[mythtvnz] Introduction

[Dagan Galarneau]

Hello!  Here's my long and boring introduction, with more detail than you 
possibly wanted to know.

I'm about to start my 3rd attempt at a MythTV installation.  The first two 
attempts made it to within 90%, but I never could manage to get everything 
working.  The major difficulties have been with my hardware, which include 
a mini-ITX computer with an Eden ME6000 CPU and a Hauppage PVR350, as well 
as a Sky digital box which requires an IR transmitter for channel changes.

The first try was about 18 months ago, using this guide: 
http://www-isl.mach.uni-karlsruhe.de/~hi93/myth/mythtv_debian_epia_pvr350_walkthrough 
-- it was an exact match for my hardware, which I found to be extremely 
fortuitous.  Sadly, getting the exact versions of all the software used in 
the guide was impossible.  I can't remember what the problem was in the 
end, but I had to diverge from the guide quite a bit.

The next try was about a year ago, using the ever-popular Wilsonet.com 
guide and Fedora Core 2.  Unfortunately, the state of the drivers and RPMs 
on Axel's repository were quite poor at the time.  Eventually I got 
everything working separately, but never together.  It was also quite 
unstable, probably due in part to the recently discovered DMA bug in the 
Via M series.  Also, none of the plugins for MythTV worked at all.

This is the one I'm about to try: http://groundstate.ca/c3mythtv -- It's 
meant for an M10000, which includes full i686 support, instead of the Eden 
C3 which is limited to i586 mode.  It shouldn't be too hard to install an 
i586 Mandriva and MythTV though.  More importantly, everything else is more 
mature now.  There's a BIOS upgrade from Via, stable Hauppage drivers, and 
even decent Unichrome drivers with hardware MPG decoding support.  I'm very 
hopeful.  What could possibly go wrong?

- Dagan