In search for a gentle Gentoo and MythTV install

New Motherboard, faster processor and an airplane in my living room...

2009-11-19T09:19:00.000+01:00

This is an idea that I have had for a long time now - I have to change processor in my MythTV box. The AMD Athlon I am using now, and which has served me well so far I should add, just is too stupid for this kind of application. First of all, it is really, really hot. This means that the fan will have to be very efficient, and after a while, this leads to huge noise. Second, it does not have any kind of CPU frequency scaling. So, my Athlon 2400 will always be at 2400 (or equivalent), meaning no power saving and no chance of havign a cool and quiet computer.

So, now I finally got on eBay and found a pulled mATX motherboard with an Pentium 4 Mobile processor and some memory on it already. Perfect! Just have to load a module and - voila! - I can set the CPU frequency governor to "ondemand" and get a 350 MHz processor when "just using" the system. Excellent! Now I just have to figure out how to set this governor at boot time... and change the CPU fan. The fan which came with the board is a really stupid one, going at full speed and sounding like a small airoplane even when the CPU is at 350 MHz and should not be in such a big need of huge amounts of cooling. I wonder why this fan was ever used... well, I will get a new fan anyway - that's for sure! :-)

Gentoo breakdown -> Mythbuntu trial

2009-10-05T11:02:00.000+02:00

I've been abroad for a year (and did not update my Gentoo box so often before that either to be honest) so now when I tried to install som file sharing on the box, the whole installation broke. Apparently, I had managed to pass the point where my old Gentoo installation was upgradable to the new system, and what I found in the forums were that a re-install seems to be the only way around this problem.

I have no time for this, I am afraid. I have to get on with work, and have lots of other projects to take care of. Building the Gentoo box was a great learning experience for me, but now I just need a quick-fix solution. Enter the ready-to-run solutions that I have seen becoming more and more mature and sensible, and more specifically the Ubuntu-based Mythbuntu.

I have to say that I am impressed. With just a few hours into the system, I have managed to get most of it up and running. What remains is to make sure that it will start up at indicated times, and that the remote control will work as it should. Wireless, SMB sharing and all that stuff just works though, as does most of the other stuff that I found troublesome before (like the graphical boot thing). A quick fix to the problem, and it seems good enough for me to stick with it. So, I may change the title of this blog at some point... I just have to find a sexy one :-)

VDPAU hopes

2009-02-18T13:23:00.003+01:00

The hottest topic on the MythTV users list right now is the VDPAU patches that are being worked on (or submitted actually). It seems that with a recent NVidia card, you could offload some of the workload of decoding to the GPU, thus saving CPU cycles. This is a very hot topic in computing right now, with the OpenCL inclusion in Snow Leopard and all... and for HTPCs it makse so much sense! Why have a very big CPU (and the huge fan for it) working overtime when some of the work could be done by processor made basically for computer graphics computations?

Me, however, I was not immediatelly not convinced that this would be a good solution for me, since I thought it would add the requirements of a second heavilly cooled processor to the box, and thus increasing noise. However, it seems that the G8 NVidia chips are available on more than a few motheboards as a built-in graphics solution. When upgrading, I will have to get med one of those... :-)

MythTV revisited..

2009-02-17T09:52:00.003+01:00

After had MythTV up and running now for a year, I have decided it is time for an upgrade of hardware. The box is really not quiet. Even in a cupboardlike the one I have, you can easilly hear the fan.. and the eletric bill ticking away :-). The current CPU is an old Athlon 2600 with no CPU frequency throtteling at all, so I would like to move to a new CPU. Also, I would like to be able to have it available more of the time, without having to wait for the long startup sequence to complete.

Thus, my plans are to:

1) Move to a 64 bit Athlon with speedstep. Possibly with a couple of cores :-)

2) Find a combination of HW that will allow me to use suspend to ram or similar features.

I am away from Sweden right now, so getting these things will have to wait until summer.

I had it all.. but now it is gone!

2007-10-25T15:35:00.000+02:00

Wow.. I have not updated this blog in a loong time now. The reason for this is mainly that the system was working fins and I saw no need to touch the setup.

Recently, however, I descided to update my IVTV driver ant therefore also the kernel to 2.6.22. I should NOT have done that. In the end, I faced a networkless, databaseless and TV output-less MythtTV box with no way of fixing all the missing dependencies. Hmm.. I never learn.

I descided to give MythDora a try and I liked the experience in the beginning. However, in the end, I found myself annoyed about a number of things, such as startup scripts and management of WPA configuration on my wifi card.

So, I decided to move back into Gentoo... and that is where I am now. Maybe I'll try to uuse the nVidia card I have lying around for TV out instead of the PVR-350 card so that I will be able to use some advanced graphics acceleration and graphical boot on the TV.

We'll see..

2006-09-02T12:43:00.000+02:00

Finally a decent demo video of MythTV

I must admit that I am becoming somewhat of a youtube junkie. That site is great!

I posted a while ago about videos on there that I thought were not good and also something that looks promising. Here is a demo I found of MythTV that I think people thinking about trying MythTV out would appreciate. It could have been more focused on MythTV rather than the Hauppauge MVP, but you can't have everything!

Image from inside the new case..

2006-07-28T10:44:00.000+02:00

IMG_0010.JPG
Originally uploaded by dargosch2003.

I said that I would post a picture on the new case, but I haven't. SNow, since I hav already posted a picture of the front, whic h I find quite nice för at PVR comupter case with this price tag, so I will not post any more pictures of the front.

Instead, I provide you with an image of what the case is like when trying to fit a whole setup in there. There are 2 PVR cards and a WiFi card filling the slots, the first harddrive is behind the DVD-RW drive and the second drive is underneathe the DVD. As you see, there is plenty of room for air to flow ;-) Luckilly, there is a vent just over the CPU and two 6mm fans mounted ot the back, othervwise, this thing would probably burn my house down.

2006-07-27T21:49:00.000+02:00

Interesting Media center...

Ok, just one more youtube video. This video is a demo of an open souce project called Elia Mediacenter.

I think it is refreshing in that it aims to be visually pleasable, but I have to be honest, the music interface is not winning any awards in my book. People think navigating the Mythmusic plugin is difficult... removing the structure will not help them.
:-/

Sort digital images.

2006-07-27T20:59:00.000+02:00

Last time I posted, I was whining about some guy posting a private TiVo demo on youtube,com. I feel bad about that, and if you read this, I am really sorry!

One of the many reasons for me regretting that post has to do with me asking myself what I really do contribute to people making MythTV boxes out there. In the last couple of months, this has not been much. So, here is something that I find really heplful:

I have a digital camera, a Canon A70. Like all digital cameras, it does both images and videos. Images are easy to handle since there are standard EXIF tags that you can extract and use when, for instance, you would like to sort your images by date and time when they were taken. There is even an excellent program called JHEAD that enables you to rename your files by the EXIF tags. So, an image taken at 12:45:23 on the 15 of November 2002 may easilly be renamed to 2002-11-15_12:45:23.jpg. Neat for sorting and you will never overwrite images because they are called the same.

Movies, however, are different. AFAICT, there is no standard for this information. Also, there are no tools that I have found that lets you rename AVI files created in the same format as the JPEG files discussed above. So, a while back, I created one! :-) It uses mplayer for information extraction, and will probably only work with Canon cameras (or just the A70 camera, I don't know), however, it is easilly adaptable to other cameras that provides this information in the AVI header. Here is the script:
(PLEASE NOTE I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS SCRIPT OR ANY DAMAGE DONE BY IT. USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!)

