PVR Round 2… Advantage, Dork.

After having a wonderful dinner of pizza with Tasha’s grandparents, I set off to continue the Epic PVR Battle.

Tonight things went MUCH more my way. Thanks to some help from a guy that had a long German last name on the MythTV Mailing List, I was able to get around my problem of not being able to see TV or recordings through MythTV. I was correct in my assumption that the driver was getting wiped prior to MythTV load, so I wrote a quickie shell script to preload the drivers and call mythtvfrontend. This worked like a charm and I can now see, control, and record television for free.

There is only one catch. I wasn’t able to successfully troubleshoot the problem so that I can see my MythTV frontend on my television. Now, the software loads on my monitor like any other software and when I tell it to Watch TV or Watch Recordings, control shunts to my TV and I get to see my program. When I decide to stop watching and hit the exit key on my remote, control shunts back to the monitor and I see the Myth frontend there.

Supposedly, the XFConfig that runs X Windows can be modified to use my TV-out as a display device, but the stock configurations that were provided did not do the trick. I sent another email to Long German Last Name and the rest of the mailing list to see what shakes loose. If this is fixed tomorrow, then the whole setup gets moved into the entertainment center and the cable box gets relocated to the bedroom.

w00t. Score one for the dorks.