replace(title, ' (<a href='/mytvrage.php?page=my_layout'>Change Layout</a>) ', '') 

 http://blog.carrel.org/2005/07/calling-features-with-asterisk.html

Over the next week I decided to pick it up. I went searching and low and behold found it as a downloadable PDF. I spent the next few days reading through it on my laptop and phone. Once I finished I decided it was time to give it a try. I started looking for hardware and the book had clearly recommended the Digium boards but didn’t mention anything else. I figured this out quickly and started reading reviews of other hardware for the SoHo option. I ran across an article talking about the Sipura SPA-3000 that was purchased from Voxilla that provided both an FSX and FSO (connection to the phone company and connection to a phone for those not into the lingo yet) for around the $80 mark. This was a good start so I searched and found the (now owned by) Linksys SPA-3102 on Voxilla on sale for about $75.
One week later I had the 3102 in my hot little hands, the thing that surprised me most was the size; it’s about the size of two decks of cards laid long-side to long-side. I headed down to the basement where all my hot and noisy computer toys are with the 3102 and a fistful of cables from the package. I plugged the Internet port into my gigabit switch and connected the phone-line to my Vonage Linksys TA and the phone side to my office phone. No sense in interrupting my POTS home-line just yet, my office phone could be the Ginny pig. Fired it all up and watched my logs for the MAC/DHCP IP address. Copied the MAC into my dhcpd.conf and gave it one of the statics out of my pool. Reboot and try to connect over browser, no-dice, no surprise, it’s a security risk. Like all Linksys devices, you have to connect to the LAN side port to get anything done at first. I ran up and grabbed my laptop and hooked it up to the LAN side. 192.168.0.1/admin like the manual says, hmm, nothing, ipconfig, 192.168.1.2 is the address is gave me, smart little thing, it must have seen that 192.168.0.* was the WAN side addressing and bumped a network so as not to conflict. Browsed to 192.168.1.1 and there is the admin interface. My goal was to disable the router function and control it through the WAN port but after an hour of fighting with it, I figured out that I was being stupid and had no firewall rule allowing me to get from my firewall (where I was testing) to the LAN, I could get out and packets could get through but I was only allowing SSH from the firewall itself. Not running upstairs to see if it worked from my desktop got me. On the good side, I learned a little more about the 3120 while I was fighting my own stupidity like that you can do most of the web admin functions by picking up the phone and dialing **** where a pretty decent IVR menu lets you configure the system. One problem I did run into was setting a password somewhere that caused the IVR to prompt me for said password which couldn’t be determined… factory reset. I can see it from the network, time for dinner and pick it up tomorrow.

I could have probably setup the software earlier but I wanted to wait until I had the hardware in-hand. First step is to choose what flavor. There are so many choices; I found AsteriskNOW, Trixbox and regular Asterisk. Turns out the first two are full systems including the OS. I already have a server I recently built with Fedora 7 that’s running firewall, email, dhcp and dns for my network. I was previously running all of these services on an old Pentium II 300 with a whopping 128MB of RAM but after adding antispam and antivirus, it just wasn’t enough. I happen to have a few server class machines and ended up using a Sun V20z to replace the old box. This thing runs 2 x AMD Opteron 248 (64-bit) 2.2 GHz procs and has 4GB of RAM so it should be up to this task as well.
Now I have hardware, software and time. I am a huge fan of yum and rpm, it’s not that I’m too dumb to compile my own stuff; it’s just that I am lazy and hate tracking down dependencies. At first glance, I don’t see any RPM’s out there so I downloaded Asterisk 1.4.13 from the Asterisk web site, untared it and copied it to /usr/src. A less on the README is no big surprise, make clean, make, make install.

[root@irongate asterisk-1.4.13]# make****
**** The configure script must be executed before running ‘make’.
**** Please run “./configure”.
****
make: *** [makeopts] Error 1
[root@irongate asterisk-1.4.13]# ./configure
checking build system type… x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking host system type… x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
checking for gcc… no
checking for cc… no
checking for cl.exe… no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See `config.log’ for more details.

