Over the last few weeks, apart from a huge workload, I've been busy moving house - now living in the clouds 52 floors up..

Anyway, one of the important projects to get done for myself, was setting up mythtv on this server (my main web server doubles up as my PVR/video jukebox.)

Just some of the highlights of setting up mythtv

• Radeon 9600SE All in wonder Card - TV in did not end up working (well, the card's quite good as a graphics card anyway, and it came with a usb remote control) so it was not a total loss..
• Bought Haupage PVR500MCE - appears to work ok, although you have to be carefull with the TV arial cable to get good reception. (very nice card with 2 tuners built in.)
• No way to get TV listings for Hong Kong Free to air channels - see later......
• Display did not render chinese (which is what the channels guides come with) - ended up modifying the theme.xml / ui.xml in one of the theme's to use a chinese font -> that solves the schedule browser
• have to use chinese font for osd display. (to display the active watched program)
• Rewind / go back, and constant recording what you watch is really nice..

I had to write a small application to grab the listings for Hong Kong TV and output XMLTV format ->
see the svn files here http://www.akbkhome.com/svn/akpear/XML_Tv/
it's pretty simple to use, only requires the mbstring to be working. (usage instructions inside the php file.)

Unfortunatly, I still have quite a uphill battle to finish for the box, let alone thinking about all the other fun stuff I started recently, and have left in limbo due to moving house. Still todo on the box:

• Sort out Remote key mappings for the ATI remote -> it's pretty messed up for almost all the features (TV/Video watching/EPG etc)
• Autoripping of VCD/DVD's when inserted..
• How to map autoripped VCD/DVD's into imdb for the video library
• Add bigger disk ;)