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I second that motion.  Plus please tell us what kind of progress you've been making.  Any luck on a boot?  Or are you still fighting compiler errors?  I very much want to pitch in and help, just unsure as to where the actual front-line of the battle is.

Cheers to you though for your progress andybauer!

Just wondering if you found a way to write custom extensions and make them persistent?  Trying to do the same thing here.

Sorry for the delay in response been in west texas working on a project there.   I got myth working (under most conditions) from a psubuntu install.  So far as recompiling everything.  I got the compilation environment setup so far as I know how  (there's alot of good documentation on cross-compilations with the gentoo people, in addition to reading the linuxMCE DEV FAQ of course ,  But so far as Hari's suggestion of changing endianness, I'm not even sure where to start.  I'm programming emdedded systems at the moment so I understand the concept of little endian vs. big endian, as bits and the ways they are organized is a good portion of what I deal with, however I'm a bit overwhelmed with the magnitude of code of here.   So right now I'm just trying to poke around and see how the DEV's are working together, and wrap my head around how I would commit my changes upstream to help everyone else if I were to actually figure out how to get this monster to compile (my usual compiles result in a 13k binary lol).  So try reading through the developer FAQ (it should sticky at the top of this forum), then try putting a psubuntu http://psubuntu.com/ install on your ps3, at which point you can install mythtv and at least acess certain media, I've had various success with upnp straight through the cross media bar in sony's OS.   If you make it that far post back.  I'm going to upgrade to 710 now that I'm back in Austin, and go back over everything and see if I can figure out this out.   If Hari's still listening maybe he can post some more hints about where the endianness is changed.

you don't read my posts, do you?

regards,
Hari

Quite the contrary, right now I'm trying to assimilate the procedure outlined in the DEV FAQ, with the stuff you've pointed out here, in order to start building for the ps3.  I just really wanted to see that this stuff would actually work before venturing that far, that's all.

Is there anything specific I appear to be forgetting?  Once again, I appreciate your contributions!

Other myth-frontends are limited around here unfortunately,  one of the reasons I'd very gladly see the ps3 become one.

The first link you posted was the same forum post I had mentioned, though I have mucked around quite a bit since the "cli" install, I'll get a fresh install on the ps3 in soon and iron out these issues with the video.  Mathew, have you gotten surround sound to pipe thru? DTS or just Dolby?  Just curious as I do love my surround sound.

So far as the second link, it said I was denied access to that folder?  I even pasted into konqueror (I truly love konqueror for these kinds of tasks), and backtracked to above the pub folder and ended up here:

ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/

to no avail, still denied access to the MPEG folder.  Oh well, anyhow if video does play smoothly I guess the next step would be to set up cross-compiling and see if an image for the ps3 can be made?  And by that, of course, I mean start cataloging and exterminating the compiler errors that will flood the terminal.   I'll start on that as soon as I at least get video running smoothly on the ps3.

Okay while trying out some of the other myth distros to determine what was going wrong I noticed the card seemed to be sometimes in lspci and sometimes not!  So I cleaned the case out and blasted the dustbunnies aside, reseated the card and tried out beta4 finally.  I followed these instructions:

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/PcHDTV_HD5500

and the card works flawlessly like it once did before under gentoo.  Ok, minor dustbunny disaster averted, who knows really what it was as it's a fresh install of beta 4 as well.  Anyhow on to ps3 fun. So in my experimentation with the mythtv centric distros I was able to get the ps3 to connect but video was always choppy, so I installed a minimal ubuntu mythtv setup using these instructions:

http://psubuntu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1805

edited /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt on the ps3 appropriately so it will use the linuxMCE installation as backend.

Code Select Expand

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Now at this point I got sound but no Video, I didn't get the expected smooth video like the author of the external post claims, but maybe it's because I'm reading raw terrestrial broadcast DVB?  Maybe I should be transcoding these videos when they are done to a friendlier format?  Anyhow, I changed the ps3 linux's xorg.conf back to the original and I could actually watch SD and HD content, but it was choppy at best, frozen at worst, though the sound came through just fine beyond any initial hiccups in both versions of xorg.conf.  There's a wiki page dedicated to this topic at mythtv:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MythTV_on_Playstation3

That's where I found the link to the other post on the psubuntu forums.  There's even information about getting the controllers to work in both wired and wireless modes.  Which wouldn't it be nice to be able to use a ps3 remote as your linuxMCE gyromouse?  At least another option to pursue.

