LinuxMCE Advanced Newbie Problems

[urnrg]

Hello. I'm very serious about using LinuxMCE as a whole house solution. We've just moved into our newly built house which my fiancee and I designed and built. I've done the electrical and also installed home run cat5e and RG6 everywhere with built in A-Bus distributed audio, Insteon switches, HD over cat5e, distributed IR and web enabled security panel (yes, I added a RG6/Cat5e for one security camera, too.) So, when I first saw the video showing how easy it was to roll out a server (LinuxMCE) controlling all this, I knew I had to have it. I'm also a web programmer (PHP, MySQL, AJAX, DOM, etc.) so I am technically handy. I can learn and want to learn and want to contribute. For starters, consider me a newbie, treat me sweet and one day I will return the flavor . If LinuxMCE can work for me 100% then I want it to work for you. If it works for you then have it work for me.

But first, I want it to work 100% and I'm having what I consider minor problems...

[colinjones]

Welcome! Did you have a question or were you just saying hello?

[urnrg]

Yes, hello.    I didn't want to start bombarding my introduction with too much information - everything will be revealed in due time, pray tell.

I hijacked my self built PC (see a pattern here?) which runs WinXP. Now I have LinuxMCE installed on another drive and I swap between the two. When I installed my NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT, WinTV PVR-150, and PCHDTV HD-5500 I first ran the hardware under Windows to see if I installed it properly. I downloaded the demo for SageTV and watched all available cable channels. The picture quality was very clear - my installations were successful.

I then installed LinuxMCE which was very easy but struggled with setting up the card properly for viewing cable tv. Two problems: scanning for available channels only finds channels 2 to 13, and picture quality is degraded.

I've searched the forums and a few others have similar quality problems but no solution.  Any suggestions?

That's it - I'll leave the other issues out for now.

urnrg

[urnrg]

I am now subscribing to schedulesdirect.org. The funny things is that now I can tune to channels greater than 13 but I can't get a signal. Strange. Anyone have an explanation?

Also, I thought that the incorrect screen resolution might attribute to the poor picture quality. I have set my screen resolution to 1280 x 1024 via DVI. On WinXP the broadcast screen is 4:3 but in LMCE it stretches completely to fill the monitor. Any thoughts on this?

I've finally setup my LAN and because of my home setup I used D-Link 604 in the office with the LinkSys WRT54G downstairs by the media panel. My network is now "finalized." My next step is to plug in my USB Insteon device and get that working.

Oh, by the way, I bought a 15W solar panel at Wal-Mart. Does LMCE do solar?

[urnrg]

In order to get all available channels, I went into MythTV Backend Setup -> 3. Video Sources, and after selecting my source, which is schedulesdirect.org in my case, I changed the Channel frequency table from 'default' to 'us-cable.' Now I can view all my cable stations.

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-632896.html

[bashers]

I bought a 15W solar panel at Wal-Mart. Does LMCE do solar?

Don't kid yourself. A 15W solar panel will do little to offset the requirements of a dedicated core and a pc in every room so don't start patting yourself on the back just yet.

Good luck with the system though. sounds like a great project.