Mailing List Archive

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 01:32 PM, Edward Wildgoose wrote:
> I heard that the shuttle was quite noisy? Perhaps you are better off
> with a slimline desktop case? More room for cards, and better
> ventilation? Shuttle does look like a very cool idea though (I think
> I saw a firm selling a silencer kit for it, basically just a quiet
> fan...?)

You may be thinking of the Shuttle SV25, which is an older model, and
reportedly QUITE noisy.

From what I've read, the SK41G case is fairly quiet to begin with, but
the best part is that it has only two fans - a tiny power supply fan,
and a somewhat larger case+CPU fan. They get away without a separate
CPU fan by running a "heat pipe" from the heatsink to the case fan.
Plus, the case+CPU fan is temperature controlled. I'm planning on
running a 100Mhz bus speed with the Athlon XP 1800, which is meant to
run on a 133Mhz bus, so the temperature should be very low at all
times, and hopefully the fan noise will be unnoticeable. I may have to
replace the power supply fan, but I'm not too worried about that. Given
the lack of load I'm putting on the power supply, it may also be
possible to run it at a lower voltage, or even remove it.

I also got a 5400RPM 120GB maxtor FDB drive (4R120L0) which is
reportedly very quiet as well.

Assuming all the hardware works, I just need to get a good remote
control with a maniacal number of buttons ;) and build a IR receiver
and I'll have a perfect box. I'll make sure to report back my success
or lack thereof at making a quiet machine when I get it. :)

I'm also thinking of getting a DVD-RW in to burn DVDs of things I want
to keep long-term, but I may wait until MythTV supports that before
buying one.

James

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 01:17 PM, Cedar McKay wrote:
>> 1) mythbackend segfaults way too easily. At first I couldn't get it
>> to run at all, because all it did was segfault when I tried to start
>> watching live TV. It turned out there were two problems, both of
>> which caused it to crash horribly with no indication of what is
>> wrong. 1) the directory I told it to write video to had the wrong
>> permissions and was therefore not writable. 2) The vbi device was set
>> to use /dev/vbi but that device didn't exist (it was actually called
>> /dev/vbi0). This last one bring me to another bug...
> does it still seg fault now that you have the vbi device and write
> permissions worked out?

Nope - it works fine now that I've got it configured right. It just has
poor error detection/reporting code.

>> 4) Even after running mythfilldatabase to refresh the listings, it
>> didn't delete the no-longer-available channels. I had to do that
>> manually by connecting to mysql.
> I think if you re-run setup there is an option to clear the listings.

I thought I did that, but it's possible that I messed up, because I ran
setup so many times trying to get the darn thing to work right I don't
remember which is which now. :)

> I completely disagree. A keyboard has lots and lots of keys, therefore
> it is fine to have lots of buttons that do different things. Remotes
> have limited number of keys, and everyone's remote is different, so I
> would want as much key re-use as possible. Right now there are
> bindings to a lot of specific keys, for instance 'e' goes to edit mode
> and 'm' goes to epg while watching tv. Also as is I control myth
> without looking at the remote b/c I can do most things with 6 buttons.
> If we seperated out functions, for instance channel up down from menu
> up down for some reason I would have to start looking at my remote a
> lot more to find keys. Folks are talking about a popup menu system so
> you can just hit a single "menu" button, and a list of possible
> actions from any particular context would pop up. That would make it
> possible to do _everything_ with up, down, left, right, enter/space,
> esc and the number buttons. That sounds sweet to me. We could keep
> individual buttons for maniacs like you ;-) who need a different
> remote button for everything.

I can see where you're coming from, especially if using a miniscule ;)
20-or-so button remote like the one that comes with the WinTV cards.
But, if you have a remote with a button labeled Channel up/down, and a
separate L/R/U/D/select arrow set as many remotes do, it would be nice
to actually have the channel up/down JUST handle changing the channel.
And do so even when you're in the EPG. On the other hand, I know of no
remote that has separate increase/decrease contrast/brightness/color
buttons, so that seems like something that should just be done via the
menu you're talking about.

James