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

package main;
#This is the line you may have to change in order to extract the correct information from
#other cameras
my $inpattern = 'Digitization Time: (\w\w\w) (\w\w\w) (\d\d) (\d\d:\d\d:\d\d) (\d\d\d\d)';

my %months = ( 'Jan' => '01',
'Feb' => '02',
'Mar' => '03',
'Apr' => '04',
'May' => '05',
'Jun' => '06',
'Jul' => '07',
'Aug' => '08',
'Sep' => '09',
'Oct' => '10',
'Nov' => '11',
'Dec' => '12');

my $file;
my $prefix;
my $output;

my $nofiles = $#ARGV;

foreach $file ( @ARGV ) {

$output='';
$prefix = '';

if($nofiles > 0){

$output .= $file." ";
}
open IN, "mplayer -vo null -novideo -nosound -v 1 $file 2>&1 |" or die "Error: $!";

while(){
m/$inpattern/ and $output .= "$5-$months{$2}-$3_$4\n";

}

print $output;

}

1;

This script will provide you with the date and time info in a YYYY-MM-DD_hh:mm:ss format. If you supply the name of more than one files, the name of the file will be given first on every line and the date second.

Ok, what do we do with this script? You may do whatever you like, but I use it for sorting images and videos ;-) This is my soluton to the sorting problem:
(PLEASE NOTE I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS SCRIPT OR ANY DAMAGE DONE BY IT. USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!)

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

#jhead -n%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S *.jpg

package main;

my $JHEAD = '/usr/bin/jhead';
my $AVIDIGITIME = '/home/zak/src/perl/avidigtime/avidigtime.pl';

#my $dir = '/home/zak/temp/test';
my $dir = '';
if( length(@ARGV) > 0){

$dir = $ARGV[0];
} else {
print length(@ARGV);
print STDERR "Usage: albumsort.pl directory\n";
exit(1);
}

open IN, " (find $dir -name \"*.jpg\" ; find $dir -name \"*.JPG\")|sort|" or die "Find JPG: $!";

my $file = '';
my $debug = '';

while(){

chomp;
$file = $_;
system("$JHEAD -exonly -n%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S $file") ;

}
close IN;

open IN, " (find $dir -name \"*.avi\" ; find $dir -name \"*.AVI\")|sort|xargs $AVIDIGITIME|" or die "Find avi: $!";

$file = '';
my @outputdir;
my $outdir;
my @div;
my $infile;
my $outfile;

while(){

chomp;
$file = $_;
@div = split;
$infile = shift(@div);
$outfile = shift(@div);
#Skapa namnet på utfilen
@outputdir = split(/\//,$file);

my $temp = pop(@outputdir);
$outdir = join("/",@outputdir);

system("mv $infile $outdir/$outfile.avi && echo \"$infile --> $outdir/$outfile.avi\"" ) ;

}
close IN;

#SORT IMAGES AND MOVIES
open IN, " (find $dir -name \"*.jpg\" ; find $dir -name \"*.avi\")|" or die "File sort: $!";

while(){

chomp;

if( m/.*(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d)_\d\d:\d\d:\d\d.*/ ){

my $date = $1;
-e $dir.'/'.$date or mkdir $dir.'/'.$date;
system("mv $_ $dir/$date/ 2>&1 > /dev/null");
}
}

close IN;

#Remove empty libraries

system("find $dir -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d |egrep -v \'.*/....-..-..\$\'| xargs rm -R ");

1;

You use it by running "albumsort.pl directory". It will sort everything in that directory into sub-directories named by the YYYY-MM-DD format, and remove sub-directories that does not match that pattern. Please note that it will acctually rename, move and remove files, so BE SURE YOU ARE WORKING WITH A COPY OF YOUR IMAGES!

Enjoy!

2006-07-26T19:15:00.000+02:00

Private demo of Tivo on youtube.. Why?

There are probably people out there that would say that having a blog about tyour MythTV and Gentoo experiences is just a pointless waste of time and add nothing to the world. I have no problems with that thought, but I would have to point out htat this blog has acctually helped me restore my MythTV setup twice, and blogs just like it provided me with good information on how to manage the first time around.

This video on youtube.com, however, I fail to see the point in doing. This is someone demoing their UK TiVo.
Why? Is the TiVo company not promting their products enough for him? I hope this guy is getting paid for this video..

(I got an urge to post about this mainly since I have not updated my blog for quite some time. I would probably have done the same thing if I did not have MythTV box ;-))

Killer new case!

2006-06-09T09:22:00.000+02:00

I finally did it. After about a year of complaining about the case I originally bought for the MythTV box, last week I ordered a new one. I went for the Enlight EN-7473 mATX case with a retro look to it. I do not mind plugging this case, since I LOVE it. It is perfect for me, and really fits in with the rest of whole TV/Entertainment system setup in most homes.

There are a few things that I particularly like:

* The CD/DVD is hidden behind a VCR-looking cover.
* Most things are accessible from the front panel
* On the right side of the front, there is a sliding panel which reveals a 3.5" slot. With the case came a 3.5" media card reader fitted in this slot. Convenient, since noone still uses the 3.5" bay for anything else.
* Two 6 mm fans fitted on the back of the case with a Y-cable to the Motherboard regulating pins.
* The funnel + vent just above the processor fan. I guess adding some sort of tube would help pull the heat from the processor outside of the case as soons as it is passed from the processor fan.
* The power button, panels and even the case feet helps with the impression that this is an appliance rather than a computer.
* It is strictly mATX, meaning that the case is not bigger than it would have to be,

I will post pictured of it from when I installed it later...

MythArchive seems to rock!

2006-05-30T08:22:00.000+02:00

One of the most frequently re-occurring topic on the mythtv-users list (and this blog) is that we would like to have some way of creating backups of recordings on DVD that is playable on a stand-alone DVD player. The previous solution was to use the Mythburn scripts, which worked well for some and less well for others.

Now, there is a new program on the way: MythArchive. Some people are already using it off the svn, but I, like always, do not trust svn versions unless that is all that is available. With the imminent release of a new MythTV, I figure I can wait a while for this.
What does NythArchive do? This is from the WIKI:

MythArchive is a new plugin for MythTV that lets you create DVDs from your recorded shows, MythVideo files and any video files available on your system.

Not bad eh? Speficically, it does:

* Creates DVDs complete with a themed menu structure
* New menu themes can easily be added
* By using different themes you can do things like create auto play DVDs that have no menus etc.
* Can use not only Myth recordings but also files from MythVideo and any file accessible from your file system
* Can use mythtranscode to cut out commercials from mpeg2 recordings.
* If a file isn't an mpeg2 file or the file doesn't have a DVD compliant resolution it will be re-encoded using ffmpeg so it is DVD compliant.
* Can use any video file that ffmpeg can decode and re-encode to mpeg2.
* Can re-encode the audio stream to ac3 for better compatibility in NTSC countries.
* Tries to select the best audio track based on what you have selected as your preferred languages in Myth
* Can support two audio tracks per title. (not tested fully)
* Can use single layer or dual layer dvdr's
* Can use rewritable DVD+/- RW
* Can force an erase of a rewritable disc
* Can create an ISO image that can be moved anywhere on your file system possibly so you can burn it on another machine.

