The New Player

Since the TV is unplugged while we work on painting the entertainment center, I wasn't going to be playing any Xbox 360 tonight. So, today was the day I installed KnoppMyth. Because of its size (close to a full CD), I wasn't going to get away with a USB key install this time. I had to open the box and hook up the CD-ROM once again.

KnoppMyth tries to be very easy to install, and the creator has done a pretty good job of leading you step-by-step through the install process. It works well, as long as you follow the directions exactly; otherwise it gets a little flaky if even your hard drive partitions are not set up right.

Once I got through the install, I went through the setup process, which, since I had seen MythTV's setup screens plenty of times by this point (and with most of them preconfigured), I knew what it was expecting. Unfortunately, when it got to the step of getting TV listing data, it crashed. I don't know why; I finished the other setup scripts and rebooted, and when I went back into mythtv-setup (helpful hint: if you don't have a mouse, Alt-X in Fluxbox brings up an xterm window), I was able to get it to download listings (after a couple tries; perhaps zap2it was having issues?)

I must say the interface was much more responsive and suffered from no video glitches, unlike the iMedia interface. I was starting to think I should've made the decision to go to KnoppMyth sooner. Even the Picture-in-Picture function was working almost perfectly (minus a strange blue hue on the small picture). Except when I tried to watch TV, I discovered a major disappointment. No sound.

For the next hour and a half, I searched forums and blogs, ran alsaconf and alsamixer, tried to aplay sound files in loops while I tweaked mixer settings... Nothing worked. Then, on a lark, I decided to plug in my microphone. (I was using a headset that had two plugs, one for the headphones and one for the attached mic.) I noticed something strange as I plugged in the mic -- I heard a crackling sound in the earphones. Did this headset need to have both ends plugged in to work? No, I still couldn't hear anything... But wait... Get a closer look at the markings on the plugs...

Yes, I had plugged the microphone into the audio out jack, and the headphones into the microphone jack. Switched the plugs, ran alsaconf one more time to reconfigure (and undo my random tweaks), and lo, there was sound, and it was good. And I went to bed.