Advanced Theory

So I haven't made a lot of updates regarding the MythTV project as of late, mostly because it's been on hold due to a much more ambitious project.

Anyway, I've updated Ubuntu to 9.04 and am still running Myth 0.21, but I'm on some new hardware. Currently:

CPU: Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo E5400 Wolfdale 2.7GHz
Motheboard: GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H w/ NVIDIA GeForce 9400
Power: CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX 520W
Memory: CORSAIR XMS2 DOMINATOR 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
HD: Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB
HD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
DVB: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1850 MCE Kit 1128
DVB: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 (1229)
Case: SilverStone Grandia GD02B

The new dual tuner card is working and I no longer have any recording conflicts (yay!). I'm looking forward to upgrading Myth to 0.22 and see if they've sped up the channel changer and card switching code.

I took the plunge and added a Hauppauge 2250 tuner to my MythTV machine. This in addition to the Hauppauge 1850 I'll be able to record the Monday night line-up of House, How I Met Your Mother and Heroes. So far I've installed the hardware support following the directions from linuxtv.org. It looks to be working, but I'll know for sure later when I add the tuner card to the MythTV backend.

paul@Mythic:~$ dmesg | grep Hauppauge
[ 11.467478] CORE saa7164[0]: subsystem: 0070:8891, board: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR2250 [card=7,autodetected]
[ 12.025681] CORE cx23885[0]: subsystem: 0070:7801, board: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1800 [card=2,autodetected]

So I got a new Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboard for my birthday (which was awesome). Unfortunately I'm starting to push the limit of what Feisty Fawn supports. My nVidia driver has been acting buggy, I never quite got LIRC working how I'd like and now I understand the DiNovo keyboard is supported by Intrepid Ibex out of the box.

Nothing is ever as easy as advertised. Right off the bat, my nVidia drivers wouldn't load and complained that my xorg.conf was invalid. Well, it wasn't. It was just... special. But I was able to find a solution that involved deleting my xorg.conf, running dpkg-reconfigure and manually getting the files I needed. Now it's up and working again on my test LCD at least. I can't image my custom modelines will give it much trouble when I switch back to my Panasonic TV.

Then I had to fiddle with my keyboard for a little bit. Although the dongle claims it's Bluetooth 2.0, it doesn't show up as a Bluetooth device. After scratching my head on this one for a while I found out that the dongle works fine, but the USB port I was plugging into wasn't! Time to tape over that sucker so that doesn't happen again. The keyboard is now working well enough, even though the dongle never showed up as a Bluetooth receiver.

Finally, I had to muck around with the network. Since it's getting late I took the KISS approach and just disabled my second NIC in the BIOS. Rebooted and... Working!

Now I'll have to figure out why my MythTv Frontend isn't filling the screen and I'll be golden.

UPDATE: Found out I just had set the dimensions incorrectly for the resolution I was using. Now I'm back to adding new features, I think iPod transcoding is next on the to-do list.

For more than a month I was having issues getting my channel schedule to match up with the channels. It was a pain in the ass to get the system to recognize one with the other. So I did what I always do, I figured out how to do it manually and now it works great.

The trick was getting the XMLid from my guide host Schedules Direct and matching it up with the channels my Hauppauge 1800 scanned.

Once I had the XMLid I went into myth-setup, the backend interface, and in the channel listing I associated the channel with the XMLid. I'm sure there's some automated way to do this with XML TV, which I played around with and got some listing information; however, the documentation I found for using the project with MythTV was sparse. Thankfully I'm just dealing w/ free OTA channels, I would've had to take a different approach with a full cable line-up.

Next project: Setting up a user job to transcode some shows into iPod format w/ commercials stripped out.

Over the weekend I set up my MythTV system to boot when it received a wake-on-lan (WOL) packet. I was able to accomplish this by mostly following the instructions I found on the Ubuntu forums. But basically I created a script in /etc/init.d named wol that used ethtool to set my WOL preferences in my network hardware and installed it using update-rc.d.

So what does WOL functionality buy me? Well, I've updated my linksys router to use DD-WRT and I can now start-up my server and grab information from anywhere!

I recently upgraded my main Windows box and decided to convert the old system into a MythTV server. So far I've been successful getting MythTV running on Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn, but it is still more of a PC than a consumer appliance. I'm hoping by the end of the project my wife and I will be able to watch and download videos and not feel like we're using a computer. After getting everything set up I will put it to the ultimate test and see if MythTV can replace our old SD DirecTv Tivo with a HD over-the-air recording solution.

Before I get into the details of what I've done, here are the hardware specs:
2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 3700+
2GB DDR 400 (PC 3200)
(2) 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 (SATA 3.0Gb/s)
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
XFX GeForce 7800GT
550W Antec TRUEPOWERII
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1800

To start the project, I decided to install Ubuntu instead of Debian since this server will be more focused on UI than my previous servers have been (which have been headless development servers). Once the OS was installed I used Aptitude to install most of the important MythTV packages, LIRC, rsync, Samba, Apache, Subversion, and other tools I use for development.

After I got the basic MythTV front-end up and looking good it took a couple of weeks to get everything to work together. I struggled with LIRC and getting the ATSC capture care to actually capture video. At one point I was pretty freaked out that I might not be able to move forward. But after a lot of sweat and tears I have video capture, the remote control and video playback all working on a basic level. Now I'm waiting on Amazon to ship the antenna I ordered so I can install it in my attic and move on to live tv. In the meantime I will continue to improve the system and make posts on my progress.