I am torturing my self again with MythTV. I picked up a Compact Flash to IDE converter last week and managed to get miniMyth installed on my mini-itx box. MiniMyth can be booted from a compact flash card or PXE boot server. After much pulling of teeth I managed to build a minimyth.conf file and get it in the correct place on the flash card for everything to boot.
Now that I have it up and running it, I can finally use the mini-itx box for watching tv from my myth backend server. This is all good but I have a nice tivo that does all that for me already, so what I was really want is a DVD juke box. MythTV has a DVD ripping module built in but I lost some more hair before working out that the miniMyth box needed a large hunk of disk for saving the temporary files before the backed mtd (myth transcoding daemon) would start. I exported a nfs share from my file server to the miniMyth box and I managed to rip a DVD for testing. Since miniMyth is designed to be used with the via EPIA motherboard with hardware mpeg2 decoding it doesn’t include include the transcoder app for converting to Divx. This also means that only options for ripping dvds are perfect or iso. Never of them seem to play back very well on the box so it looks like I may be retiring it for good and buying myself a mac mini to use as a media server.
I have been using the mac port of mythfront end for a while but I still haven’t worked out how to get it to rip dvd’s yet. My file server also seems to have a funky usb controller that doesn’t work well with linux so I can’t use that for ripping dvds from my external dvd drive. So the next plan of action is to move the firewire card to my file server and hook the external dvd drive using that.
Oh and to top it all one of the fans on my file servers power supply has died so the the machine powered off and beeped very loudly a couple times over the weekend so i need to look into getting it replaced.
So over all a successful geek weekend.