Also, it incorporates a RAW archive format that enables you to dump the recordings, with all the meta data attached, on disk and then restore it from MythArchive whenever you like.
Also, it is implemented in Python, so maintenance of the code will be smoother and less prone to be a victim of the 'rm -Rf /' incident.

With my new, and working, DVD burner, I am very excited about this program. I liked MythWelcome alot, but this will definitelly take MythTV to another level. I wonder what the Google summer of code will bring...

I have to get a new DVD burner..

2006-04-03T23:38:00.000+02:00

I have a definite problem with the Aopen DVD burner I am using currently. Basically, it does not work, except for very expensive discs, and then only sometimes. I am thinking of buying the
NEC ND-3550 IDE Silver OEM DVD+R/+RW/DVD-R/-RW (Dual layer)
I have tried NEC burners at work before, so I have great hopes for it. The last one I tried worked on every disc out there.

Microsoft is avoiding using standards at all costs.. as usual.

2006-03-26T15:07:00.000+02:00

I read in a computer magazine sometime this month that Microsoft Media Center will, in the future, support automatic wakeup of the computer in order to record shows. The reason it does not work right now, Microsoft states, is due to the fact that motherboards do not support their "On Now" technology

This is strange. My MythTV box manages to start up at specified times, record stuff and then shut down again... Can it be that Microsoft is, again, avoiding the use of established protocols, like the wakeup feature of BIOS:es in order to force everyone to use something they designed (and in this case does not work yet).

I am getting tired of this same old song. When will it stop? Do we really need 6 kinds of wheels?

Welcome mythwelcome!

2006-03-24T23:04:00.000+01:00

The 0.19 release has been around for a while now, and I installed a couple of weeks ago. It works Ok, except for Live TV, which seems to have been reworked into a state of no usability. I do not mind, however.. I think maybe this is the least useful feature of MythTV.

A very nice feature though is the new mythwelcome program. It is designed to be a solution that fixes alot of the small issues that has been solved in the past by small scripts and lock files.
Mythwelcome is started instead of the frontend. After it has been started, It can be set to start the frontend if the startup was automatic. Otherwise, only mythwelcome is shown (see picture below).

The trick is that mythwelcome does not count as a frontend. So, during recording, it will show what the backend is doing, and when it is done, mythbackend may shut the computer down. This mimics the ability of the scripts I've posted in this blog previously, with a nice frontend, but there are twists.

* Using the remote, the user may block and unblock shutdown.
* You don't have to start the frontend or a web browser on another computer to learn what the MythTV box is doing, and for how long.
* Start an Xterm (or another program) using the F12 key
* Set up to two daily startup periods when the MythTV box should start, regardless of recording schedule. This is a great feature which allows for getting to the box from a remote location.

I used to have problems, however. See these threads [1,2]
Whenever I started mythwelcome from an Xterm or the .xsession script, the screen froze.
However, if I started it with verbosity level set, it started ok from an Xterm, but froze the screen from the .xsession. I stopped investigating this, since I seemed to be the only one with the problem, and started using my old scripts again.

Today, I started fiddling with it again, and it turned out that the fault was the windowmanager, 'evilwm' that I was using. I switched to fvwm2, and mythwelcome starts up ok, regardless of how it was called. Strange....

Not so nice hard drivers anymore - I do not like lvm!

2006-02-25T15:50:00.000+01:00

I feel that I have to warn anyone that reads a howto on seting MythTV up and gets the advice that you should use lvm so that you may add drives later. Don't do it! The computer will crash on moderade disk usage.

Furthermore, you should NOT use XFS on that lvm, since XFS do not shrink. So, when you want to do something about your current setup, you cannot simply remove the HD from the lvm since a major part of the filesystem may be on is and you CAN NOT SHRINK IT.

So, you'd have to get storage space someware to copy files on the lvm, delete the lmv and then coy the files back to one of the disks. This is what I am trying to do now.. I sure hope I'll find a friend with a large hard drive and on the same network as me very soon...

Nice new harddrives...

2006-01-28T14:57:00.000+01:00

One thing you can never have too much of, that is harddisk space. This is particularilly true when coming to PVR applications. I suffered fo a long time with a 80 GB hard drive, storing everything from the OS, temp space for DVD image creation and recordings. Not an ideal situation.
So, when I got the opportunity to byu anothe one at a low price, I took it. Nice feeling to have some room, and since I, in the install process, listned to advice given about lvm, the upgrade was a breeze. Suddenly I had two harddrives looking as one and with 137 GB storage on it.

Now, a while ago I had my birhtday, and my nice brother descided to give me something nice. A shiny new HARDDRIVE with 250 GB storage on it. Suddently, I have got 377 GB of space for recordings, movies, music and photos. AND, I got dedicated partictions for temp spaces, which is very handy when transcoding or arhiving the recordings. I must admitt that I am abusing the "Record every showing of this program" option....

Save power.

2005-12-04T09:15:00.000+01:00

One thing that I noticed in the installation of 0.18.1 of MythTV is that the detection of whether the computer was started automatically or not no longer worked for me. I used to have this script fire up the frontend for me:

mythtv@mythtv ~ $ cat /usr/local/bin/mythguictrl
#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

package main;

my $lockfile ='/home/mythtv/.mythguilock';
my $logfile ='/home/mythtv/.mythtv/guilocklog';

my $date =`/usr/bin/date`;

-e $lockfile and unlink $lockfile;

if( $ARGV[0] eq "auto" ){

open LOCK,'>',$lockfile;
print LOCK "1";
close LOCK;

}

open(STARTLOG,">> $logfile ") or die "Unable to open log file:$!";
print STARTLOG "$ARGV[0] $date";
close(STARTLOG);

1;

This script is iserted as a startup script of MythTV. If the computer was started up automatically, for instance using nwram-startup, it is supplied the argument 'auto', the frontend was not started, and the box would shut down itself after recording was done.

Now, after 0.18.1, this did not work anymore, so we started using more power than necessary since the box would fire up, record and then be on for the rest of the day. Not good.

An alternative solution was posted by Phill Edwards here

mythtv@mythtv ~ $ cat /home/mythtv/bin/remote_chk.sh
#!/bin/bash
#
# remote_chk.sh
# This script checks whether any keys have been pressed on the remote control
# in the TIMEOUT seconds since mythfrontend was started (this script is started
# when mythfrontend is from .ratpoisonrc). If there has been any presses then
# the frontend is assumed to be in use and so we don't want to shutdown
# mythfrontend. If there haven't been any key presses then assume that it's not
# in use so we kill mythfrontend (which is auto started on system startup) so
# that the auto shutdown processing can then go ahead.

PROG=mythfrontend
#15 minutes
TIMEOUT=900
LOGF=/home/mythtv/.mythtv/irw.log

irw > $LOGF &
sleep $TIMEOUT

IRLOG=`cat $LOGF | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`
#UNK=`cat $LOGF | grep unknown | grep -v grep | wc -l | awk '{print $1}'`

#if [ $IRLOG -eq 0 ] || [ $IRLOG == $UNK ]

if [ $IRLOG -eq 0 ]
then
echo "remote_chk.sh killing mythfrontend at `date`" >> /tmp/mythrestart.log
killall $PROG
fi

exit 0

This script will shut down the frontend after 20 minutes if no button on the remote control has been pressed before this time. Since human use of MythTV requires at least one menu change, this will prevent it from shuting down the box in case you acctually wanted to use it from the frontend. Inventive work-around.

