Matt Schmandt

I am sure all Mythtv users know that at the end of the month they will no longer be able to receive channel data from Zap2It.  Schedules Direct looks like it will be the replacement for at least all US users.  They just announced earlier today that they are ready for people to sign up.

I have read about two ways to switch over your data.  Mythtv released version .20.2 yesterday that has native support for Schedules Direct or you can tweak the XMLTV grabber with a new url.  I would normally recommend waiting for the distributions to include packages of the new Mythtv version but we are under a tight schedule and I don’t know how fast they will have updated packages.  I will probably go with the second option for now.

I successfully upgraded my Gentoo MythTV box from .18 to .19. The upgrade was very smooth. In the past, it was very difficult to build a myth box on Gentoo because of odd bugs with combinations of the nvidia driver, lirc, ivtv and the kernel. I really like that it records mpgs instead of nuvs. It no longer requires any extra scripts to convert them for playback on my computer. They moved around some of the menu items to more logial places and also did many nice upgrades to MythWeb. The dual tuner support got improved but I don’t care about that much yet since I only have 1 tuner.

Hopefully sometime in the next with in a month or 2, I will finally mod my Xbox to be a 2nd frontend. I think I have decided on doing a hardware mod so I can still play all my old games. I still have a lot of research to do on deciding on a chip but I has seen some nice guides out there. If anyone can recommend one please post info about it in the comments.