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Now that my MythTV Project (well, Phase 1) is nearing completion, I’ve come up with a few new projects.

I’m not sure why I feel this need to have many little projects on the go… I barely have enough time to put into one project.

Anyway, Here’s my idea.

Microsoft’s Marketing department came up with this one a few months back.
The Microsoft Surface. Looks cool, I can see the potential, but I think its a long way away from being something that everyone has in their lounge.

Keep in mind, the technology behind the Multi-touch interface has been around alot longer than Microsoft Surface (Check out the bottom of this page to see some examples of earlier systems). The US Military have been putting alot of money into it too…

One of the nicest features of MythVideo, is being able to store your collection of DVD's on your hardrive.
From there, its a simple task of selecting the Video from the Video Gallery, and hitting play.

You can fetch all the Movie's details from IMDB, including poster art and movie ratings.
This makes it much more convenient, and more useful than having to fetch the DVD from your collection to watch it.

The only downside that I can see, is that you'll start to run out of disk space very quickly, as each movie will take up between 4GB and 8GB.

I faced a few challenges in getting this working, and I'm going to try shed as much light on this as possible.

I'm about to submit my MythTV for its WAF rating, before being put into full use in the house.
So to make things nice and easy to use, and to also assist in finding all the favourite episodes for recording, I've put every NTL Analogue channel into the channel database, with mythfilldatabase working 100% fetching all the scheduling information.

So for everyone that has been trying to get this working, I'll dump all the necessary configs here, so you can get yours going too.

In my last 2 MythTV posts, I explained how to get mythbackend running on boot, and how to get mythfrontend started automatically when you start X.

Now I'm going to explain how to get X to startup and login on boot.
This essentially makes your MythTV setup completely operational from powerup, without user intervention.
Definate WAF in that...

This is how I did it on my Debian machine.

Now that I've covered starting mythbackend on boot, I'm going to explain how to get mythfrontend running as soon as you start X.

Its pretty simple, as its just a few lines in your .xinitrc

I'm using fluxbox, so thats the example I'll be using.

I'm also assuming that you have your X working properly, and have tested it properly

In part of my quest to automate the startup of my MythTV, and in my quest for WAF (Wife approval factor), I've identified a few small issues that don't seem terribly well documented anywhere.

I'm going to document them here, as clearly as I can.

This Howto contains a very simple startup script for automatically starting mythbackend on boot.

Since Splashy is no longer part of the package tree for Debian, I decided to give usplash a go.
Its the same splash loaded that Ubuntu use, and it works quite nicely on my Ubuntu desktop machine at work.
I run Debian testing (its not THAT bad.. sheesh)

I needed it for my MythTV, for WAF (Wife approval factor).
If anyone has a nice MythTV style boot image, please do send it on.

So here's what I've got so far...