Did some playing around with some music systems today.

First up was MythTv. It seemed like it should be pretty easy to install as I noticed that all the components were available from the atrpms repository. So, I added the atrpms yum config to my yum.conf and did a 'yum install mythtv-suite'. Immediately I ran into some issues. The atrpms has a lot of overlap with the freshrpms folks, so there were conflicting rpms I installed a while back. I ended up having to go and just remove all the freshrpms ones I could find and then try installing from atrpms. For some reason atrpms didn't get it's kernel and kernel module rpms to detect right, so yum kept wanting to download the i686-smp kernel and modules for my single processor athlon box. I finally just downloaded and installed the correct kernel modules myself. Once I got the rpms all figured out mythtv was pretty easy to install. Loaded a mysql database and started the setup program. It downloads about 9 days of tv guide listings by default, which I wish it would have an option to just skip. The interface on it is very slick. Pretty easy to navigate, you can get weather, view videos, view dvd's, play music or the like. It scanned in my 10,000 mp3's in about 25minutes. The music player looks quite nice and has all the functionality you might expect. One anoying thing is that putting all my mp3's in the playlist results in it taking litterally 3-4minutes if you exit the music option and go back, or change something in the playlist. Looking on the mailing list they have a fix in CVS for this now. Another thing thats kinda anoying is that when you leave the music menu area (for example to see what else is there or look at the weather) it stops playing music. It would be nice to keep going until something else that needed the audio was launched. Also, there isn't any easy way to control it from a remote machine. For example, to skip a song from a laptop. There is a web interface, but it's only for recording tv shows and the like.

As a suggestion from tkil I took a look also at the Slimserver software. This is the stuff that comes with the Squeezebox device. It basically streams audio to the squeezebox and it plays it out your audio device. Someone has written a package called slimp3slave that basically act's as a squeezebox in software and uses madplay/splay/mpg123 to play it on your computer. So after a bit of fiddling with the software I got that all working. The slimserver comes as an rpm so it's very easy to install. It does need the 'perl-Time-HiRes' package, and anoyingly (as tkil points out) starts on install instead of waiting to be run, but its pretty slick. It has a nice web interface, all the functions you can think of. Will have to play with it some more in the next few days and see.