[mythtvnz] Chch setup help please?

[Jim Cheetham]

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Steve Hodge <stevehodge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Jim Cheetham <jim at gonzul.net> wrote:
>>
>> Playback comes from a Popcorn Hour A110 -

> I've gone the more traditional way: fileserver with a 3TB RAID 5 for

RAID5? You are brave. Multidisk RAID-1 is far safer in the face of
multiple disk failure, and simpler while you're trying to recover.
Those are the only criteria I use :-)

> What's the A110 like playback-wise? E.g. is it better or worse than myth for
> interlacing (if you've compared; I guess if you're happy it must be pretty
> good)?

It's certainly good enough for me, over HDMI onto 38" LCD. I'm not
doing HD, and not using BluRay elsewhere ...

> Can it do anything with myth's commercial detection? I presume it's
> got skip forward/back? There's no way I'd accept anything these days which
> didn't have 30 second skip. I also don't think I could live without
> timestretch.

The commflag data is unavailable, I'm only re-playing the broadcast
mpeg2video data. I'd have to create a new video file by assembling the
"program" portions of a broadcast, and copy that down to the Popcorn
if I wanted to skip commercials, and the commflagging would have to be
very accurate to make that worthwhile. Comments onlist have indicated
it's not quite there, so I haven't bothered.

I don't have a +30sec skip AFAIK, I get 2x,4x,8x speed forward & back.
It's not perfect, but if you blast past the point you want on 8x,
pressing play tends to drop you back by ~20 seconds anyway.

Some programs can't rewind. I once encountered one that wouldn't
fast-forward! There's nothing obvious to me to show the differences
that cause this; in at least one case it's a single episode from a
series, so I have to assume that it's broadcast with the same encoding
as its compatriots

On the whole it's a good machine, but it's by no means perfect :-)

-jim