Oops, no compiler. Easily fixed, yum –y install gcc and try again.

checking how to run the C++ preprocessor… /lib/cpp

configure: error: C++ preprocessor “/lib/cpp” fails sanity check

See `config.log’ for more details.

They wonder why I like yum better. Ugg, google tells me I need c++ too, yum -y install gcc-g++. Take 3.
 

config.status: creating include/asterisk/autoconfig.h

               .$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$=..     

            .$7$7..          .7$$7:.   

          .$$:.                 ,$7.7  

        .$7.     7$$$$           .$$77 

     ..$$.       $$$$$            .$$$7

    ..7$   .?.   $$$$$   .?.       7$$$.

   $.$.   .$$$7. $$$$7 .7$$$.      .$$$.

 .777.   .$$$$$$77$$$77$$$$$7.      $$$,

 $$$~      .7$$$$$$$$$$$$$7.       .$$$.

.$$7          .7$$$$$$$7:          ?$$$.

$$$          ?7$$$$$$$$$$I        .$$$7

$$$       .7$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$      :$$$.

$$$       $$$$$$7$$$$$$$$$$$$    .$$$. 

$$$        $$$   7$$$7  .$$$    .$$$.  

$$$$             $$$$7         .$$$.   

7$$$7            7$$$$        7$$$     

 $$$$$                        $$$      

  $$$$7.                       $$  (TM)    

   $$$$$$$.           .7$$$$$$  $$     

     $$$$$$$$$$$$7$$$$$$$$$.$$$$$$     

       $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.               

configure: Package configured for:

configure: OS type  : linux-gnu

configure: Host CPU : x86_64

Well now isn’t that pretty and a good sign that I got it right on the 3rd try. Now I run make and after a spew of work on my session I get:

+——— Asterisk Build Complete ———+

 + Asterisk has successfully been built, and +

 + can be installed by running:              +

 +                                           +

 +               make install                +

 +——————————————-+

Ok, if you insist, I guess I will make install.

+—- Asterisk Installation Complete ——-+

 +                                           +

 +    YOU MUST READ THE SECURITY DOCUMENT    +

 +                                           +

 + Asterisk has successfully been installed. +

 + If you would like to install the sample   +

 + configuration files (overwriting any      +

 + existing config files), run:              +

 +                                           +

 +               make samples                +

 +                                           +

 +—————–  or ———————+

 +                                           +

 + You can go ahead and install the asterisk +

 + program documentation now or later run:   +

 +                                           +

 +              make progdocs                +

 +                                           +

 + **Note** This requires that you have      +

 + doxygen installed on your local system    +

 +——————————————-+

That’s it, I have it installed. Wait there’s more; a quick look at some other guides suggests I should get:

·         asterisk-addons-1.4-current.tar.gz

·         asterisk-core-sounds-en-gsm-current.tar.gz

I choose the gsm because they talked about gsm in the book a lot, I might need a different package but I will see.
It was time to dive into configuration, I remember the book was very thorough so I started going through the steps there. Back in the asterisk source directory, I did a make config to create the Fedora/Redhat style startup scripts. I also did a make samples to get the /etc/asterisk directory populated. Next I needed to get my 3102 configured so I used the Voxilla Configuration System to get the basics setup. I copied each of the suggested sections into the corresponding configuration files and then hit the Install Configuration button to handle the 3102 side of things. I was getting excited to I checked the Registration State field in the web voice configuration section and it said failed. I would hope so since we need to actually start Asterisk. I started Asterisk at the console with /usr/sbin/asterisk –cvvv. So far, so good. While I was fiddling around trying to figure out how to force the 3102 to register, I saw

*CLI> — Registered SIP ’101′ at 192.168.0.206 port 5060 expires 3600 in the background.

A quick check of the Voice Status page also showed

Registration State: Registered.