Really waiting for 0,19 release of MythTV

2005-11-27T19:49:00.000+01:00

I've been bad again: I have not written in a while. The most important reason is that most things just work with the current setup. The remaining thing has been the ability to archive shows on DVD, with menues. The solution for cutting without synchronization problems seem to be based on the CLI version of the ProjectX application. So far, the solution has been based on a web-interface, with is fine for most applications. However, I must say that it has been slightly annoying having to fire up two computers to be able to make an archive.

It seems that some work has been done on this issue in the SVN for MythTV. Screenshots were released today on mysettopbox.tv,

For the record, I will NOT start using the SVN version because of this, but I have to admit that I have been looking forward to this.

Try the IVTV 0.4 release!

2005-11-09T14:39:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I last blogged about the MythTV box. The reason for this is that it just works for most of the things I use it for. The one thing that I have found annoying in the past is that the DVD playback was a bit jerky. The reson for this was that I never got Xv support to work in the driver without visual artifacts.

Now I installed the latest stable release, 0.4.0, of the IVTV driver, and there is a HUGE difference. DVD playback is flawless and not at all jerky. If you read this and have a PVR-350 card, you should try this new driver and activate the Xv extension.

You can count on hackers..

2005-08-19T16:43:00.000+02:00

Summer usually means that ther are a lot of hackers out there having a bunch of time to spend on a project. I have done some work as a sysadmin, and I know that not all of those projects involve building things... hacking into a server and messing things up also counts as a project, for some...

Fortunatelly, some spend their time more wiselly. Like Martin Bene, who spent the summer making a patch that I have frequently requested on the mythtv-users mailing list: a patch that makes mythburn work. This is a copy of his post:

You asked for it, you got it:

Another update for the mythburn scripts, no new features this time but
major rewrite of configuration.

* No more hardcoded paths
* new installer
* cleaned up requirements for access rights: all write access either to
temp dir or to config dir.
* single config file with settings for directory locations, database
etc.

The update is available either as a patch against current mythburn CVS
or as a complete tarball (content equals cvs+patch).

http://mabene.icomedias.com/mythburn/cut-0.5.diff is the diff, apply
with patch -p1 -E (a couple of files get removed).

Full tarball at http://mabene.icomedias.com/mythburn/mythburn.tar.gz

* put the mythburn stuff in a sensible place; /usr/share/mythburn might
be a good choice.
* cd /usr/share/mythburn
* ./install.sh

The installation script prompts you for
- tv dir (where the recordings are stored)
- directory where mythtv fonts live
- directory to put temp files (will be created)
- place to put DVD file structure (will be created)
- user the webserver runs as
- group the webserver runs as
- directory where MythWeb is installed
- host the mysql database is running on
- name of mysql database
- username for accessing database
- password for accessing database

All config settings have defaults that match KnopMyth setup. Most
settings are checked so it's not easy to enter invalid settins that
could lead to problems later on.

The installation script sets file and directoy owner and access rights,
writes a config file, creates symlinks in the Mythweb directory and
patches the "burn dvd" link into mythburn.

If all required packages are installed, you're ready to go.

This should work regardless of your installation; I wrote the scripts on
gentoo and did some minimal testing on Knopmyth.

Let me know why it doesn't work for you and how I broke your system :-)

Bye, Martin

So, go get it. Try it! (I haven't)- There is a rumor of a frontend patch around too.. is christmas comming early this year?

LIRC IR Blaster ?

2005-08-01T13:43:00.000+02:00

When I first started planning this project I figured that with the change in Sweden from analog to digital TV we would have to fgure out a way to control an external settop box from MythTV. For this purpose, there are IR blasters available that will act as a remote control and send irsequences to an externa box.
I went ahead and bought one of these things here.
However, since the cable company we use have decided to provide all channels in analog format also, we will not use the thing, it seems.
Though, I have been thinking of other things to control using it.. maybe the VCR? My girlfriend will soon be working, we hope, as a teacher and the schools around here have not yet embraced the DVD for presentation of multimedia content.
The bad thing is that not much else is within reach of the box... :-(

Xv and a new case?

2005-07-22T21:23:00.000+02:00

I have to say that I am basically satisfied with the MythTV box as it is right now. I know that things will change when the new version, featuring a frontend deamon and other much needed stuff, but it works pretty much as one would expect right now. Of course, out of the two times I have tried to show off it's capabilities to visiting people, the first one was a complete failure and the second one was a complete success. Not bad, considering the fact that the failure was caused by me having fiddled a bit too much with the XML parsing libraries that MythTV needs for it's menues. A re-install of them solved the problem.

The only small issue I can think of regarding hte software is the lack of hardware accelerated scaling for non-MPEG2 sources using the IVTV framebuffer device drivers. This issue is, however being worked on by John Harvey and teh state of the Xv implementation is that it is already quite usable but that the image may in some cases have artifacts. This mainly concerns OSD elements, and I am sure that John, or someone else, will solve the problem. Not a very big issue for me, since playback using the x11 driver in mplayer and xshm driver in xine is not a problem on the Sempron 2.4 GHz box I am using.

I have never been a particular big fan of the case though. Sure, it is kind of flat and it was cheap enough, but now.. I don't know. Judge for yourself.

And in place:

Appart from the look fo the case itself, I am a bit disturbed by the noise caused by the box. In hte beginning, the 40mm fan I am using (since there is no room for a larger one in the case by the processor) was connected directly to the PSU. This way, the noise of hte fan was really very unintrusive, and I noticed the PSU more than the 40mm fan. However, I noticed (when I enabled the hardware sensors in the linux kernel) that the temperature inside the box was not healthy at all.
Most of hte time, this was not a problem, since the box was not on for more that about half a day at a time. However, I noticed that the box would crash if we went away for a couple of days, usually leaving some stuff not recorded. So, I got an extension cable for the fan so that it would reach the far-away connector on the MB (and thereby getting it regulated by the the MB temperature). Now, the temperature in the case is fine even under high load, but the noise has increased considerably.

I have found a candidate replacement case, the Aspire X-QPack. There are a number of good review of this case around, and most of them concludes that the design is really good regarding airflow and internal space (considering the volume involved).
Here are some pictures:

The 120mm fan in the back is also, according to one review, pretty quitet. It compares well to dedicated HTPC cases out there, for a lot less money. One thing I don't like, however, is the LEDs in combination with the side windows. In case I decide to take the plunge, I will either have to find a store that sells the no-window variant, or kill the light!

KnoppMyth has got some competition

2005-07-04T08:35:00.000+02:00

The alternative to doing a full Linux install and then figuring out and installing the components needed for MythTV is to go with a pre-packaged distribution known as KnoppMyth. This distro is based on Debian and installs quite easilly it seems (I have not tried it myself, but I have seen it been done), but the problem is just that this is Debian. I ran debian on my boxen a couple of years back, and I noticed that all the media stuff that I did want to use (like Mplayer) needed a bunch of libraries with *much* higher version number than the packages available in Debian unstable. As a consequence, I started getting a /usr/local that was almost as large as the rest of /usr (QT and GTK helped aswell). When scanning the archies in Mythtv-users, I definatelly see people needing to compile a bunch of stuff on their own.. I mean the IVTV driver is usable with a recently bought card only if you run the unstable branch.

