Category Archives: MythTV

DIY HDTV TV Antenna (Bowtie)

DIY HDTV Antenna

Build your own HDTV TV Antenna to cut the cord from your cable provider and save $1000 a year. This DIY antenna is very easy to build with just a few basic tools and a few supplies available from the hardware store.

After being disappointed with the current channel offerings and ever increasing price of our local cable provider, we recently decided to disconnect our cable TV service and go for over the air broadcasts as well as the many online services available now. I built this DB4 antenna, also called a bowtie antenna, to increase the rang of signals I could pick up over the basic rabbit ears antenna.

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Adding a Second Hard Drive to Knoppmyth

mythtvI switched back to Knoppmyth a couple months ago for my MythTV fix and I’m pretty happy with it except for a few minor glitches I’m still trying to work out. One of those glitches is that sometimes when the backend gets busy the video can become choppy and sometimes even effect the video as it’s written to the disk. This page states that this is caused by I/O problems with the disk and suggests changing the /myth partition from ext3 to the XFS file system using the instructions on this page. Since I have been using the box for a while, it has a lot of recorded and other video on it and their instructions are for a fresh system . I am also nearly out of space on this system so i’m also adding a second hard drive which further complicates matters.

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Podcasts on MythTV

mythtvI love using my MythTV for 3 main reasions:

  1. Timshifting TV
  2. Watching downloaded video
  3. Watching video podcasts

This article is about the 3rd feature, watching video podcasts. I use a script called podget which is run every night by cron to download any new shows and delete shows older than the age I specify. It also creates a playlist for all the new shows it downloades so you don’t have to figure out what’s new and what you’ve already seen.

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Playlists on MythVideo using Mplayer

I’ve been using MythTV for a few years now and now find it an indispensable part of my media setup. So, I recently went back to Knoppmyth because my mythdora box was acting up. Well, I got podget all set up again to download my video podcasts, but I couldn’t get MythTV to play the playlists it generated. First, it wouldn’t play them at all, then I figured out the new version of knoppmyth was using a “mplayer-resume.pl” script to start the videos which generates a file with a time stamp each time you watch a video so you can resume where you left off. Well, this didn’t work well with playlists and I don’t really need to resume anyway, so I changed it back to running mplayer directly. Well, that wasn’t enough either since you have to add the -playlist option to tell mplayer that it’s a playlist. So, I added a new extension in the media settings for m3u playlist files:

mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -playlist %s

Well, that would play them , but I was only getting sound, no video.

So, after a few days of searching, and talking on IRC, I finally discovered that I had a typo and used -vo vx instead of -vo xv. This option apparently tells mplayer which video driver to use, so it’s kind of picky. BTW, the above line is the correct line. So, the lesson learned, is to double check when manually transferring command lines.

Mythlink for Human Readable File Names

I started using MythTV with Knoppmyth a few years ago. It had a feature where it would put a human readable filename in a folder that linked to the original file that was recorded from live TV by MythTV. I’ve since started using Mythdora and I did some searching and couldn’t find anything like it that worked on Mythdora So I found a copy of the script and modified it to work with both Mythdora 4 and 5.

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