Ok, I was using OSX on my Mac Mini for a long time. MythTV, compiled for OSX, simply does not work with the fanart and coverart. I recently discovered jamu that installs with .22 on the server; the application conveniently scans your recordings and adds fanart and coverart. It looks great with basically all themes. Coverart will place an official looking cover as if it was an oldschool VHS wrapper, and the fanart will display a fullscreen image behind the description of the recording. Again, it looks great. On OSX it would not display. I actually went through the hassle of Samba mounting /var/lib/mythtv to try and get the fanart and coverart on the Mac Mini, but it still would not display. Currently I installed Ubuntu Karmic.

Fanart and coverart works right out of the box. The server is detected out of the box. Audio works out of the box. I just set the playback drivers to the mac hardware option, and HDTV playback works smoothly. The bottom grey bar is basically gone now, which is an improvement as compared to MythTV for OSX. There is currently only one thing lacking from my system. The nifty Mac Mini remote.

I currently am using one of the convenient iPod touch remotes that does indeed work. But it has no tactile feedback. I like it and will use it but I would like the mac mini remote to work as it did out of the box on OSX. I tried installing Mythbuntu control centre, but no go.

sudo apt-get install mythbuntu-control-centre

It allows you to install lirc graphically. It does setup /etc/lirc/lircd.conf and it does load the macmini IR driver. The driver works, and the /dev/usb/hiddev1 is created as expected, but lirc is non functional out of the box. Using irw I cannot get lirc to respond to button presses. I do cat /dev/usb/hiddev1 and there is output. I can use irrrecord to create a lircd.conf file. It appears to work. I apparent cannot get hardware.conf configured properly. Even with the custom lircd.conf file, irw still does not respond to button presses. Quite a frustrating experience. I don’t know what to do next. Irrecord is creating lircd.conf therefore I can only assume I have some sort of misconfiguration in hardware.conf. I will intestigate further. Everything is simply after irw starts responding; the mythbuntu-control-centre already has .lircrc configured which I can modify to suit the naming schemea I used during the creation of lircd.conf. I’m close but not there yet.