Maybe a change in base distribution for knoppmyth is the key. Dennis Hand seems to think so. He has recently announced a Fedora Core-based distribution solely devoted to provide a simplistic install of MythTV on a computer. It is called MythDora and even provides a Fedora Core port of the Mythburn scripts. Check it out.

The alternatives.

2005-06-14T09:36:00.000+02:00

I have ben asked a couple of times "Why MythTV?". I really have no good answer for those that have not tried it themselves, so I usually give a summary of the features list.
But there are alternatives, one of which I have tried myself. I'll start with that one:

Freevo
Very popular system written i Python. This makes it really flexible and easy to write plugins to, which shows in the number of plugins available. I decided to leave Freevo since it was a bit on the slow side and, more importanly, did not behave at all the way I and my girlfriend expected it to.

One should also mention the DVR project which aims to replace the VCR, nothing more. It records shows from an EPG and is able to display them. Good enough for some people, but I and my family. No point in having a screen shot of this one.

Leaving the Linux world and looking at Windows XP MCE reivals, I find a two projects workt taking a look at:

GB-PVR
A .NET based approach that seems to have attracted a good following Open Source world. There are loads of plugins and themes, including a PIM applications and email checking. Some skins are quite similar to the appearance of MCE:

Media Portal
Another feature-rich Windows media center. From the features list, I get the impression that this one acctually rivals MythTV in features, and has DVD burning included also. For MythTV there is only a web-based plugin so far (which caused me some trouble last week). However, a friend tells me it is quite slow sometimes.

DVDs on PVR-350.

2005-06-12T19:57:00.000+02:00

Even though there is a MPEG2 decoder on the PVR-350 card, there is no was (yet) to use this ability in when playing DVDs. Somewhat counter to what you would expect, but then there it is. Even more, until a couple of months ago, there were no Xv support in the framebuffer driver for X, which basically seems to mean that the TV output on an old, dumb graphics device would be just as good.

When reasearching various DVD playback programs, I found (like many before me) that you basically have to choose the less unsatisfactory solution for you. There is basically no alround solution.
Mplayer rocks for speed and lirc support, but there are no menues. Ogle is has really smooth playback and menu suport, but no lirc (why??). There is a companion program on the web that handles lirc -> ogle transactions, but it would not compile agains the versions of ogle i tried.
Xine is fully stacked in features, but the speed leaves much to be desired. I finally went for the xine solution, and with the following line I get pretty steady playback:

xine -D -V xshm -A alsa --no-logo --no-splash -pfhq dvd:/

The -D flag is strictly necessary for me.. the interlace lines are terrible.

It is mentioned once in a while in the relevant mailing lists that someone should provide direct support for PVR-350 in the form of a driver for Xine. So far, I have not seen anyone mention any progress on this. I really hope someone is working on it...

No port this time, just a patch..

2005-06-10T08:42:00.000+02:00

The mess I got into last week was due to a half-ready port of the mythburn shell scripts to a more general environment. Luckilly, the bad code killed itself in the process by removing itself from the disc. Now that I have the system up again, I decided agains starting to restructure the code to a distributable package again and just fix the thing that needed fixing. I've posted a patch here that takes me from the current CVS to code that will generate a correct DVD structure (with menues and chapters) as well as with thumbnails that are not blue inhte faces and not up-side-down.
Hope this will help someone.

Someone should get the urge to continue the work done on a MythTV frontend part of the scipts that are in the CVS. Web scripts are great, but there is something strange about having to fire up two computers in order to burn a DVD of the recordings. I don't know QT and is not really up to it right now, but since the code that acually does the work is in shell scripts already, it might not be that difficult to make a "selection" application in QT.

I tried nuv2disc. The thing is set to operate in 800x400 or more screen resolution. I have not been able to scale it down to 720x576 which is the TV out reolution of a PVR-350 in a PAL country. I don't like guessing which buttons I am pushing..

Not sure about udev..

2005-06-06T11:17:00.000+02:00

The system is up again. I decided to go with Gentoo dispite the compiling time.. although this time I started at stage3. Stage1 builds are cleansing for the soul, but boring when you just like to get the damn thing to work.

This install (which I really hopoe will be the last one I do) was of course much less work then the first one. The settings stored in this blog and in the Gmail archives of ivtv-devel, mythtv-users and mythtv-sweden lists really helped. Mostly copy-n'-paste and wait for gcc to finish.

The major obsticle has been udev. I know that devfs is not perfect, and even really unflexible when it comes to removable devices, but for me it is more important to get drivers for static hardware to work. No matter what I tried, i could not get the video devices readable by the system. The filsystem in /dev reported the correct attributes, but i got error everytime I tried to access them.
Switching back to devfs did the trick.

Maybe m just being a n00b, but if this is the state of udev, my thought is that it was prematurelly released.

Not very happy...

2005-06-04T17:57:00.000+02:00

This is it: I am officially a victim of bash scripting and have reached a new low in hacke status.
I hve been mucking around with a bash script for burning DVDs of my MythTV recordings. I wrote before that I really like the script, buthte problem with it is that it is written specifically for KnoppMyth. I've ported it to "proper" Myth once before, but this time I thought I would do something that could be distributed to other distros then Gentoo as well.

To make a long story short, in one of the scripts i inherited, there is a line

rm -R $dir/*

which was fine, until I started thinking that this is incomple and changed the name in the setup file I introduced. Now $dir was undefined... and I managed to stop it just *after* it completed /bin...

It is of some comfort that I have posted most of the tricky parts of my setup on misc lists and on this blog. I don't think getting back will be that hard, but then there is the compile time of Gentoo.

I am seriosly thinking about moving to a binary distro, although I know I would go fairly quickly.

Fire in the hall!

2005-06-02T10:24:00.000+02:00

I must admit that I gave up on burning from MythTV. The main obstacle seemed to be the DVD+RW device itself which would not burn an entire DVD in Linux. I updated the firmware, tried both the ATAPI and SCSI interfaces for burning, upgraded the kernel to a version that would work for this burner and finally rebuilt Gentoo completelly using a set of USE flags I got from a guy in the Gentoo forum.
Yet, it would not work. At least not until a two days ago.

When trying a Plextor USB writer at work, without problem, I got an idea that there might be a driver-disc-interface issue here. Trying a bunch of combinations of disc and interface using a new version of cdrecord-proDVD finally got me a sucessful burn of a Video-DVD image on a DVD+RW disc that I could then play as a DVD in MythDVD. Now, I will toss the non-working DVD-Rs I bought a while back and try to find another brand that works. I am getting close in this!

For MythTV part, I am planning to use the mythburn scripts fount here. I've ported it a while back from KnoppMyth to "Proper" Myth, and I like it so myuch that I will make a more easilly distributable port of it and give it to the maintainer. The script is too good to just fade away.
I like it much better than the nuv2disc package.

I should have learned.. One should trust IVTV magic.

2005-05-21T16:26:00.000+02:00

Ok, it has been a while since my last post. The reason for this is that I have been slightly depressed. The reason for this is that we decided to buy another TV card.. one never learns.