  So the video issue is limping at the moment but growing stronger, and could have a promising future especially if Sony decided to release some documentation.  Sound is great! I'm using the optical connector and I'll see if I can't scare some surround content to pipe down the setup soon.  So far as in game OS support of upnp:  First off the mythTV in LinuxMCE at least shows up as a UPnP media server but results in error in all media I've accessed. I've been experimenting with media tomb and it works pretty well for pics and music, but video hardly ever works properly.  I'm going to continue to experiment with different encodings and post my findings soon.

Sorry to say I didn't get further last weekend, but I seem to be having a serious problem getting the pchdtv HD-3000 (a card built specifically for linux)  to work with linuxMCE.  Previously I had it working under gentoo, but have since erased the partition where the mysql databases were residing.  I am thinking about trying a couple of other myth based distribution just to see if I can test the myth setup on the ps3. I am still very committed to this distribution as it is so comprehensive.  But I would like to ask if anyone has had any experience with similar distros? Or maybe even experience with the pchdtv line of cards?  On the pchdtv forums they name instantaneous compatibiliy with the other distros,  I will experiment with this and report back.  I'd really like to figure out why it doesn't work here in LinuxMCE, and subsequently fix this problem.  When I get the backend working I will continue on integrating the ps3 into linuxMCE.  Once again I appreciate all the replies that I have gotten from you and will report back with any findings.  Cheers!

The PS3 is a slow build environment

Duly noted, I have a bit of experience cross compiling for the AVR series microcontrollers, and I even setup distcc on gentoo to help out an old G3 ppc tower I had while it was still being used.  So I'll look into how the psubuntu people ended up getting their's to work.

It's one reason it might make sense to start building just an MD image

Do you know of any documentation for creating these MD images?  A rudimentary search didn't produce anything useful, I'll keep digging but I was hoping maybe one of you guys could point me in the right direction.  I'm also creating an account on the wiki, so maybe I can help seal the holes in the documentation there.

Hey now, stop the flame-war here and now.  I greatly appreciate everyone's response.  This is a dev forum and I welcome any ideas and especially help.  So everyone just think zen thoughts for a moment.  Then lets get back on topic, and the topic is "How to utilize a ps3 in a linuxMCE environment".  I think the bittorrent stuff would be uber cool, but I also am not going to attempt it until I see linuxMCE boot off of the HD first.  Once that happens then I will attempt the PXEboot stuff.  And if that goes smoothly, then perhaps we can go for the torrent tricks.  But I'm also a noob when it comes to linuxMCE, right now I'm converting from a gentoo based roll your own mythtv solution.  So that means I have lots of growing pains as I learn about the linuxMCE philosophy, one of which right now is my myth backend appears to be borked [but thats the contents of  a separate post].  So here's my roadmap:

1. fix backend and test out mythtv's current capabilities on the PS3, specifically will it play back HD

2. look into upnp servers

3. attempt a compile of linuxMCE on the ps3

4. if I can get things running on the ps3 locally, then I will try and see if I can get the PXEboot stuff running

5. write the torrent client for all MD's 

All of this will be done by this weekend............... ROTFL

* thoth picks self up off of floor, wipes tears out of eyes, dusts off sleeves

OK so this is a long term roadmap, and it won't get done by this weekend. However, I do plan on making progress over steps one and two and be preparing for three by the end of this weekend.  So happy thoughts everyone, if you're here reading then you would like to be able to watch 1080p 5.1 content streamed thru the PS3 from a linuxMCE box, and that's exactly what I intend on getting done.

