Ryan Homan

With all of my searching for new info about MythTV, I came across a large list of plugins now available. If your running version .20 then all of these should work. First off are the main ones that are official plugins for MythTV that I recommend using to get the most from your system pending you meet all the hardware requirements.

• MythDVD - allows you to use your frontend as a DVD player and ripper
• MythGallery - provides support for an image gallery that can be displayed as a slideshow
• MythMusic - allows you to play your collection of musicin formats such as mp3, ogg, or even wma
• MythWeb -this provides a web interface to use your mythtv system with almost all features as long as you are running apache
• MythVideo - this plugins is used to interface with video not recorded by MythTV (divx movies, home videos, etc.)
• MythWeather - provides an up-to-date weather report whenever you need it for your location
• MythArchive - now included with version 0.20

Other official plugins that are commonly used, but I have yet to get much use from are listed below:

• MythNews - provides access to RSS feeds
• MythPhone - uses the mythtv interface to allow placing and receiving of phone calls with VOIP (Asterisk is a common implementation)
• MythBrowser -allows you to surf webpages from the mythtv interface
• MythControls - allows you to change your keybindings without having to exit mythtv
• MythFlix - provides an interface to you Netflix account
• MythGame - allows you to play rom based games with a built in emulator

There are also several unofficial plugins that I want to try when I get a chance. Some of them have great potential.

• TVWish - my favorite unofficial plugin - allows for you to have a text list of show titles and when the script is ran regularly, it will automatically schedule the shows when it gets the info from the listing site.
• MythMail - its a pop3 client to access mail
• MythRecipe - allows you to browse an internet db of recipes while playing your favorite mp3 in the background
• MythFM -allows you to listen to FM radio from the MythMusic interface with the radio receiver on your tuner card
• MythStream - provides streaming of audio and video to the fronend from websites and more
• MythCalendar - need I say more?
• MythTiVo - GUI for playing recorded shows from a networked TiVo (no updates for a while on this project though)

Well thats about all. That should keep you busy updating your MythTV box with all these plugins for a while. Be sure to comment about them if you’d like. If you would like more info on any of these plugins, visit ExtremeTech’s article on them.

I was reading up on mythtv the last few days and realized that even though I have been running it for the last year and half or so and keeping up-to-date on it that I was missing a lot of great things that have come about. One very cool thing I came across was using the MediaMVP from Hauppauge as a frontend. It only $90 from newegg and comes with a remote. The only downside is it may not play divx encoded video that well and also only supports s-video out as the best quality so no HD stuff with this thing. It also requires a little work to get it working with your mythtv setup. See this article from mythtv.org about it with the pros and cons. Now you might ask well what do you have to do to make it work as your frontend. Well, the people who work on the MediaMVP Media Center project at sourceforge have made life a lot easier. Just tftp the new firmware to the device and its hooked up and ready to go. I’m looking forward to possibly trying it out sometime.

Well I’ve been using notes 8 for a little over a week now. It has lots of many new features which I definitely liked using. I really liked the more user friendly buttons and functions and how it looks like most of the other apps I work with. I also liked the integrated sidebar with IM, calendar, and RSS. It was however quite a resource hog though even on a newer system. I was running it on a laptop with a 1.7 Pentium M with 1GB of memory, but it seemed extremely sluggish. It also frequently crashed or gave me error messages. I sent them all off to IBM, but it actually became so troublesome that I went back to 7.0.2 because of all the errors. I would like to give the folks at IBM credit for coming up with an up-to-date GUI and similar functionality to other apps, but for a beta, I thought it was missing some things. The speed is going to need greatly improved. I do not think systems with 512 MB of ram will be able to run it. I also feel they need to fix the many bugs I came across. Hopefully they will get it all taken care of and by launch date it will be as great of a product that it has been advertised as.

A guy I work with had his hard drive crash on his laptop. He had some valuable files on there. First we used a linux livecd of knoppix to recover some of the files. This was done by mounting it read only in linux and copying the data to the network. Some of the files were corrupt though. The next step taken was to purchase SpinRite 6.0 from grc at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm and was able to recover even more files. This product is truely amazing. Try it out if you have files you can’t get off a bad hard drive. Its only $89 for 1 license. Please comment if you have any success stories with it or other recommendations.

While working on a problem that randomly seemed to happen, I ran across the following issue. A form on the web with a computed subform would allow you to enter your data, but when it saved the document, it would choose the wrong subform. I narrowed the problem down to the computed field that determines the subform. It was calculated based on the query_string from the url that was passed. I spent hours trying to find out why the query string was blank when the page was submitted. Finally I came across this post on the forums here.
This explained my problem and now we are thinking about writing the javascript necessary to work around this problem until it is fixed in Domino 8

I received a laptop from someone who said the screen wasn’t working. After doing some testing, I verified that the backlight was out. Just FYI: It is a very tedious process to get the LCD panel unassembled to get to the backlight. Once I got the backlight out I went online and looked around on how to replace it. I found out I could order one rather cheaply from www.ccfldirect.com. They just ask for the vertical and horizontal measurements and the model of the computer and then you can place the order. To replace the connectors on the end of the bulb, some soldering will be necessary. I will let you know once I receive the part and complete the operation.

Well I’ve finally caught up to the rest of you out there and put up a blog. I’m gonna try to update at least once a week so check back often. I’ll talk about what I’m doing at work (my new notes programming job), what I am doing with my business, rmpcsolutions.com, and what I am doing at home, plus some other cool things as long as people read it.

Have a great day!