Not a whole lot new here… I haven’t done too much new and exciting stuff. I’ve been tweaking my PowerMac G5 a little bit — trying to find out what it’s capable of. I’ve been very impressed. Not only can you change a lot of the under-the-hood settings within the OS X environment, but you can run virtually any Linux/BSD based application including window managers like Enlightenment and KDE. Very neat stuff.
I also finally got my MythTV box up and running well. My only complaints now are the pauses between channel switches (MythTV prebuffers and requires a pause so there’s no fix for it) and also occasionally I get some slight audio and video jittering. I think that tweaking some of the decoding settings will fix this just fine. It’s currently recording prescheduled shows (which I can schedule through a web interface running on my server) and all the other details are working. I’m just waiting for more and more features to be integrated into it. My feeling is that sooner or later there will be a fork that takes MythTV solidly in a new direction that focuses on stability, ease of use, and reliability. For now, I have a “free” TiVo which cost me the price of a Hauppauge PVR-350.
#1 by Anonymous on November 9, 2005 - 5:31 pm
You could use a second tuner card in conjunction with a priority heuristic to pre-buffer on your most likely next channel, then switching could be accomplished slightly more seamlessly. With two cards you could also change the pause into a delayed response on the channel change, even without any heuristics..