Like many people, I went out into the great choas known as Black Friday after a deal.
In my case I was focused on obtaining an Olevia 237T 37″ LCD television being sold at Target for the low, low price of $549.00.
After getting it home and plugging it all into my MythTV system, I ran into problems. First of all, since the tv had a vga input, I used the vga output of my video card instead of the svideo output. Initially I got no video, but then I realized I needed to undo some of my xorg.conf changes since I had changed the output.
After fixing the xorg.conf problem to not use the svideo port (thank you SSH!), I ran into other small problems.
Getting the resolution output right
The 237T has a native resolution of 1366×768, which according to an article at CNET.com is the most common resolution, yielding an output of 768p.
It turns out that I needed a particular video modeline in order to make the tv work properly. This required a great deal of research since manually calculating a modeline is not something that I really wanted to undertake. After finding a few online calculators, I found that I could not use them since the Dot Clock Frequency was not something that was included in the manual for the tv. So I diligently searched on the Internet to see if I could run across someone else who had this model tv (or the slightly improved 537 series) that had solved the problem. On the MythTV wiki, I ran across two entries for the 537h. I tried them both, but unfortunately the source display on the tv still reported a resolution of 1024×768. After trolling the xorg.conf logs, this turned out to be due to a failure of either modeline to be validated.
Digging ever deeper into the realms of HDTV screen resolutions and the xorg.conf options, I found that the binary, proprietary Nvidia drivers give you something that can help out a lot here, Appendix J. Programming Modes. This enables one to specify a series of validated modes and the driver will automatically validate them and use the correct output settings for the first mode that is found to be valid.
Here is what I ended up using in my xorg.conf file:
Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Videocard0" Monitor "OleviaHDTV" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1360x768_60" "1280x720_60" EndSubSection EndSection
Getting the right TV output
The next hurdle was to make sure that I got the right output of each of the MythTV applications.
Xine
In the configuration of the DVD player or the Video player, make sure that you launch xine with the following command:
xine -pfhq -D -r anamorphic
In theory xine should automatically display the video output exactly as is on the media, but using the command above will ensure that your get a fullscreen display. (Thanks to a posting in the Freevo-users list by John Molohan for this)
Mplayer
In the DVD or Video playback configuration you can use the following command to launch mplayer to use the correct aspect ratio (Thanks to Jarod Wilson for this tip):
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -monitoraspect 16:9 -vo xv %sYou can also set these same configuration options in your mplayer configuration file (~/.mplayer/config):
## Audio Output ao="alsa"
ac="hwac3,"
## Verbosity
really-quiet="1"
## Video Out
vo="xv"
## Scaling fs="yes" zoom="yes" monitoraspect="4:3"
double="yes"
## Misc
nojoystick="yes"Internal DVD player
The MythTV built-in dvd player should display the video correctly by default.
Live TV output
When watching live television, you have a few options:
- Leave the aspect ratio alone
- Change the aspect ratio to be 4:3 or 16:9
- To set the aspect ration to be Fill
- To set the aspect ratio to be 4:3 with zoom or 16:9 with zoom
Each of these has it’s own drawbacks, but I have gotten the best results using 16:9. This setting is in the Playback options of the TV section of the MythTV setup.
References
In order to get the updates for Ubuntu to take MythTV to 0.20.2 you need to add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
After doing this run the following commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
In addition to the MythTV updates a few other things should be available. I went ahead and just got everything and have suffered no ill effects.
After updating, make sure to shutdown the backend before running mythtv-setup to change the data provider.
sudo /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop
After running mythtv-setup, make sure that you start the backend back up, then run mythfilldatabase.
For those who don’t know, Zap2It Labs stopped offering free channel data for the community.
A paid for solution Schedules Direct has stepped up to the plate with a fairly inexpensive solution. In order to use it you need to update your MythTV installation.
The 0.20.2 release of MythTV supports SD.
Gentlemen, start your updates, because at 12:00 a.m., 08-01-07 Zap2It Labs goes dark.
One of the annoyances I have discovered with MythTV and Fedora Core is the inability to eject the optical drive in a default install of MythTV.
Apparently the function EJECT that is called in the menu file for the Optical Disk doesn’t work in Fedora Core.
To fix this, edit the file optical_menu.xml. Look for the line:
EJECT
Remove the text EJECT and replace it with:
EXEC eject -T
This will tell the system to send the optical drive a close tray command if the tray is open and a open tray command if the tray is closed.
After recently upgrading my MythTV system, I set to editing the metadata for my video collection.
Everything worked fine when editing through the regular interface, but when attempting to edit the data through the MythWeb interface, I noticed that entries where the title started with double-quotes, the field in the edit screen was empty.
The data would be stored in the database, if entered in quotes, yet the edit screen would not retrieve it.
The solution is to add the usage of PHP function htmlentities in the edit.php file of the video module of MythWeb.
The problem is in line 102 where the value attribute contains the following snippet of PHP code:
The corrected version would look like this:
This is built off the latest version of the stable MythWeb module. Download the corrected version.