Getting closer to having my all-in-one media PC up and running.
FEDORA BLUES
The main problem, lately, has been finding a working version of transcode for Fedora. I have to complain again that Fedora repository management is a huge pita. There are lots of Fedora repositories to choose from, and they are only “mostly” coordinated. There’s no single channel like with Gentoo, and that results in chaos. The latest example is the nrpms repo, which hasn’t been working for three days, which means my system hasn’t been working completely right for three days. Trying to patch everything manually really isn’t an option once you’ve committed to a repository and it’s wormed its way into your system. Besides, that defeats the whole purpose. So the only answer is to wait. The bottom line: it’s not a benefit to have choice if most of the choices are broken.
[MythTV] VS [dvd::rip]
Enough whining. An essential part of a media PC is to be able to collect your DVD’s in one place for easy access. The best way to do that is to rip and “transcode” them (convert them into a more tightly compressed form) onto your hard drive(s). transcode is the 500-hp engine that does all that gnarly conversion work under the hood, but you’ll want to be isolated from all its sharp edges with a graphical front end of some sort. There are two good options I’ve found that bring transcode and all its related utilities together for you.
dvd::rip gives you complete access to all the switches and dials of transcode, directly in edit boxes and dropdown lists. You can set it up just as you like, then save the settings for the next “project”. It’s pretty useful if you want to dig into all of your options. It’s written in perl and uses Gtk+ for the GUI.
MythTV has an option [Optical Disks->Import DVD] that asks nothing more from you than the desired end quality (and even there you only have three settings to worry about: Perfect; Excellent; Good). The other nice thing about MythTV is that you can queue up jobs – copying the DVD to your hard drive takes a mere 10-15 minutes, then you can pop another in, while the massive ugly 10-hour transcode job of the first DVD continues to run on its own, into the night while you sleep. If you’re sticking it out with Fedora, here’s a Fedora-specific HOWTO on getting MythTV set up and running.
RECORDING TV
MythTV is the way to go, I’m still sloshing through this bit, more to come later…
