Calling all MP New Zealanders (Both of you!!) (21 Viewers)

[mcraenz]

Well, I'm sorry guys. I'm installing MythTV. Windows just became incredibly unstable, blue screened on me, the lot. Couldn't get it to pick up the channels again. Too much effort for so little gain. Thanks for the help though, and I may look at it again, one day.

I used myth for a while with a full client/server setup but I just found that MP had a much nicer cleaner interface. especially the overlayed OSD stuff. But hey maybe your hardware combo just agrees more with myth. I also wouldn't lead anyone to believe that my MP experience has been pain free!

 

[Klathman]

Another new user

Thought I'd just drop a note to say that I've joined the ranks of MP users. It hasn't been the easiest road as seems to be fairly normal but I am slowly getting there. Coming from the MCE side of the fence there are a few disappointments for me but I'm hoping that I can at least work around these in the future.

Currently I'm running with a PVR150MCE and IR Blaster controlling a sky digibox. Initially I tried to set up TVE3 but had a few problems connecting so moved to TVE2 which allowed me to make a bit of progress. I do plan to go back to TVE3 when I get things a little more under control though.

So far I've had HUGE problems with the IR Blaster and remote. The remote worked straight away but the IR Blaster wouldn't. After loads of playing I found the following.
1) Don't have energy saver lights turned on and expect MP to get a good IR signal
2) Don't have the IR receiver near a plasma TV and expect to get a good IR signal
3) Use the MCE Replacement Plugin
4) Set the Port to Both but have the IR transmitter on the second port and NOT the first
5) Set the IR speed to fast as the STB won't respond otherwise the trasmitter will send it but the STB won't understand it.

Once past all that I have recently found that when the box returns from an S3 sleep that the blaster doesn't work and the non-standard remote buttons don't work. I have found some info on this but it was apparently fixed in 0.2.0.5 so I might need to do some more playing. *sigh*

I think this may be causing the same problem if I set MP to start with windows as the remote doesn't work for quite some time and sometimes I need to kill MP and restart for it to start responding.

Another annoyance is having to do something to start TV fullscreen. I understand the rational but coming from MCE it's a bit of a pain. Also having to remember to go to scheduled rather than Recorded TV if a show is still recording is taking a while. And to end that area I have a recurring show that I wanted to stop last night and the only way to do this seemed to be to kill the whole recurring schedule. Still I'm sure that's a process thing that I can get sorted.

Then I also need to do some button allocation changes so that hopefully I can turn off TV in fullscreen rather than having to go to any other menu and hit stop. Again I can understand the rational but I prefer it to work a different way.

Then on to how Music is displayed. I'm used to MCEs way of showing album art for folders and subfolders (ie multiple album covers if subfolders with different albums are present.) So I wasn't too happy with share view. So sorting by Artist gave me a shock when the first letter of the Artist name is shown as the top level. I'm sure I could create my own folder.jpg files for each folder but that does sound like a pain.

On the plus side XMLTV integration is great. I'm sure the picture quality is better than MCE. The guide with icons looks much better; although anyone know how to make it bigger or show less channels per screen? The timeshifting is much nicer particularly the ability to jump in increasing sizes, the ability to add different source types will be wonderful and accessing media on network shares or even scattered locations is great.

From here I obviously want to get the problems above fixed and get the TVE3 working and am also keeping an eye out for the new S2 FireDTV which will be on my shopping list.

If anyone has any suggestions to help with the above then I'm all ears too so thanks in advance.

 

[mcraenz]

From here I obviously want to get the problems above fixed and get the TVE3 working....

Hmmm...I'd suggest just going straight to TV3 rather than getting all your problems sorted out with TV2 then moving to TV3 to get a whole bunch of new problems to sort out!

 

[Klathman]

I had a time window to get MP in and working before the wife came back and threw the toys. TVE3 just wasn't going to be in and working on time which is why I went for TVE2 and this way at least I can get some overall MP experience before taking another jump.

 

[dan_nz]

Hey again,
I can say that I was hoping to get MP working for the cleaner interface and some of the extra benefits (multiplex recording for one). Installing Linux actually made me discover some hardware issues - that yes swapping PCI-slots did solve (although, I DID do it before, its just this particular PCI slot stopped my PC from booting, so I must've done something wrong in that respect). Now that I have MythTV working and getting a nice image and everything, I may look at MP again this weekend (first I'll make an image of my Linux install though )

Since installing MythTV on Ubuntu in February it has gotten a lot easier to install. A lot of the steps have just been shrunk down into "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-mythtv-frontend". That said, it doesn't look as elegant as MP, and setting up LIRC isn't as easy as setting up WinLIRC interestingly enough.

So yeah, I might just jumpback, maybe this weekend. ?? I know one of my flatmates was quite looking forward to new stuff on MP

 

[johnrw]

macraenz
Are you now still usining the guide data from the internal card for Sky TV with the Sky TV channels from the STB assigned to an AV input plus your Oz stuff the way you taught me? I have got it going with just MP single user 0.2.3 Rec1. Your new Freeview description site looks good. A Sky version would be good or a comment about the Sky setup in your Freeview description would be good. I guess there is the "attention-you-dont't-want" factor to be cautious about.

Anyway, it is a neat and tidy solution to use the Sky TV data via the internal DVB-S card and the channel from the STB AV.

 

[mcraenz]

Yeah I'm only getting MY 7C / SBS guide from XML file now; everything else I'm getting from DVB-S It's a good solution. And while I've really appreciated the work Reven has put in to xmltvnz you just can't beat the real thing!!

 

[johnrw]

Yeah I'm only getting MY 7C / SBS guide from XML file now; everything else I'm getting from DVB-S It's a good solution. And while I've really appreciated the work Reven has put in to xmltvnz you just can't beat the real thing!!

What did you think about my other comment - "Your new Freeview description site looks good. A Sky version would be good or a comment about the Sky setup in your Freeview description would be good."?

 

[mcraenz]

Do you mean in terms of using sky for EPG via DVB-S in the case where people use a Analog card+Blaster+Sky Digitial Box? Yeah I think I should put something up. Although I've not had any experience with blaster+Sky Digibox, maybe someone else can chip in here.

I'm wondering though if it might be best for me to pull all this info out of my site and put it in the wiki then we can all contribute. Now that I think about it seems a bit pointless for me to take this information away from the MP community site to where it could potentially become obsolete. What do you guys think?? Maybe a complete wiki section for NZ Mp users (There is already some info there) If we all work together we can makea pretty complete guide/resource. Of course we'll have to leave out any "special stuff".

 

[captcol]

I agree, the nz customization area in the wiki could be better, and who better to do it but those of us that have media portal running in NZ.

Currently I am having issues incorporating xmltvnz in tv server, it imports the epg etc etc but thats it but no listings in the front end, I think it maybe to do with channel id's or sumthing but I am abit lost. I will spend some time on it this weekend and then once sorted can post to the wiki the steps. (using beta 6 of xmltvnz)