My Delusional Dream

While not entirely true, that's the gist of what happened. Last Sunday, October 30th, the machine was hanging a lot. After lots of cussing, I decided just to shut the machine off and banish it to the corner for a while. When I got back the machine wouldn't post and was making a funky smell. I'm still not sure if it's the motherboard, processor, or power supply. I hope it's just the power supply.

In any case, it provided a nice excuse to upgrade my computer with new toys. All of the cards and drives inside the computer were fine. Unfortunately, I couldn't reuse much of the other components such as memory, or rather chose not to reuse much of it. Here's what I got for the new computer:

• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice core)
• MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum Motherboard
• XFX GeForce 6600 (256MB ram)
• 1GB Ram
• Antec Overture II Media Center Case

Since then I've been fighting to get everything working again. But it looks like it's all basically going. We were able to watch the high-definition version of Monsters Inc. with little problem. The DVD player and remote work fine. I even have it controlling the cable box so we can record digital cable or high definition right from the cable box. Tonight I'm going to get pcHDTV card working on it, provided that I can actually get XvMC to work properly. I'm working on a thorough writeup on how to get MythTV working in this sorta setup, and I'll post it soon.

In the mean time, here are some pictures of the system as I built it and put it in the entertainment center. For reference on what the old setup looked like, you may want to see these pictures: old mythtv box, old entertainment center.

Update 11/08/2005: I started writing this yesterday, but didn't donwload the photos until this morning. In the mean time I've managed to get XvMC working by beating it into submission using a brute force method. This means that HDTV is more or less working, but I can tell that my disk I/O is hurting. It may be time to invest in that large RAID 5 array soon.

My parents recently purchased a new house in the exurbs. So far out that Google maps doesn't have any photos for the four highest settings. It's 44 miles one-way to the nearest mall. Yup, that's the middle of nowhere. My Dad built a nice set of cabinets for their living room. Including a a mantle over the natural gas fireplace. When they moved in, unfortunately, their old TV didn't fit. It hung over the front edge about half an inch. Clearly this was not acceptable. The only rememdy, go out and buy a big badass flat panel TV. And they got a nice good one, I believe its the Panasonic TH-37PX50U; a 37 inch widescreen plasma screen. I'm jealous.

Unfortunately, it's stuck in the stretch aspect ratio, which means that all 4:3 content gets stretch to its 16:9 dimensions, kinda strange. Anyway, I was trying to fix this by playing around in the menus when I found that there was option for "license". Naturally I clicked on it.

Here's the full text of the license, transcribed by me:

This product utilizes the following so called
"open source" software:
(1)the software which is licensed under the
  GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE,
(2)the software which is licensed under the
  GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE,
and
(3)software developed by the third parties and
available under certain terms and conditions.
For the software categorized as (1) and (2),
please refer to the terms and conditions of
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE and GNU LESSER GENERAL
PUBLIC LICENSE in the following screen.
If you wish to get further information as to
the software, please contact the web site below.
http://ww.am-linux.jp/dl/DTV05U

The problem is, I could not figure out how to get the screen to pull up the GPL or LGPL, which would have been kinda cool. But alas, no dice. Furthermore, when visiting http://www.am-linux.jp/dl/DTV05U one is greeted with a nice 404 error. That's just not cool. I even tried switching the model from DTV05U to DTVO5U, but it still didn't work. Crapola. So then I visited http://www.am-linux.jp/ which makes me wonder again, WTF is wrong with Japaneese people. Really, why do those bunnies need to be there?! I even followed the click stream looking for the USA software and couldn't find anything. Sigh. The Japaneese stuff is there at least.