Dang it, you seem to contradict yourself.  Should I set the mythsetup's capture cards to none, or as a DVB card?  At one point you said "make sure you have something to choose other than none" which would indicate it should be set.  But then next sentence you indicate it should be set to nothing "when i make my mythsetup it finally came up with a blank option.  choose that then".  So my question is - should it be set to none, or set it to something?  [I just tried on linuxMCE either way and with both myth still isn't showing any signal from the card, but gentoo does when booted to my old setup, any suggestions?]

Ya I definitely didn't want to use it as a core, though it would be cool to plug a hauppage usb device into ps3 and have it record HD broadcasts (ripping blu-ray media would also be a huge plus).  But I've already got a core machine, big thing is I just want to be able to play my media on the system I have hooked up to ps3.

So far as KDE goes, sure the psubuntu starts you out in gnome/ubuntu, but all (most?) the ubuntu derivatives have been compiled as well.  So where previously I had just ran a

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

right now I am running a


sudo apt-get install mythbuntu-desktop

which seems to be doing just fine.  So I'll post results of my experiment soon.

As far as PXEboot, your guess is as good as mine.  This might be doable if there was a special kernel on the ps3 that would get far enough in the bootstrap to then go out and get the rest from the linuxmce box, but for now I would be happy with a hard drive version of the boot disk I see some people using in their media directors when the MD doesn't support PXEboot'ing.  Does anyone know how those disks were created?

That's the weird thing mythTV completely supports the pchdtv card, but I can't get mythTV under linuxmce to use it correctly.  I've got another drive in my box with gentoo on it and everything works there.  The cx88-dvb module is loaded under 'lsmod'.  And when I run mythsetup it seems to be configured correctly, but when I start mythtv every five seconds or so it pops up saying something about it using the capture device already.  It's really rather annoying as it drops you back to the main myth menu every five seconds regardless of where you were in the interface of myth.  I'm going to retrace my steps and figure this one out.

So after reading the developers FAQ I thought I might try my hand at getting the ps3 to integrate with linuxmce.  However, I noticed the final build looks to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5.5GB which puts my current setup out as my linux partition is over  5 gigs with psubuntu installed.  So I see one of three ways to implement some integration (in order of preference)

1. erase psubuntu, install bare bones base debian to build new linuxMCE (absolutely the most involving but rewarding scenario)[EDIT: I should even be able to work around the space issue with NFS or perhaps a USB drive (I'm thinking samba would be a bad idea), foregoing the bare bones debian install, I'll experiment this weekend)

2. install mythbuntu through the repo's and at least have mythtv from the linuxMCE setup (would be at least able to access movies on linuxMCE, but not sure how what the maximum HD content this setup could push through)

3.  get mediatome or one of the upnp servers running and access media through the XMB in sony's OS (this scenario could run concurrent with the other two and is well worth looking into as you wouldn't have to reboot ps3 to watch media and in fact I have  halfway already done this by using elgato's eyeconnect running on a macintosh that had iTunes configured to use the share partition from the linuxMCE box as the location of it's music library [so in essence the ps3 could see and play a large portion of the media on the linuxMCE box, and HD played fine so long as it was formatted correctly for the ps3, h.264 I believe])

I plan on pursuing scenario 1 this weekend, and was wondering if anyone had any experience compiling a distro for the ps3,  or maybe even attempted this already? 

In terms of mythTV on ps3, has anyone at least tried scenario 2?  If so, could the ps3 handle HD content?  I mean it should considering the hardware, but I'm not sure if the issues with the hypervisor are roadblocking full video capabilities.  I might give things a shakedown here, before erasing the current psubuntu install.

And has anyone out there gotten a ps3 to play nicely with upnp in linux?

I know you said you didn't want to try an ide drive, but maybe you could install to IDE and then dd/tar the install to a SATA drive.  This could be tricky as ubuntu uses the uuid's instead of /dev/sdX, but you should be able to just edit /etc/fstab to the proper values (or even reset the uuid's).  Another option would be to use an ide as the OS drive and all your sata drives as media extenders.

Were you able to get  the pchdtv card working?  I have a hd-3000  that I would like to see work in a linuxmce setup.