Media center tag

After some painful downloads of over 10MB over a 24kbps connection, we got some satellite action going on on our MythBox. While we don’t have Myth yet (we need to download a bit), I did get channels streaming (via dvbstream) to Mplayer. At first the channels were quite choppy, and we found that the average load was about double of what is allowed! We were able to fiddle with the output a little to get it outputting fine.

So, no, we don’t have broadband yet. Once we do though, MythTV and Blackbox are going straight on the machine!

Well our media center PC is half way done. I put in the components that I have. So now all we need to wait for is the RAM (Thursday), the digital TV card (Wednesday) and for a new graphics card (still to be ordered). So the machine will probably be ready by Friday (as I also need to clear out the old house).

However, the TVNZ channels are moving over to the new Optus D1 satellite on Wednesday and this will take at most three days to complete (three days longer than they expected) because of the error that the satellite went up with. So won’t be of much use until then anyway.

I decided to set it up with Ubuntu, but take out the Gnome and use Blackbox (a lesser load and can run the other apps as well). And because we don’t have broadband, it’ll take all day to download the stuff anyway.

Ah, the space! Ugh, the crap!

We are on dial-up internet going through wireless. It’s like being thrown back to… well the beginning of last year when I was on dial up as well. Such a horrifying event. Then, City of Heroes released a 13MB patch just to taunt me! Just on Double XP weekend.

Paul and I have decided to rebuild my old computer (no I never got around to selling most of the parts - just the RAM) and turning it into a Media Center. We are looking at changing the graphics card with a dirt cheap one (possibly an FX5200) for TV-Out and putting in a DVB-S tuner (this will pick up Freeview when it is out, but will pick up clear One and 2 right now anyway). Also stick in a DVD player and we’re away!

Still got some things left to do at the old place, like clean up and gather some remaining items, but now practically all moved in here.