[mythtvnz] TV and monitor on one PC. Sane?

[Criggie]

Aaron Pelly wrote, On 10/09/2013 11:32 AM:
> I have a mate who's interested in a PC running ubuntu and myth. Which 
> should be reasonable. The PC will probably be in close proximity to 
> the TV, making an HDMI cable plausible. I'm wondering if myth will 
> happily run on one monitor, the TV, while his other monitor is used 
> for general computing. Further to this, for lounge chair use, can a 
> remote be set up for either just the TV monitor, or just myth?
>
> I hope this is clear. I'm sure I could set something up along these 
> lines for him, after some research, but I don't need to reinvent the 
> wheel if you guys already know of similar solutions. The guy is 
> reasonably tech savvy, and happy to fiddle a bit. WAF is not an issue. 
> But anything that's too high maintenance probably won't be acceptable.

You'll want to run the box in some kind of dual-xserver mode, else 
keyboard focus will mess with things.

Its totally possible to run mythfrontend on one monitor of a dual screen 
session, but any pause/play/arrows etc will be sent to your active 
window.  This is fine for me because its my desktop.

In your situation, you want two disjoint desktops, and to have enough 
CPU that starting a hefty app on the desktop won't bog down the tv playback.

And you need to tell your X video card driver module that the HDMI is to 
go for one X display and the DVI/VGA ports are for your normal desktop.


Personally I have an older core2duo sitting on the stereo, with a HDMI 
link to an older 720P TV.  There's a radio keyboard and a $10 IR remote 
to use and it works well.  Only downsides are the time to start up from 
cold, and while starting up the TV won't display anything because it 
only shows 720p not the boot-time HDMI resolution.

Just remember, its only TV.

-- 
Criggie

http://criggie.org.nz/