First, forgive me if this is not exactly the right place for all the comments below. I'm not asking for any advice or answers. This post is purely informational. The purpose is to provide feedback on KnoppMyth (R5C7) from a new end user.

I'm tech savvy, but I want to use KnoppMyth as an end-user without too much tinkering. (In summary, I don't think it's quite there yet, but I hope my comments will help!)

My goal was to have a playback only (no TV capture) box for movies/videos. Music, MAME, and photos would be good, too. Automatic DVD ripping wuld be great. One technical constraint is that I do not want to network the box.

Note: I have not found anywhere in your documentation if network/Internet access is required. Is this assumed? I ran the install with no network, saw some error/warnings, but made it through OK.

Hardware

I ran the KnoppMyth auto install on a "clean slate" machine:

AMD Athlon 1200MHz
512MB RAM
200GB HD
DVD-ROM drive
nVidia Geforce 2 MX200 w/ SVIDEO (and VGA) out (32MB SDRAM)

Nothing impressive, but that should handle video playback.

Install

The KnoppMyth install did not recognize any "multimedia" cards (so I assume no hardware accelleration - not a show stopper for me).

The nVidia driver kernel setup seemed to be different than instructed in The Pamphlet of KnoppMyth. The install-nv... script required a version, which I didn't know, but a 7174 file was there, and that was already magically installed.

Regarding the Pamphlet, as an end-user, it's really scary that not editing XF86Config-4 to ensure proper sync can destroy my TV. Since that's the purpose of MythTV, shouldn't something more careful be done in the install to ensure this doesn't happen to anyone? I'm knowledgeable enough to edit these configs, but many folks are not.

MythTV Usage

I know these comments may not all be strictly Knopp-issues, but here they are.

Ejecting the CD usually causes the tray to retract immediately

Watching videos from CD media requires ugly file browsing

No menu-driven import of videos from CD media (had to go to command line)

Inserting DVD does not auto-play (or give any option, like Play or Rip?)
In fact, choosing to Play DVD failed (some type of error message blips, but that's a show-stopper for an end-user)

Ripping a DVD gave an error about the daemon not running. Pushing a number changed that message to Checking/Waiting, which never responded

After watching a video from CD media, upon removing CD, then going to Video Manager, database was confused that CD was gone (had to correct DB)

After copying videos to hard drive, videos show up in little thumbnail blocks, but with no picture; because of the layout, it's impossible to read titles (if no thumbnail images, a list-view would be better)

After copying videos to hard drive, they do not show up in any organized way (like the file structure they were in). They're just all together in a big "pile".

When choosing a video to watch from the list, the Loading... sometimes blips away (trying again sometimes works)

Conclusion

At this point I have not dug deeper into any of these issues, but that is the point of this post. These are my first-time end-user impressions. Seeing all the great things MythTV can/could do, it is my goal to someday take the time, effort, and money to set up a "real" box for general household use (PVR, photos, games, weather report, Web browsing, Email notification, movies, etc., etc., etc.).

However, in conclusion, I'm giving up for now. Instead, I'll just keep using my olde DVD player.

Sincerely, thank you for the effort and keep up the great work! I look forward to trying again later.

Hi Nyhm,

I am just a user of KnoppMyth also. However I have poked a very pointy stick at my KM box to see if it will jump through some "extra" hoops.

Since you do not have a tv card, half of your system analysis is crippled. Since it is not on a network, it is fractured a little more but that is ok.

Yes, it will run fine without a network connection. To accelerate the boot up process a static IP should be used. To be basicly safe a 192.168.0.2 for the machine, 192.168.0.1 for a gateway, nm 255.255.255.0 & 192.168.0.1 for dns. Other wise the machine will have to wait ~ 2 minutes for a time out before continuing to boot.

DVD's if they are home made and / or non ecrypted should work fine.

Music, you can rip them in either ogg or mp3 of various quality levels.

Games supplied are limited in quanity, frozen-bubbles & tuxracer but both are cool. You can add others. Mame, I knownothing about.

The killing of your tv because XF86Config, I haven't done it yet but I understand the caution advisory and also the warning would be needed as a libility factor I suspect.

The os under KM is Linux, you can do what ever you want / need it to do. Using one cd it would be impossible to set up a everything do all for everyone and the I believe the basic intention of KM is to be a home pvr & entertainment center, and it does this for 0$ not counting hardware.

What do you want your KM box to be? ftp server? http server? email client?

