Monthly Archives: December 2009

myth in small window

with thanks to spodesabode for this

MythTV is wonderful, and it’s backend/frontend separation is ideal for my uses – as it means I can watch TV in my bedroom, where I don’t have an aerial. However, it is quite obviously designed for people who use it as a complete Media Center, and not people who run it on their machine. I found the best thing to do is have a secondary launch icon, which loads MythTV with a different resolution.
The following instructions are for Ubuntu, but I did something very similar in Fedora.
First, copy the mythtv.desktop file.
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/mythtv.desktop /usr/share/applications/mythtvsmall.desktop
Then we’ll edit this file with sudo nano /usr/share/applications/mythtvsmall.desktop
Edit the file:
“Name=” portion to read “MythTV Frontend (Small)”
“Exec=” portion to read “mythfrontend -geometry 640×400”.
640×400 is a nice size for my twin 1680×1050 screens, and keeps the widescreen aspect ratio. Moving the window around is as simple as holding down ALT and click-dragging on the window.
http://www.spodesabode.com/discussion/54/mythtv-in-a-window/
to make the backend setup small windowed:
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/mythtv-setup.desktop /usr/share/applications/mythtv-setupsmall.desktop
edit the file:
sudo nano /usr/share/applications/mythtv-setupsmall.desktop
“Name=” portion to read “MythTV Backend Setup (Small)”,
“Exec=” portion to read “mythtv-setup -geometry 640×400”