Because my daughter, who is off at college, complained bitterly about
having to constantly swap VHS tapes to record her shows at school, as
compared to "Mything" them at home, I threw together a Myth box for her
out of spare parts. In the process, I found out a few things that might
be useful to someone else in the future, so I'm posting them here for
archival purposes.
The only usable capture card I had was an old ATI TV Wonder, which has
an MSP3400 chip. In the past I had successfully used that particular
card with btaudio on RH9 and with snd_bt87x on FC2. This time, I could
not get DMA audio to work with any recent distro. I tried FC4, Ubuntu
5.10, and FC3 with a dist-upgrade. No joy for any of them. I was about
to go back to RH9 and btaudio, but I tried installing FC3 again without
a dist-upgrade and that worked. So, in short, I was not able to get
snd_bt87x to work with any kernel newer than 2.6.9 or so. The symptoms
were simple: No /dev/dsp device was created, nor was the capture card
recorded in /proc/asound/. But everything is now working fine with the
default kernel installed by FC3.
Second, I managed to save myself the headache of finding an IR receiver
for lirc. Once upon a time I bought, but never used, a Chicony KB-9820
IR keyboard. Using that, along with a Philips six device Universal
Digital DVD Learning Remote (PHDVD6ZL, $20 at Fry's) gave me a usable
remote control at a tiny fraction of the effort that was required to get
lirc working on my original Myth box. I can't say if that particular
keyboard is still available anywhere, but it does work well.
Other than that, I finally discovered a use for Windows Internet
Connection Sharing, as her Internet connection is with Airimba wireless
who only allow a single connection per account. That was solved with
two old NIC's, an ethernet crossover cable, W2K ICS, and a bash script
that retries mythfilldatabase until the connection is available.
Of course, daughters being what they are, she was distressed to find out
that "her Myth" can only record one program at a time (unlike the home
box). Maybe I can pick up another TV Wonder off Ebay...
Hopefully, having this note in the archive will help if someone
encounters any of the same problems.
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