And so it begins..

My MythTV Journey, Part 1

It all started a while back when I decided that it would be nice if I could view some of the videos I had on my computer on my TV screen. My first attempt at this involved hooking up some wireless A/V sender/recievers I had lying around. This worked, but had a few problems. For one, my 2.4GHz phone interfered with the 2.4GHz A/V sender (even on different channels.) Another problem was that I would have to run back to the other room to start the video, which, of course, was a pain.

My next attempt was a little more successful. I placed my laptop next to the TV and hooked them together. Using Media Portal and my ATI Remote Control, I was able to watch computer videos on my TV. This worked, but it had quite a few problems:
  • It was a hassle to hookup all the wires (power cable, video cable, audio cable, usb adatper for remote, etc.) everytime I wanted to do it.
  • If I wanted to use my laptop, I had to unhook it.
  • Media Portal would sometimes slow down or lockup.
  • Couldn't play all the formats I wanted to.
  • Needed access to videos on desktop computer (w/ large hard drive). I could have fixed this by setting up a wireless network, but I never made it that far.
  • Took up space in entertainment center. (Space had to stay empty so I could ad and remove laptop.)
  • Pain to run Media Portal and them change settings on laptop to output to TV only.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Restoring Color Icons in Gimp 2.10

Image
When Gimp 2.10 was released, the new icons for the toolbox items were all black and white. If, like me, you'd like to go back to the color versions, here's how:  Select Edit --> Preferences From the Preferences dialog, under the Interface section, select Icon Theme For the icon theme, select Legacy if you want icons like they were in 2.8.  If you'd like color versions of the new icons, select the icon theme named  Color . 
Read more

PowerBuilder and SQL Server: Tips On Working Together

I recently worked on a project that used PowerBuilder for the front end and SQL Server for the database. I've worked with both of these technologies in the past but this was the first time I used them together. Below are some notes about the things that I learned regarding PB and SQL Server working together. Single Quoted Strings If you do any work with SQL statements in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), you'll find that SQL Server only accepts strings if they are surrounded by single quotes. You can use double quotes in the PowerBuilder painters and they'll get translated properly on their way to SQL Server. But you may want to just go ahead and use single quotes everywhere, especially if you are trying to track down a problem by copying SQL from PowerBuilder and pasting it into SSMS. Identity Columns One of my tables had its primary key set in SQL Server to autoincrement. In my datawindow I would insert a row and then do an update. I was expecting the value SQL Server ...
Read more

A tip on multithreading in PowerBuilder

The way you do multithreading in PowerBuilder is to create an object that contains the code you want to run in another thread. You then create an instance of this object as a “shared object”. You also code another object – the “interface object” and pass the shared object a reference to it. You can then call functions on the shared object and have them run in the other thread. The shared object communicates back to the main thread via the interface object. The other day I set up a program using a shared object. I had a shared object that was running some code asynchronously. When it was done, it called a function on the interface object and the interface object called a function in my window to let me know it was complete (by setting a variable). At one point I needed to wait until the shared object was done with its processing before I continued what I was doing in the main thread. I had it coded something like this: Integer li_status Li_status = wf_get_status() Do while li_status = ...
Read more