The card we ended up buying was an analog PVR-150 card from Hauppauge. This is similar to the one we already got, but with two major differences:
* There is no TV out, and therefore only an MPEG2 encoding chip.
* The MPEG2 encoding chip on the board is a new CX23416 chip.

A new chip makes it harder. Chris Kennedy is working on support for this chip in the unstable branch of the IVTV driver project, and the support seems to work pretty well. The problem is that the kernel module for the encoder chip on this board does not play nicelly with the module for the encode on the PVR-350 card we had working.

So, on the ivtv-devel list, there were lots of setups floating around suggesting that the saa7127 module should be hindred to attach to the PVR-150 card with a i2c_enable=1,-1 argument and the cx25840 should be made to play nice with a corresponding i2c_enable=-1,1 argument. In addition, there were a lot of posts suggesting that one should supply a cardtype=2,6 argument manually, to tell the ivtv module that this did, indeed, regard a PVR-350 card as #0 and PVR-150 card as #1.
I listned to all of these adviced, and I ended up with a very large modules.conf, without me getting the results I whanted.

What I got was that I found a setting that enabled me to tune on both tuners with if I physically changed the slots they used, and thereby the order in which they were initiallized. This wshould have gven me a clue to the solution, but it didn't. The backside of this setup was that could not get any kind of screen output. Not even a flicker on the screen! The framebuffer attached ok, but
X was transported into void (without even an error message).
In the original card order, I could use everything on the PVR-350 card, but every attempt of getting data from the video1 device (for the PVR-150 card) resulted in a I/O error. I could tune ok though..

I spent a good portion of a week trying different settings and module load order. Nothing.
However, yesterdayt I got to a stage where I could tune both cards ang get good data from both cards, but this time in the original PVR-350 - PVR-150 card order. I was happy for a while, until I realised the TV out problem came with successful tuning. All of a sudden, I could not get TV out even with the 350 card in the first slot.

Today, I got to thinking about my first attempts of setting the PVR-350 card up. In that case, supplying less options had done the trick. Also, I noticed that there was a difference in the behaviour of the two encoding modules: saa7127 grabbed everyting in sight, but cx25840 acctually respected the i2c_enable arguments I supplied. But, the cx25840 dd not load it's firmware properly if autoloaded by ivtv. This is when I decided to remove everything until I got to the setting that worked for the single PVR-350 card, and just loading cx25840 before it.
After havng tested a coulple of variants, I found one that acctually worked! With this load order, I could tune both tuners and get TV OUT!
Here is the successful setup:

mythtv root # cat /etc/modules.d/ivtv
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
alias char-major-81-1 ivtv
alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c

The modules are loaded by:

mythtv root # cat /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

tda9887 pal=B
cx25840 i2c_enable=-1,1

ivtv ivtv_std=2 tda9887=0
ivtv-fb
lirc_dev
lirc_i2c

Simple. Trust the force! Also, there should be good dose of black magic*!

Now the whole faily is happy and dancing to MythTV music

*[For those that do not understand the pun, the cx25840 has an option 'no_black_magic' which should not be set.. :-)]

DVB or analog?

2005-04-26T11:35:00.000+02:00

It occurs frequently on the PVR mailing lists that someone thinking of setting up a PVR box (like MythTV) asks the list for advice on a particular setup. And, almost as frequently, the person states something like "I will only get one TV tuner card, since I will not need more than one..". The responce to that statement is always something like "Yeah, right. Yo will change your mind."

Initially, when I started the MythTV build, I was one of these fools thinking that one tuner card should be enough. Now, I know how naive I was. Of course, You coudl get by on just one card, but after a whil, when the whole family starts to acctually use the box, confclicts are bound to happen.
So, like so may MythTV users before me, I am researching the best buy for a second TV card.

In comes the issue of whether to get a digial or an analog card. Sweden, where I live, will stop having anlog TV in 2008, and therefore I seems like a good idea to have a look at digital options rather than a more expensive analog card with a MPEG2 encoder. However, the number of free DVB-T channels in Sweden is rather limited. All but one of them fits into the same multiplex. Also, the channels that we most frequently record from is not included in the free channels.
The option would of course be to get a DVB-C card and use it with the digital cable service that we are supposed to be able to get in out building. However, my guess is that this would mean that we would have to use a CI interface for the subscription card, and then we would HAVE to watch live TV through MythTV. Moving hte card around is not a very good idea since it would surely be in the wrong place come recording time. :-)

I don't know what we should do...

Appearance is everything..

2005-04-20T09:16:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I stumbled uppon a new theme for MythTV that have not (at least I think) been mentioned on the mythtv-users mailing list or on any of the other fora that deals with MythTV. I really like it, so I would like to promote the use of it... it is a change from the sometimes much too serious MythTV standard themes. Have a look:

You can download it from this site.

Sometimes when you aren't even trying.. it just works.

2005-03-31T08:45:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I decided that I would spend some time trying to get the MythTV box into a working state again in the post-Freevo era. Getting it to tune properly again was a no-brainer, but sound would not work... not even in MythMusic. So, I decided that I would reinstall the alsa drivers for the on-board graphics chip (ADI1880). For some reason, I also got it in my head that I should build the intel8x0 also.. it is mentioned in the alsa docs as an alternative to via82xx, but it did not work when I fiddled with it in the beginning of the install of Gentoo.

Using the via module, I got some results, but the output was still not very good. Howver, when I switched to the intel8x0 module, the via82xx got pulled in automatically (without me saying so) and sound is perfect! Even in Live TV! YIIHAA!

Finally, the MythTV box works like it should regarding TV recording and music. My port of Mythtvburn still works, but the burner still gives me a headache. I have got in contact with a Gentoo user for whom the exact same burner "just worked". I am now trying to get him to send me information on his setup. Next, I will have to buy a second TV card and a joypad for MythGame :-)

Freevo and back again

2005-03-29T14:53:00.000+02:00

Last week, I decided that I reaaly should check out mode of the options out there. From the Google:ing I did before buying the PVR hardware, I did see Freevo as the prime alternative to
MythTV. Since the problem I had with MythTV was highly related to the use of an internal player in MythTV, I also thought that I would solve the audio issue by the move, as Freevo uses Mplayer, Xawtv or Tvtime for live viewing.

Installing Freevo was not very difficult. The Freevo plugin management system made it easy to set up components, extending the base setup with aditional functionality. A couple of freatures that I particularilly liked was the ability to detach audio in the music module so that it would keep playing when browsing pictures or setting a recording schedule. This is not possible in MythTV (although I get the impression that it is comming), and the only way to record something without interupting the music is to go to the web interface. Also, you get the title of the music currently playing in the "idle bar", which is very nice.

However, there were a number of issues that eventually caused me to go back to MythTV: the way the gallery plugin works, the range of options in the music playing module, the power of the scheduling application. Also, I frustrated with the notion that I would HAVE to login to the box through ssh every time I would like to change a setting. The MythTV setup program is not great, but it beats console hacking and restarting of Freevo in the case of small corrections. I got tired of this process, and went back to MythTV.

MythTV 0.17 and new IVTV drivers.

2005-03-11T08:45:00.000+01:00

I've had some problems with the MythTV box for a couple of days now. I thingk it all started when I wanted to transcode an abnormally large file to a smaller one, and at the same time mark commersials. For some reason, that task never finished, and did not go away even when I rebooted the computer and changed the name of the original file!
Since then, I have been experiencing hard lockups which would look like a heating problem except that the sensors tell me that there is no problem.

