Pluto Home is the project that LinuxMCE is based on. They are essentially the same thing, the different is Pluto Home is supposed to be a black box application that takes over your computer (with the advantage of stability) whereas LinuxMCE is designed to coexist with everything else a little better. Pluto Home is also offered as a commercial solution preinstalled and configured (but the software itself is still open source).

To get more info on how it all worked I visited the Pluto Home forums.

It seems that MythTV isn’t as integrated into Pluto Home/LinuxMCE as I’d hoped, but it might not actually matter depending on how you use it. When you select TV, it just launches MythTV and puts it at the front. It then simulates key presses from whatever your current control method is (which could be a remote, a mouse or their Symbian software on a bluetooth mobile phone). If you can use MythWeb to set things to record (which is what I use with Myth most of the time) and then just use Pluto/LinuxMCE to view the recordings then minimal integration is not a problem since I’d never use MythFrontend…

Could this be the ultimate home entertainment system? There’s a video dotted around the Internet that firmly says yes but I strongly suggest that video is not your first source of information about LinuxMCE since its uber-fanboy nature will just annoy you.

It’s basically a wrapper for MythTV, Asterisk and a few other things brought together with a snazzy interface and user accounts. The third party reports I’ve read suggest it’s not as easy to setup as the website suggests, nor perfectly stable. But the list of features it claims to support (and hopefully will completely support soon) is quite amazing.

For more info, visit the LinuxMCE website.

Someone on the MythTV mailing list recently announced GMyth, a library based on ANSI C and GObject to provide access to Myth backends in a GTK environment. Their ultimate goal is to have MythTV accessible from a Nokia 770/N800 complete with live transcoding.

You can find lots more info over on MoRpHeUz’s Blog.

I just got an email announcing that due to some sort of technical difficulties, my unbundling has been put back. No word on a new date either.

There is now a single click installation route for getting Mono on the Nokia 770 and Nokia N800. Basically it sets up installation repositories and installs the runtime. From that any apps you install will install only the components they need. Whether there are any really cool Mono apps for Maemo yet is something I don’t know. But I’m sure there will be :)

If you play EVE, pay with time cards. Especially if you’re European.

Basically it comes down to the US$/€ exchange rate. I also happen to be part of an affiliate scheme selling them through Shattered Crystal, but even if I wasn’t, I’d tell you anyway (in fact I waited a little longer to post this while I found a good affiliate scheme :P).

I’ve explained the whole exchange rate thing a bit better as well as given more info about Shattered Crystal on my EVE Online Time Cards page.

After talking about for quite a bit, I finally have a computer setup running MythTV.

I decided to go for MythDora. It has the advantage of being straight forward to use and still leaves me with a fully functional desktop computer (which KnoppMyth doesn’t really do. It did leave me one slight headache - I didn’t have a spare DVD drive (MythDora is 1.2GB) so I had to borrow the one from Windows desktop). The hardware I have is pretty moderate (well, really low end for most applications - a Sempron 3200 and on board GeForce 6100 with a Hauppauge HVR 1300) but it runs as a combined backend/frontend without any problems, even when recording, transcoding and viewing TV (an “advantage” of living in a country where HDTV is still not a thing).

On the subject of transcoding, there was one stumbling point - specifically it just didn’t work at first (I got the illuminating error message “Failed with error code 0”). After posting the output to the MythTV-Users mailing list someone pointed out it was a MythDora packaging problem - libmp3lame hadn’t been installed.

The only thing that isn’t working now is the MCE IR blaster for controlling my Sky box (I’m just using Freeview though the DVB tuner on HVR 1300). lirc seems to be setup right since when I run irw and press buttons on my remotes (either the MCE remote that came with the HVR or the Sky remote) it detects them properly. Running irsend doesn’t do anything though (there’s not even an error). But at the moment I’m recording more than I can watch with just Freeview anyway.

Next time, less rambling.

I got an unexpected email today from Catherine Wynne of the BBC. Apparently they are doing a piece about TalkTalk on the 6 o’clock news tonight and during the research came across my TalkTalk problems post (the one with 500+ comments - mostly about problems people are having).

They would like a number of comments from TalkTalk users regarding the service. If you’re interested (and read this quite a bit before 6pm 27th February), call:

Catherine Wynne’s Number snipped since it’s no longer relevant

Yesterday I received a letter from TalkTalk announcing their equipment had been installed in my local exchange and that I would be connected at the end of March. Which according to some people may be the same time that I lose my internet access and phone line. They say it should only go down for twenty minutes and make big deal out of the fact that BT engineers will be doing the actual changeover. Luckily I have internet access at work so I’ll let you know either way.

Yesterday I was in London meeting a friend. We decided to go to Pizza Hut (the one on Strand near Trafalgar Square. 45 minutes later we left not even having had our order taken.

In hindsight I’m not even sure why we waited so long to be honest. There was a certain level comedy to it, after all once you’ve been waiting for half an hour there is part of you wanting to see just how long it could possibly take. There worst thing was that we weren’t the only ones. At least one of the group left (who hadn’t been waiting as long) and another was still there that arrived about minute after us. We eventually decided to leave after reasoning that considering how much food had been brought through, even if we did order there’d be a ridiculous wait for the food.

So we went down the road to Pizza Express and were served in two minutes.