U810 MythTV

I have just found mxk which should allow me to use the mouse-stick as a cursor pad for MythTV in tablet mode. This makes things a whole lot easier!

U810 MythTV

The U810 is just asking to be used as a media player in the Archos vein and MythTV looks like a good way to go. I don't want to lose OpenSuSE but fortunately the MythTV guys have a good page on getting it working over OpenSuSE that's a good start. Here's what I did...

1. Skip partitioning/configuration and go to section 3.2 and do the 1-click KDE install
2. Add the mythtv user (3.3)
3. Skip all the hardware we don't have and go the section 4 and configure the backend (well sections 4.1-4.3 anyway - and I didn't do detailed setup as that's for PVR/TV functions)
   
4. Skip mtoto section 5 and install MythVideo, MythGallery, MythMusic and MythWeather (why not?)
   
5. Skip the rest

However, there are a few wrinkles with MythTV for this particular application...

1. It's basically a MediaPC model so TV and PVR functions dominate - fortunately it installs fine without a TV tuner. Then I went into /usr/share/mythtv and there I found the menu layouts: library.xml contains the button definitions for starting MythVideo, MythImage and MythMusic. I edited mainmenu.xml, commented out the TV functions (Watch TV, Watch Recordings and Manage Recordings) and replaced them with the button definitions from library.xml, removing the, now redundant, button link to the media library too.
2. I found that images in MythImage were't displaying with the correct aspect ratio - turns out I had the DisplaySize in the Monitor section of /usr/X11/xorg.conf set to default values which assume a 4:3 15-inch screen. However. if you change them to the actual values (124 72), all the fonts become huge as X attempts to display them at the correct size. Doubling up the figures (248 144) gives a more reasonable look and ensures the aspect ratio comes out right for photos.
3. I found the volume toggle produced a nice display on screen but did nothing. In Setup, set the Mixer Device to ALSA:default and Mixer Controls to Master.
4. Don't try using OpenGL as a drawing engine - it is truly glacial.
5. In the default, window-manager-less version, playing video (which launches mplayer behind the scenes) results in a loss of input focus so keypresses/mouse clicks have no effect. This means I need a non-intrusive window manager to sit behind it - TWM is too basic and I may be lazy and just use a pruned KDE as I have other things to hack now.
   
6. It's really designed for remote controls rather than touchscreens/mice so tends to expect button/keypress navigation. This is fine but in tablet mode we have only got 7 buttons and one of them is a shift-key so 12 functions tops. Pen gestures springs to mind as a way round that one.
   
7. It doesn't know about laptop to tablet switching. hibernation and powersaving.
   

This means I need to sort out the tablet mode buttons, XRandR screen switching and probably some sort on-screen keyboard facility before this will really fly.