I edited the /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf and added an example from the book:

exten => 611,1,Answer()
exten => 611,2,Echo()

Note that this will be under the [home] heading instead of [internal] as the book shows since the Voxilla configuration sets the context to home. I also made a change to the dialplan on the 3102 to allow 611 [2-579]11<:@gw0> instead of [2-79]11<:@gw0>. Dialing 611 from my office phone put me into echo land like it should have. The sky is the limit from here; I am going to move on with voicemail, fwd and some of the examples in the book on my own.
It was a much shorter journey then I expected which I think is good. I always say start with a very basic working configuration and then add one little thing at a time. Good luck in your ventures with Asterisk.

I have been a die hard TiVo fan from the start. I won my first TiVo in an essay contest with an essay on why every pregnant woman needs a TiVo. The TiVo was great to begin with, it was provider agnostic, Linux based, configurable, upgradable and with a few additional codes you could enable some of the anti-commercial features like 30-seconds skip. When I switched over to DirectTV and purchased a DirectTivo, I noticed that each version of the software that came out provided less and less end-user features and more provider features. It is the sad fate of most companies that they must first service their stock holders and then their retail customers. I wanted to get into a series 2 TiVo but then DirectTV decided they could do it better and abandoned the TiVo platform altogether. I was also looking in to HD and I realized I could either use money or brains to solve the problem. It was time to take control of my PVR and try to provide TV recording, on-demand viewing of my DVD collection and some integrated web services like weather and browsing.

My first attempt at a PC based PVR was Microsoft Windows Media Center. I’ll admit that it was easy to setup, quick to configure and worked very well. However I felt the DRM noose from the get-go and realized that it was going to be incompatible with my long term goals. After building a new primary box, I rebuild my AMD Athlon 64 3200 into a box running Fedora 7.

I followed Jared’s Fedora MythTV howto and began creating my first MythTV system. After a few days of playing with it on and off, I had it running. I quickly recognized that I would need to add some hardware to get the system going so I went out to CompUSA and bought a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 MCE capture card. This solved both the capture problem and the remote control. After all, who wants a PVR that only plays DVD’s and that you have to control with a full keyboard. I had toyed with the remote control that came with my Dell XPS M170 but it turns out that even though it looks like an MCE remote, it isn’t and won’t work with lirc at all. The next step was moving it into a case that looked at home in my entertainment center. I picked up a Silverstone LC10 and moved the system into it’s new home. I was still using an old Toshiba 32-in CRT TV that I’ve had for about 10+ years and it was starting to develop some purple and green spots in the corners of the screen.

Before I got into replacing the TV, I wanted a tested solution in place that was storing HD content. After researching options for HD capture, I settled on a relatively new solution from Silicon Dust called the HDHomerun. This miracle device provided 2-tuner HD support in an external appliance that hooked directly to the network via Ethernet. No internal installation meant better compatibility and no need for drivers. During this trial I had purchased a picture frame antenna from Radio Shack that was feeding my 150MCE for over-the-air TV channels. It worked pretty well and I was able to pull in a good signal for the local channels. I had the MythTV system and my DirectTiVo running side by side recording the same shows so that in case the MythTV system had a problem, I could easily watch the show on the TiVo. This also helped to gradually introduce the MythTV to the family and help them get used to it. All I had to do was copy a few of the kids favorite DVD’s into Myth Videos and they were on-board. My wife really enjoyed the automatic commercial skipping and while still hesitant to the change, was warming to the idea day by day.

Switching over from the 150MCE to the HDHomerun was fairly painless, the signal quality jumped way up with a digital solution and provided a comparable signal to the DirectTiVo. I moved the antenna and the HDHR down to the walkout basement and quickly realized that it might be a good idea to get a better antenna. While some channels were reasonably strong, others were unreceivable. I once again researched and picked up a $50 DB2 antenna from Antenna’s Direct. Using a compass and antennaweb.org, I mounted it to the ceiling in our unfinished basement and aimed it. The signal difference was night and day. It was about this time that I made another commitment to the MythTV system by purchasing guide data from SchedulesDirect, the pay service for guide data for MythTV. There was a lot of concern when Zap2It, the previous free provider decided to bow out of their deal to provide schedule data but the MythTV group came through with a great solution. For several weeks we enjoyed all of our favorite shows in digital broadcast and could see the quality difference in the HD signal but couldn’t really take advantage of it with the old TV. We were switching to the DirectTiVo less and less. I had a coax line run from the back of the DirectTiVo to our bedroom and we were still using it for before-bed shows but it was being phased out. I was still having some problems with the ATI Radeon X850 card so I took the opportunity to pick-up a card with better Linux support, an Asus NVIDIA 6200 which had good reviews on the MythTV-Users mailing list (speaking of which, you can see my sordid posting history there to see some of the struggles and solutions). Having the NVIDIA card in there made all the difference. Everything looked very crisp and clean and I verified with a few downloaded examples that the system was capable of HD.

