Posts tagged Mac Mini
Ubuntu Karmic – Mac Mini – MythTV
Dec 15th
I gave up on OSX. I could not get the media center working the way I wanted. Plex and XBMC have their bugs, as previously posted, twice, preventing predictable functionality. MythTV for OSX simply is not as refined as its native Linux counterpart. It feels like running Windows applications via wine. I just scrapped OSX for Ubuntu Karmic. Out of the box, off of the cd, things work great. Audio works perfect. What didn’t work? The Mac Mini remote control. I tried for a day to get it to work the hard way. I saw that /dev/usb/hiddev1 was working and displaying data; shown with cat. But lirc would not bind to the device. Ultimately I removed the program, and ran a system update. Problem resolved; clearly a bug report was filed and a resolution provided.
Fanart and coverart work fine. The Linux based fronted is seamless compatible with the Linux based MythTV server. I didn’t even need to input the servers ip information manually. I did have to set the repeat feature, for each key in ~/.lirc/mythtv.
Now all I want is to have MythTV sleep the system and wake the system. I get it to sleep the system by making the halt script sudo pm-suspend. Adjust your /etc/sudoers files to allow passwordless sudo for /usr/sbin/pm-suspend. The halt script is configured in setup-general settings. Waking the computer is another thing that I have yet to get working.
XBMC/Plex Crash Using MythTV
Sep 23rd
For the most part MythTV is nicely integrated into XBMC and Plex. You can view all recordings and pull up live tv. There is only one bug. When you do a recorind with your MythTV backend, and the beginning of the video starts on one channel, and changes during the recoding to another channel a hard freeze occurs. Albeit it may be my recoding method, which is firewire, but I cannot verifiy this for sure. I have a MythTV frontend also on the Mac Mini im using as a frontend, and during the same situation it does not crash. The problem is after getting a taste of XBMC and Plex as a frontend I cannot see myself going back to a MythTV frontend. I am going to delete the few recordings that are causing me problems, and try and re-record. Maybe its just a random bug, and not necessarily the recorded transition between channels. Maybe its some sort of flag that MythTV puts on the video file, but not likely. In either case XBMC and Plex for Macs are the way to go for a frontend, especially for MythTV 
