Yeah yeah the most enthralling thing I'd really done with linux before now is maintaining my smoothwall box (which isnt always simple) but a few things on this fresh install have got me stumped.

Ok for a start, i did the install with a monitor plugged in, with just a keyboard for interactivity. I ran the setup in TV mode because it kept crashing (blue or black screens) on normal mode. Just to highlight the fact now, I did not have the mouse plugged in at setup.

Now I've moved it through into the room with the telly, given it a nice network cable and wired it up via the shuttle's TV Out that comes on the motherboard.

Problem 1 - Controlling
I've only got 1 keyboard and I'd really rather not have to take mine from this PC into the television room whenever i want to watch something. I plugged a mouse in. First into USB with no love followed by putting a usb-to-ps/2 adapter on but to no avail.

I havent got the money to spend on a IR controller for it yet but I do have a usb playstation controller to usb convertor. I would love to find a way of getting that installed and mapping some keys (somehow) so we can control it via pads.

I'd also really love to get the mouse working any way I can.


Problem 2 - Samba
Ok this is a little bit of an odd one. I've mapped a samba share to /myth/video
If I ls from ssh (as user: mythtv) I can see everything as i should be able to.

Sometimes this can take a while to come though... I'll have to do 50x ls before things show up, so I'd like that delay cut down.

The second sub-problem which is infinately more of a problem for me is when I do take my keyboard through to the other room, go into the media section and look in the video folder, there is nothing there. Not even a directory I created in there. I read somewhere that I need to rescan the contents, but honestly dont have a clue how to do this.


Problem 3 - Screen size
I'm using a PAL (UK) TV to output onto. The picture is smaller than the screen (doesnt fill it) and the picture is actually cut off a bit...

Again, not much clue on what to do here, but any help is appreciated.



As I started off saying, I'm no linux guru. I can edit files, save them and reboot. Not a lot but it gets me through guides and howtos. Please bear in mind if you give me an answer like: "just edit the x69Defribulator file and comment out where the decomfribulator is mbaffed into the future" I wont have a monkeys what you're talking about =) A brief explanation or example of what you mean is always immensely appreciated. Ty all in advance.

Controlling

Keyboards cost a little as £3 (www.bigpockets.co.uk).
Get a remote, Hauppage Tv cards have a built in IR and come with remotes. You probably want/have a PCI DVB-T Freeview card if you're in the UK?

Scanning

From the mythfrontend go to utilities/setup, video manager. This will automatically rescan the myth/video (and /cdrom folder) contents.

Tv-Out

To get it to fill the screen you will probably want to enable overscan. You do this by editing the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file. You add something like:

Option TvVscan "over"

... under the part where it detects your graphics card I think.

It will then probably be 'zoomed in' - i.e. the edges cropped all the way around. To solve I then tweak the X and Y height and width, and offsets (position) manually from the frontend - Utilities/Settings, Settings, Appearance. For example, on a 42" plasma tv I found that this would fit the screen perfectly:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6092

You can also change the % of overscan somewhow, never figured that out myself though.

Best you have a good read of the wiki first...

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=PalHowTo
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... MythConfig
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... Transition

Ok, just did a reinstall on with the mouse plugged in and using the TV as output and everything seems to be much healthier in those 2 worlds.

As for buying another keyboard, that's all very good but at the end of the day, I dont want a great slab of plastic to control my television. I want somehing much more practical. A remote would be ideal, but I honestly havent got the money for one at the moment. I really want to be able to use my gamepads.

I'll just add to my problem domain that I currently have no capture card inside my box. I want to use it for playing videos over the network.

Something else I forgot to mention although really should have is there is quite an immense amount of crashing going on. They can be caused from just pressing something on the GUI or 2 minutes into playback of a video file. As far as I can tell they are completely random but definately related to something about the the video chipset (which is detected as a savage chipset). Its always a completely terminal crash (the keyboard stops working) marked by a real splurge of a vomit-looking mess on the screen. I've also born witness to striaght purple lines, plain red and plain blue crash screens.

Other than those, its just samba which is being a bit unpredictable... is it posible to force a refresh of what smbfs thinks is on the network drive?

Not sure what the rules are on bumping threads but I really need the help. Feel free to castigate me accordingly.

If you need any details on anything hardware realted I'm good to give. If you need log details I might need a sharp poke in the right direction.

This is the samba setup howto on the wiki (sounds like you are already using)

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... SambaHowTo

This is autofs setup howto on the wiki (used for reconnecting and keeping connected network mounts at startup)

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... +and+samba


My prefrence is I mount network shares in /mnt/network

I use autofs to keep knoppmyth connected to samba shares.

Then create a symlink to my shares in the appropiate /myth directory

i.e.

Code:
ln -s /mnt/network/videoshare /myth/video/network
ln -s /mnt/network/musicshare /myth/music/network


This gives me the best of both worlds, I can use my internal myth hdd for ripping/TV recording and use my server for larger media storage browsing in directory tree.



Myth Menu
Utilities/Setup > Video Manager (It will scan for new videos of your chosen file types in /myth/video)

I'm not sure what the advantages of mapping to the /mnt location are then linking across but anyway...

I've made a directory in my /myth/video dir called tv
When i map a samba location onto this directory sometimes when I ls from inside the folder, i get the correct (samba) contents but sometimes it just looks like a blank directory.

if I use smbclient to have a look at the location to make sure everything is OK, it all connects fine and shows me what I should be seeing in /myth/video/tv. Its not a massive problem.. my biggest issue is the blatent video problems my little shuttle box is having

As for the crashing... I think I may have nailed that down to hardware being a little dodgy - so dont worry about that so much