My failing TV, having a DVR that was capable of HD and the support of my wife led me to getting a Samsung LNT4665F 46-in 1080p HD TV (a fathers-day gift dream). I also bought an HDMI to DVI cable and hooked the MythTV system to the new HDTV. I changed the resolution of XWindows to 1920×1080 and marveled at what I had put together. I watched a few of the local newscasts in awe of the image quality. As we were watching Law and Order in HD one evening, my wife asked me why we were still paying for DirectTV. I told her that we still needed it for the bedroom TV and she said it would be OK to cut that off. We had a few dozen of our favorite shows on the DirectTiVo so I called them up the next day and cancelled my service. It was sort of a liberating feeling. We were still getting all of our favorite shows and not paying a dime for them in recurring costs. I had a few shows that I was missing but it was easy enough to find them available as bittorrents and transferring them to the MythTV system was a breeze. I also ran into a little gem called TED that would automatically monitor the bit torrent sites for new episodes and download them. I transferred a good deal of my DVD’s to the system as well. Things were going well except that we were running low on shows in the bedroom.

I built another system from NewEgg specifically for upstairs this time with a 250GB HD and a motherboard with an on board NVIDIA card. The hardest part to setting up this system was running an Ethernet connection to the bedroom. I didn’t have to worry about any capture cards so it was pretty straight forward. I also decided on a smaller case since I could build on a micro-atx form factor. The NMEDIAPC 200BA fit the bill although it didn’t take me long before I realized the LCD display was nothing more than a fancy fan-speed/temperature monitoring device, not a true LCD display for MythTV. The good news is that NMEDIA has a list of good LCD’s that are controllable and fit in the box. Another good idea in concept is that you can add a disassembled MCE IR receiver inside the box. They created an internal mounting bracket and supply the cable to connect it to the USB header on the motherboard. In practice though there seems to be a reflection problem or the window isn’t wide enough because I have a hard time getting any remote to be received without multiple repeats of the same command, even with the repeat set to 5 in lirc.conf. We are able to watch all of our recorded shows in the bedroom again. I was a little frustrated when I found out that MythVideo isn’t shared quite as easily. I ended up copying my Star Trek: Voyager Series DVD’s onto the upstairs MythTV system using DVD Decrypter and AutoGK. I read that you can create NFS shares between the two MythTV systems and then you can see videos from both drives but I have yet to tackle that challenge. The down side is now every time I go to manage video’s, it wants to remove links to the videos stored on the other side. Not a big deal but I am doing a lot more database management through phpmyadmin.

I am very happy that I have taken control of my media needs. I am using MythTV for what it is designed for and not taking advantage of much else yet. I am getting consistently high quality recordings of all of my favorite shows too and can share the recordings to my bedroom system. The kids no longer smudge and scratch their DVD’s since they are all stored on the drive of the MythTV system. I have a Harmony 890 to control the main system and using my old Harmony 679 in the bedroom. I don’t foresee the need to add DirectTV or cable and because of the draconian measures they are taking to lock out open source systems like MythTV, I don’t even want to attempt it nor am I willing to pay for their efforts. I look forward to more and more media being available directly over the Internet and would gladly pay for a service that provides additional channels in open source standard formats like xvid. Until then I am very happy that I can get all of the major networks in HD digital free of charge. A huge thanks to the authors, developers and community that has helped create MythTV, fantastic work.