Then, I got a post on the MythTV mailing list that said that the problems with a low recording and livetv volume went away after an upgrade to ivtv-0.3.2h and MythTV 0.17. So, yesterday, I took the plunge...

Sadly enough, the volume is still low, but now I have made contact with a person that used to have the same problem as I have, and now don't. Hopefully, a comparison of my setup with his setup will prove sucessful.

Radio?

2005-03-03T11:22:00.000+01:00

I haven't touched the MythTV bow for a while (meaning I haven't fiddled with the settings for awhile..), but now I feel that I should wrap up the first stage of the project.
What I have done is:

Installed Gentoo on a new box. This is important as it has not been within 3 meters of a Windows install medium. I am very proud of this fact. The bow works ok, but makes a little to much noice.
Installed MythTV, MythWeb, MythWeather, MythNews, MythMusic, MythVideo, MythPhone and MythDVD. I have also ported the Mythtvburn-scripts from KnoppMyth to a "properly installed" Myth. This works great, except I cannot burn the DVD yet (this is a kernel issue though).
Go the #%! IVTV driver to work on the exotic version of PVR-350 i bought.

Right now, I see a couple of things that will have to be dealt with in order for me to be satisfied with the system:

Get the DVD writer to write DVD:s. This is annoying since I have fiddled with DVD burners before, with good results. Also, I have found a post reporting "no problem" with Linux and the specific driver I have. Arrghh!
Get the transcode deamon to work. I think there is a persmission thing somewhere.
Get FM radio to work. This is not supported in MythTV any more, but I would be happy to fire up an external applikation (such as kradio) for this through LIRC. I have tried the console app 'radio' but it could not tune into anything. Back to seaching the IVTV lists again.
Find the solution for the low TV playback volume. Recording volume is ok.
Install a secong TV card. I am reseaching DVB cards.

Gmail is beautiful...

2005-02-25T15:00:00.000+01:00

Not much has happened in my MythTv box for a while. The most important features just work now.. while the playback volume issue is odd, I really does not see it as a significant feature anymore.
The most important part is that the recording volume is ok, and it seems to be just that... ok.
I've ported the mythtvburn scripts from Knoppmyth to the "properly installed Myth" and it is now possible to select recordings and create a DVD image for burning.. complete with menu navigation and everything! The only remaning thing is to get DVD burning to work with the version of cdrecord and kernel that I have installed. I figure that this has to do with the removal of CD writing from the kernel at 2.6.8.. maybe the patched gentoo kernel does not fix this issue?

I find myself having less and less time for the MythTv box, and since the installation is now in a usable state, maybe it does not matter som much. In the install process, I joined a number of mailing lists that I would like to keep in touch with. Some of these mailing lists are, however, high volume lists that I would like to not have to worry them filling up my account in case I don't pop them very often. I think I will use my newly registered Gmail account for this. The speed and storage is excellent and I can access it from any computer.

Speak up!

2005-02-14T09:08:00.000+01:00

I cant figure out why the playback volume is som low in the MythTV module. I can record, transfer the recorded file to another computer and play it there with reasomable volume (not terribly high, but nao alarmingly low..) but when I play it back on the MythTV box, it is barely noticeble, even when I use an external amplifier. When playing video or music, the output is more than OK, even though I had to pull it down a bit to get a decent quality sound - the build in sound chip does not giv good sound quality in the highest setting.

I've made some posts abuot this.. I hope someone will take the time to help me find a solutoin to this problem. My guess is that it is ALSA/OSS related, but I have no idea what to do about it.

Missnamed Blog.. up until now.

2005-02-10T08:35:00.000+01:00

It struck me that the Blog I was writing in was sligtly miss-named. So far, finding a gentle Gentoo and MythTV install has not been much of a problem. MythTV installed nicelly and ther are plenty of good guides around. Put together, they cover most aspects of the install process and also give plenty of good advice as to how to best set up the rest of the environment.

The major proble of the install has been getting my tuner to work correctly with the IVTV driver.
Don't get me wrong, the driver works correctly, but I have to say that there should be PAL oriented guides out there. To set up PAL, you sometimes have to first understand non-PAL and then make modifications to that for PAL. Frequent changes in the parameters needed in order to get the various modules to wok with PAL doe not help the end user either.

However, now everything in the TV based frontend works and everyone is happy. I have recorded my first show and the result was fine althought the sound was very low due to a low set recording volume. I should really set up btaudio so that I could grab sound from the tuner instead of the loopback cable to the soundcard.

I said earlier that the Blog might have beeen miss-named. That was then, this is now. Now it is correcly named. Now my main obstacle is the web frontend. I get Internal server error everytime I try.. there must be some permissions missing somewhere.. perhaps the links are wrong? I'll have to check tonight.

Pictures...

2005-02-09T10:07:00.000+01:00

I finally took the time to transfer the pictures I took during the process to Photobucket so tht I may post them here.
Of course, when you go for this kind of project, it is important that you have another computer . Also, since the wireless card was low on the list of priorities, everything had to be done close to the wireless access point, which is in the kitchen. My girlfriend was very pleased with this... :-)

This is what everything looked like when it was all assembled. Mind you, at this stage, not much worked.. not even TV-out. (The mouse has been replaced by a small, black one..)

Yihaa!!

2005-02-08T23:15:00.000+01:00

After having tried all possible combinations of kernel module parameters, I have to admit that I had given up. But, then I posted on the ivtv-devel list and got a link to a very simple setup:

I just put
tda9887 pal=B
ivtv ivtv_std=2 tda9887=0
ivtv-fb
lirc_i2c

in /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.6

and
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c

in /etc/modules.d/ivtv
(Have a look at the original post here
Now, I am recording :-)

This is one of these times when you just smile and do not try to understand what just happened....

Some progress..

2005-02-06T20:37:00.000+01:00

You cannot plan everything! Before I got the computer that we were putting MythTV on, I did substantial research on both the PVR-350 card and automatic wakeup for the MB.
The IVTV fora I found gave the impression that TV out would be a problem and nvram-wakeup did not support my motherboard.

Now, I have TV out and automatic wakeup configured, but I cannot get a decent result from the tuner! This is the only remaining issue... I wonder if the developers of ivtv is working on this. I hope so.

Cold boot...?

2005-02-04T16:33:00.000+01:00

The card jsut refuses to tune properly. FOr somem reason, I cannot get a better picture than what I got a cuole of days ago. I searched the fora some more and found something related to PVR-150 that said there was a "cold boot"-problem in the driver for that card. Apparently, people had got it to work by starting it in window$ first and then warmbooting it into linux.
It seems that some register is set by the windows driver that are missed by the ivtv driver and the card keeps it's settings when the computer is just rebooted.

Also, I found some posts mentioning that loading a subset of the modules initially, removing them and then loading all drivers (this time including the tuner module) might do the trick.
I'll try that.. booting into windows just in order to set a register seems a bit over the top.

Not sure I like my tuner...

2005-02-03T10:06:00.000+01:00

For some time now, I have been trying to get the d.{2}n PVR-350 card to tune to the channels I specified, but all I get is something that resembles a snowy day in the northern part of Sweden. [That is, white dots on a pitch black surface for peaple who have not heard about what lore says about Swedish winter]. I thought that my channels were wrong and have basically tried everything to get it to find a working channel.