A list of what my machine does, I don't watch a lot of tv or movies and I needed a tool also:
First, it is
KnoppMyth PVR to capture a special tv show here and there
KnoppMyth Tv Listings of the channels to see if there is something
KnoppMyth Music to rip and play my cd collection, only a couple hundred so not very many.
KnoppMyth Gallery for all my family photos
KnoppMyth Games my kids like frozen-bubbles
KnoppMyth Weather works great, of course it is only as good as the weatherman's forecasting
That is just the defaults, then you can easily add MythInternet Streaming where I watch NASA Tv

Also you may add what ever else strikes the fancy:
in mine I have added Gcompris for the kids, Gramps, Mozilla, Thunderbird, XMMS, Celtx, Dia, Saytime, OpenOffice, FreeMind, Proftp, Audacity to my menus.
I use the menu to turn my modem on or off for remote access
It feeds my betabrite display with my son's local (at home) weather station data, while once per hour displays the information on screen or on request. It tells me the time every hour right after it has updated my son's web page from the ftp server. (weather box is M$)

The only two things it doesn't do me for at this moment is be a print server and the phone. And to fill in some spare time I am playing with perl-voice to see if it might work as a supplemental remote control.
Almost forgot, weekly it rips the Prairie Home Companion and a couple of other radio shows for my enjoyment in the evening. All this is just for at home enjoyment and education. It may not be "primetime" but many thanks to Cecil and his team! It is real high on my favorite list.

Thanks
Mike

Nyhm: basicaly you are using only secondary features of mythtv. Mythtv is a PVR first and formost. And the PVR features are the most complete. I agree mythvideo needs some work. And DVD playback is not appliance like (probaly never will be without changes to laws). You should really take your conserns to a mythtv board. This board is for knoppmyth.

P.S. Please no autoplay when a disc is inserted. That is the worst "feature".

A lot of these issues you had can be attributed to a bug in R5C7 with location of DVD in setup. The cool thing about KnoppMyth and MythTV is that these products are flexible enough to be a lot of different things to a lot of users. If you want it to be a DVR it can be, it you want to to house mass amounts of videos and DVDs it can be that too, if you are an audiophile MythTV can accommodate those needs too. Problems tend to arise because it is so it diverse becomes hard to perfect every area with every piece of hardware. Here are quick answer or suggestions to most of your issues.




Dunno, there is an eject button under optical disks.



Sound like you are using MPEG4 CD. Play with MythVideo setup in settings, if configured correctly will automount your CDs & DVDs and you can play them out of MythVideo



All the menus are in .xml format in /usr/share/mythtv write a menu item and/or script to copy all the avi, mpg, mp4, & mov. files from the CD or DVD to /mythtv /video. Document how you did it on the Knoppmyth WIKI or these forums, if people or the developers find it useful you could find that in a future version of KM.



Are your DVDs encrypted ? If so some research may yield some suggestions to work around that.



Known issue.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10196



Yep, Because Video Manager scans for videos in /myth/video there is a smylink to “cdrom -> /mnt/cdrom” in /myth/video so will also scan optical drive. Video Manager will add all those videos, then you eject the CD, next time video manger will scan and notice the /mnt/cdrom files are gone, so will ask you to remove those files from DB. Personally I turn off scan for new files setting in Video settings and do not show unkown file types.



If you had a internet connection what you would do is in Video Manager is tell Myth to scan IMDB for poster and description. Since you don’t have network connection can manually enter in that info using Video Manager and copy .jpg file to /myth/video/.covers and then modify metadata for video to use poster, or just change to listing view (m key)



Go into setup and change your video setting to use Listing view or I prefer






If you are using KM primarily as a video player I suggest updating mplayer according to this howto.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4706 This adds a ton of codecs and uses latest version of Mplayer.


Check out this post on machine I build for similar purposes

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7732

Thank you very much for your constructive feedback. Like I said, my post was prior to doing any further research or tweaking. The purpose was to provide the KM developers a first-time end-user report.



The beauty of an Open Source community! I didn't want to spend too much time on this, but now I've started fiddling with the menu layout to show only the features I want. I'm impressed with how easy it is to tweak mythtv (but that's for another forum).

Also, the Listings view was exactly what I needed, rather than Gallery, for the video files, thanks.

This is a great hobby project... now I just have to keep it from usurping all of my time.

Although this is a bit off topic I think it may apply to this post a bit. MythTV is probably not at the level that someone who has never used Linux or used it in passing can get it up %100 on the first go. But it is getting very close. I have been running mythtv for two or three years now. When I look at my notes for each version I can se how far it has moved along. For r4v5 my notes have things like compile lirc to allow remote and irblaster. The instructions are about two pages long. Compile ivtv so pvr 150 will work. Install zine so menus will work for dvd’s. Enable dma on dvd drive so cd’s wont be choppy. And the list goes on.

With the latest version I don’t need to compile anything. IVTV lirc nothing and setting up an irblaster is a synch. It is quite impressive haw far and how much easer mythtv has become. With every relieace it is easer and easer to setup. So stop by in 6 month and do you review again and you will be surprised how much has changed.

While MythTV has gotten better, the features you speak of are a result of improving KnoppMyth.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

What ssbn wrote (and cesman clarified) is exactly why I chose KnoppMyth as my MythTV distro. I'm looking forward to the next major release.