Whole house solution?

[radmofo]

OK guys, I think I have read every post in this forum. I have been messing with linuxmce now for far too long to not have it implemented. I have 6 pc's all kicking around they all will work as a core or media director. I think I have installed linuxmce at least 50 times.

Here is all I want to do...I have a dish net 722 dvr (dual output) and a dishnet 625 dvr (dual output). I have two Haupaugh 500's and a hauppaugh 150 capture cards. So a total of 5 pci tuners. I want to control the dishnet boxes with lirc USB-UIRT (which can't be done because one tuner on each box only responds to RF remote freuqencies. (MY FIRST PROBLEM) anyone have a solution for this? I can control the ir tuners in each box but very unreliably...

For the 5th tuner I have time warner connected, This one is super simple and works great and it super easy to set up I have done it umpteen times. Very Stable

I also have a HDhomerun which brings in HD broadcast CBS/ABC etc.... This is also very easy to setup. And does seem to be stable usually.

My core of choice is a server grade MOBO Intel core duo with 5 pci slots 4gb ram and a 4tb Raid5 array. It can't get any faster.

Other issues I have, from a remote MD if I attempt to rip a DVD to the core, I get failures about 1/5 times. Even over 1000/mbs lan with commercial grade cisco switch (tried a couple others as well)

Tv is choppy from MD about half the time, especially if more than one MD running.

MD takes like 10 minutes to boot several combinations of approved hardware swapped as core/MD.

I was very hopeful that this release would remedy everything but it didnt.

Can it really be this hard to set this up?

All I want is media, no lights, no climate etc. DVD's, LIVE TV and recorded programs available all over the house.

Heck I'am to the point I will pay someone 1K just to make the damn thing work!! Any Takers?

[teedge77]

why dont you just use mythtv?

[radmofo]

Mainly because I'm intrigued by the diskless media director and don't want any noise at all in my viewing area.

[radmofo]

Actually I guess Mythbuntu 8.04 has support for diskless MD's now.

[teedge77]

sorry...it was early and i posted without a complete thought in my head apparently. i meant one of the mythtv distros....obviously mythtv is part of linuxmce also. mythbuntu sounds like it might fit your needs though. if you ever decide you want the other stuff, you can always come back and try linuxmce again.

[radmofo]

I'm not done with it yet, just looking for answers is all. Has anyone else been sucessful in doing what I am trying to do? I literally want to get this thing spun up and operational and not touch it again...ever. I want a 3 year old to pick up the remote and find her own shows and movies. Is this to much to ask? I'm ready to just hire http://www.kaleidescape.com/ but they dont do live tv, which I want.

[wsuetholz]

Here is all I want to do...I have a dish net 722 dvr (dual output) and a dishnet 625 dvr (dual output). I have two Haupaugh 500's and a hauppaugh 150 capture cards. So a total of 5 pci tuners. I want to control the dishnet boxes with lirc USB-UIRT (which can't be done because one tuner on each box only responds to RF remote freuqencies. (MY FIRST PROBLEM) anyone have a solution for this? I can control the ir tuners in each box but very unreliably...

I also haven't seen anything that will let a PC send RF.  Do these tuners have any kind of serial input?

Other issues I have, from a remote MD if I attempt to rip a DVD to the core, I get failures about 1/5 times. Even over 1000/mbs lan with commercial grade cisco switch (tried a couple others as well)

I had similar issues with my MythBuntu setup, which for some reason was configured to use smbfs shares rather than NFS.  Then after switching to NFS, I had to change the buffering parameters on the mount lines in /etc/fstab up to 32k.   I'm not at home now, so I forget what the parameters are.  However, make sure that you are NFS mounting, and then do a search for NFS mount options.

Tv is choppy from MD about half the time, especially if more than one MD running.

I thought that the mythtv TV viewer protocol was supposed to auto adjust the buffering during playback. 
Is that TV playback from your HDHomerun or is it TV playback from any of your 7 sources?  I have HDHomerun, and have sometimes noticed LiveTV being choppy.  I've actually been thinking about putting the HDHomerun on it's own separate network.

[radmofo]

I guess I can't diffrentiate between which is more or less choppy. They all have there "choppy" moments.

[indulis]

A couple of Qs- what is your network switch (some can't actually support all ports being run at full speed at the same time, or multiple ports in a group of ports), and are your network cards set to NOT autodetect full/half duplex?  I am am hoping you are not running wireless or ethernet over mains power (which for me was v v choppy due to fluorescent lights putting noise onto power lines).

You should also check your DMA settings for disks (google hdparm).  Don't forget that if you RAID5 your disks and have multiple streams reading/writing at the same time, it may be slower than a bunch of mirrored disks.

Finally, RAID5 on Linux is a pain in many ways- still you may know this.  RAID is often implemented as kernel code anyway (search for fakeraid on the net), mmd mirroring may be better.  If you are using an older PCI RAID adapter then I have heard of these adapters producing intermittent problems on new machines with faster PCI buses.

Can you get a look at the system performance using vmstat?  Is the CPU utilisation high?

Anyway- hope you solve the issues!

Indulis