Now, I found something in the MythTV Troubleshooting section....

I have a PVR 350 with a Philips FM1216 ME MK3 (idx = 57, type = 38) tuner and no matter what I try, I can only capture snow...

This sounded familiar so I checked, and sure enough, my tuner is type 38. The manual continued:

For some odd reason you have to mention an extra module (tda9887) to the modules.conf file. For example:

options ivtv ivtv_std=2 tda9887=0
add below ivtv msp3400 saa7115 saa7127 tda9887

Wow! Now I can acctually see the channels in mplayer when I tune. The output is that of a mistuned TV (black and white and rolling over the screen), but still.. better than snow!!
Another post said suggested I should play with tda9887=0 / tda9887=1. Worth a try!

Please, keep my settings..

2005-02-02T10:10:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I finallly got the remote to work on the Myth box. Rather, I enabled MythTV to use it! I found that the group change I had set up in devfsd.conf was re-set in an external file included at the bottom of the main file. So, the group was changed to video and then back into root again.. no wonder MythTV could not use the remote.

Now, just a couple of things remains until I've got a working box:

Set up the channels in MythTV. Recording noise is not as much fun.
Get nvram-wakeup to work. The A7V400-MX is mentioned in the CVS sources, so I'm confident this will work. I will probably have to join yet another mailing list..
Figure out how the image import module works. So far, I have been unable to use this module.
Fix some BIOS settings. Right now, BIOS time is GMT+1, which makes everything gathered by XMLTV appear in the tableau a little later than we would need it to be. Also, I have to remove the 00:00:00 time wakeup I included for testing purposes. It works a little too well... :-)
Connect audio to my speakers. Also, I will have to get the mixer in MythTV to work correctly.

I think that is it. Appart from posting a couple of feature requests... :-)

MythTV up and everyting is on the screen

2005-01-31T23:44:00.000+01:00

Finally, MythTV starts up automatically in the framebuffer and with a size that allows the user to acctually see all the contents on the screen. The grey Hauppauge remote works somewhat, but I definitely will have to find a better setup. The thing that does not work is movement up and down in the options. Kind of important.

So far I have configured and tried the Weather module and Music. Both of them were extremelly easy to configure.. I could even find the town I live in in the Weather menu.
Im currently importing my first CD into the system. Could not be simpler.....

One should really read the instructions once in a while..

2005-01-31T11:18:00.000+01:00

I got at tip that the problems I'm having with the screen being larger than the physical TV screen is acctually something that you should be able to fix quite easilly in the MythTV settings.
Chaning the overscan in the display section in MythTV seems like a good solution for this situation.

Sometimes it might be a good idea to have a look at the documentation... :-)

This morgin, I tried to show my girlfriend the status of the MythTV project (since it worked perfectly the day before). I started the machine and the screen was a mess. There must be something wrong with the framebuffer loading. It seems a bit silly that MythTV is auto-loaded when I start KDM manually through ssh, but not when I get it to run as a part of the boot sequence. Maybe the console is trying to use the same framebuffer? I'll have to debug this when I get home.

BTW, i have taken some pictures of the progress of the box.. will be posted as soon as I get them on photobucket.

2005-01-30T21:49:00.000+01:00

In the middle of an emerge, I cannot help thinking that I should warn whoever finds this blog (and remind myself) that you really should plan your emerge sessions in advance.
I'm following the instructions in http://home.comcast.net/~alf_park/mythtv.html
and http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Setup_MythTV#Remote_config_hauppauge_gray
Pleas pay attention to the fact that the innocent line

emerge evilwm kdebase mythtv mythvideo mythdvd mythbrowser mythgallery mythmusic mythnews mythweather

does take a while (like most QT-related builds do..). Doing it during night is much less irritating. Still.. it means that the rest of the family can acctually use the TV.

2005-01-30T13:40:00.000+01:00

Now, the Hauppauge remote works in the console (using irw). The problem was that the lirc_i2c module was not loaded properly and the device created was /dev/lirc/0, not /dev/lircd... strange, but it works. [I wonder what /dev/lircd does...]

A note about the hadware of the project:

Motherboard is an A7V400-MX from ASUS. Great mATX board with integrated sound , LAN and VGA. Havent tried the VGA out in X, but the LAN worked out of the box with the via_rhine module and for sound I used the via82xx ALSA module. I never got the kernel ALSA to work though... enabled ALSA in the kernel and emerge:ed alsa-driver from protage with ALSA_CARDS="via82xx" in the make.conf.
The processor is a Sempron 2.4 GHz. Updating the BIOS to name it properly was trickier than I imagined..
For TV in, TV out and remote, I will be using the hardware on the PVR-350. Nice card, once you get it to work.. :-)
Network cables is not something that I like. The thought was that I would use a Netgear WG311T wireless card (revision 1). This is supported with the madwifi driver, but I have not been able to get WEP to work. If someone knows how to get this, I would very much like to know. I had to inset a line into the 'start' portion of the init script in order to set the ESSID..
/usr/sbin/iwconfig ath0 mode Managed nickname PVR channel 6 essid X

Now, it seems that, appart from WEP, the only thing remaining is configuring MythTV

Some light....

2005-01-30T01:29:00.000+01:00

Finally, I managed to get the ivtv-fb to work and get a gdm display on it. It seems that the only way to get the ivtv framebufer to output a correct picture in PAL mode is to use the patched version made by Chris Kennedy. Get it from here . Silly me for not finding this wabpage sooner (http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php?page=GentooHowTo)

Now, the challange is to get the remote to work. There are a lot of config files around for the remote that comes with the PVR-350 card, but so far I have not been able to get a signal.... everything loads ok though.

On my way...

2005-01-29T15:49:00.000+01:00

Last night I tried to install the new Gentoo box. Acctually, I started the whole process on wednesday,but sometimes things do not go you way.

Everythin in it is new and the thought was that the new processor, motherboard and RAM would go into my girlfriends computer. Turns out that Window$ does not like you changing IDE controller alot so my girlfriend was forced to choose between a total reinstall of the OS or keep the computer like it was... she chose the latter. (I don't think she trusted my computer skills enough). :-)

I tried to install from stage 2, but there was a strange error with db during bootstrap, so I proceeded with the stage 3 install. So far, I have had 2 major challanges:

1) The new motherboard (A7V400-MX) needed a BIOS upgrade in order to properly recognize the Sempron processor. The problem is that I do not have a floppy drive anymore. "Who needs them in this modern world?", right... well I can tell you .. the people trying to upgrade their BIOSes.. I managed to borrow an USB drive from work, found an old Windows 98 crash disk and inserted the new image on that. This used to be a simple thing... now I cannot even format a boot diskette in windows 2000.. What can I say.. I've been taken by the penguins...

2) Sound. The MB had an internal 6.1 sound card on it that people had been able to use in Linux. The via82xx ALSA driver loaded ok, the card was unmuted and all mixers were at 100% -- but no sound. After a couple of hours I now play music on a headless desktop computer. [Note to self: I the manual says that the externa audio connector should be connected, do that or use the supplied (and default) jumpers. It helps.]

The beginning...

2005-01-28T10:18:00.000+01:00

In this blog, I will try to document my experiences with installing and using Gentoo linux with MythTV. I hope that it will be able to help other users of these softwares out there (in case I succeed..)