New mythtv frontend setup

I’ve just setup a new Mythtv box. Although the previous system was relatively quiet, it was in a big box, and I want minimalism now rather then obvious geekery in the living room.

So I’ve got myself an Acer Revo r6310, found at a cracking price on the superb UK Hot Deals. This is a Nvidia ION dual core Intel Atom powered beasty. The old Mythtv box is now up in the loft.

I was going to try out one of the Mythbuntu releases. But it took ages to download, so I ended up putting a Gentoo minimal installer on a bootable USB stick and went from there. After setting up distcc on my main Linux box (also 64bit) the compilation took about 36 hours.

Using VDPAU with the binary Nvidia drivers. playback is awesome. So far the largest 1080p sample I have (The trailer for Alexander) plays perfectly. Although I seem to be unable to get WMV audio to play.

Video output is via the HDMI > DVI and audio is purely via SPDIF to the amplifier.

Very pleased so far.

weird scsi controller shennanigans

My main Linux workstation uses a pair of u320 300GB SCSI drives with a pair of RAID1 arrays (Linux RAID) attached with a LSI Logic LSI20320-R MPT Fusion based controller. This card has stood me in good stead for quite a few years now. It is a HP branded one I bought on Ebay, however, I flashed it with the LSI generic firmware I found.

My motherboard is an Asus NCT-D with 1 PCI-e, 1xPCI-e x16 three PCI-X and a single PCI card slot. I wanted to place a PCI card DVB-S in there to act as a slave MYTHTV backend to serve the satellite channels. The only free slot was the one above the SCSI card. However, after adding the DVB-S card my machine refused to boot. The SCSI BIOS did not load.

It appears that this card MUST be the first card in all the PCI slots (does’t include the PCI-e slots). I’ve never come across this before in many years of messing with scsi host adapters!