Well, I have been playing around with Knoppmyth R5D1 for a while now, and love it. I use it to watch DVDs and MPEG4 disks, play music and a few games (Stepmania and Unreal Tournament). I haven't used it to watch TV cause a Duron 850mhz just doesn't do the job.....anyway.....

The reason for this post. I love how Knoppmyth handles DVDs and MPEG4 disks. A friend of mine wants a box to play these, and maybe a few small games. Has anyone ever stripped Knoppmyth down to function as just a glorified DVD player? Is this even possible, or a sane goal?

Hi,

The 850mhz should give you tv also, maybe not both record & playback at the same time however I would almost guarantee it using a 350 card. I can do it on a 400mhz Dell.

If you really want it to look like a plain old cd / dvd player, just cutomize your menu selections. as user mythtv,
cp /usr/share/mythtv/*.xml /home/mythtv/.mythtv/

Now you can hack away and make them look like what ever you prefer, to activate, just exit mythfrontend (esc) and (alt m) to restart the mythfrontend
hint <!-- --> anything inbetween disappears,

It is open source, if you want you can make it play the National Anthem every morning at 6 AM and taps at night!

Mike

well, on to editing files......

The tuner I have in it is based off the bt878, and when I had a duron 1100, it was watchable. it would studder only when I brought up the TV guide. with the 850, it sttudders too much. However, from a system built from scrounged parts, I can't complain.

Thanks

Hi,

If you were to record then play later I would suspect the stuttering would be reduced significantly. Also the x50 series have a built in hardware encoder that off loads a lot of work from the cpu.

I would tend to try an older version (A26 or A30.2 maybe) of KnoppMyth for the bttv as the x50 cards weren't as popular then so I think the support may have been a bit better. Just my perception and I have made an occasional small error in the past. now I have 5

Actually the homemade KM boxes are the best as you can poke at it a lot and not worry if you break it. Usually by that time you also know how to unbreak it.

Mike

well, this system is realy more of a proof of concept, plus, I haven't been watching much TV lately, it serves as a fancy frontend for playing DVDs and Stepmaina right now. Soon I plan to build a new one with a x50 and a sempron.