At some point I am going to want the TV capture feaures (moving in with a bunch of TV nuts), but right now I'm just looking to playback some DVD disc images, music, and other random video files from a remote control, idiot-resistant interface. Once I get Myth working right, my desktop will probably cease to serve as a desktop. I'll just move it out my my home theater setup and let it sit. I rarely use the desktop anyways, I prefer my laptop in bed to sitting at my desk. Currently it has an ancient SBLive! that sounds great for two channel sound, but I've got the full surround system and I would like to take advantage of it. My video card is a Nvidia FX5300 with an s-video output, so it sould work, although I'm a bit corncerned about the quality of s-video compared to component outputs. In my experience, s-video outputs seem blurry, and once again, I've got the home theater setup with the 16:9 TV, I'd like to utilize its capabilities. On 3/3/06, Dave Sherohman <esper at sherohman.org> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 02:20:07PM -0600, Thomas Johnson wrote: > > I'm thinking about turning my desktop into a MythTV box to play DVD > > images straight from the harddrive. > > If you're *just* looking to play DVDs, then MythTV is serious, > serious overkill. IIRC, it just calls mplayer, xine, or whatever > other external player you've configured when you tell it to show a > DVD (or any other video file that's not a MythTV-created recording of > a TV show), so, if you're not planning to record TV shows, you're > going to be better off just installing mplayer, xine, or whatever > other player and just using that directly. > > Also, from a design perspective, mythfrontend is somewhat desktop- > hostile. Its design is so heavily focused on being run full-screen > on a dedicated box and managed with a remote control that it's clumsy > to use in any other way. Running a myth client on my normal desktop > system, I've found that it appears to have no way to resize the video > window or toggle between windowed and full-screen modes short of > stopping playback and wading through the setup screens for every > minor change; it completely ignores all mouse input; and (under > WindowMaker, at least) it always starts up with no title bar on its > window, making it impossible to move the window without bringing up > the window settings (via keyboard) and manually turning off 'disable > titlebar' each and every time it's run. (Yes, this is one of my > major pet peeves with MythTV... I absolutely believe that programs > should concentrate on doing one thing well, but not to the extent of > making it harder to do anything even slightly different.) > > On hardware recommendations, I can't offer any suggestions for a > sound card (I'm perfectly happy with analog stereo, so I've never > paid attention to SPDIF and have no memory of ever even hearing of > TOSLINK before), but, for video, my dedicated MythTV box is using a > plain old Radeon 9200 and I've had no problems with it, although most > people on the MythTV mailing lists seem to advocate nVidia cards over > ATI. > > -- > The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the > White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that > we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened. > - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html) > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >