Wow - been a while!

Ok, so it's been a while since I last posted here. Things have been moving on since my last post.

Not long after I had installed the system, they went and advertised the 0.22 release of MythTV! Naturally, being the kind of person I am, I wanted to dive right in and test it ... but then again, what about my existing recordings!?

The answer? To build a bigger and better box of course! So, diving into the small repository of machines I had, I found an AMD64 box, loaded it with a gig of memory, and ordered myself a 500Gb drive to throw in it. I also ordered another Hauppauge DVB-S card, and then a HVR-1300. Everything seemed to start off smoothly. I installed the base system with Mythbuntu 9.10, and once that was up and running I immediately killed it by copying the database and files off the old box to the new one. Much to my surprise, a reboot later and it was asking me to update the database structure to the new 0.22 version, and off it went.

It's not without it's issues of course. I still have references to the old system dotted around in places, but on the whole it's fine. HD broadcasts are not watchable live, due to the system just not having enough oomph to decode on the fly, but that is something for the future (like when I finally get myself a HD television). Storage groups are a bit of a melon twister to start with, but that is soon sorted.

The main problem now is ... sound. I have one of those nice(?) on-board sound cards that will do 5.1 surround sound. I have all the speakers connected, and using alsa-mixer and speaker-test, I know that the setup is correct and working just fine. The problem is that no matter what I try, MythTV refuses to use it correctly. If I try and use the ALSA settings in the setup, then I only get the rear channels played from movies and the like. If I use the /dev/mixer etc in the settings then it works fine for movies, but won't upmix for normal TV and I have no volume control. I am sure there is something I am missing somewhere, but I just can't find it at the moment!

Oh - just a word on housekeeping. For those of you that use the "myth.find_orphans.pl" script to check for orphaned database entries/files, and you get the "0 valid recordings" issue ... the key is the "host" option to the script. This was a gotcha for a while for me, as I was trying to run it with "localhost" as the option ... this will only work if you haven't changed the setting so that other frontends can run off the box. If you have, then you need to use the host name that you set for it to correctly find the options ....

It's all a matter of size

Well, a week into the big build, and things are settling down nicely. Recordings are working as they should be (once I got over the over-zealous tendencies to set everything to "record on any channel, at any time", which due to the setup seems to mean "record this as many times as possible, regardless of if it's one you've already got - and by all means record the same program twice at the same time on different regional variations of the same channel"). MythWeb is a brilliant invention, and makes configuring recordings and the like a dream. Being able to watch NasaTV on the big screen is just great. Even commercial flagging works a charm (even though everything I read said it was hit and miss in the UK).

The problem now is fairly simple ... a 40 Gb hard drive just doesn't cut it. With the average recording rate being around the 1.5 to 2Gb per hour, you don't get many recordings before things start grinding a bit. Having a read around it would seem that the average disk size for the mainstream users is about 500Gb or more, depending on how much you want to be able to keep at any one time (or how many DVD's you rip to disk).

Also, I am itching to try another input card on there, as one single DVB-S input does give a shed load of channels, but it is also missing quite a few that you get on DVB-T, as well as often nagging about conflicts when I try and watch live TV. I think it's going to be a USB one, but I have a lot more reading to do on them yet.

Part way there ...

Finally got my hands on a USB remote control today, and boy does it make MythTV more useable. After playing with VNC - which makes things stutter - and Synergy - which makes things blink with the screensaver - it's nice not to have to have a computer to control a computer, however I did have to remap all the controls as the default setup is a little .. quirky.

Satellite TV is running well, although with some strange results I wasn't expecting. Fiver and Five US are on Sky freeview, but not on Freesat it seems ... even though it uses the same satellite etc. As always, results vary dependant on weather here. Spent most of the weekend not being able to receive much due to the storms, but today is much better.

Transcoding is working well saving disk space, and the advert detection so far has been spot on. Just need to work out how to automagically delete them when it transcodes. MythWeb is a little flakey here and there, but the streaming media is a huge plus.

Next step ... a little fine tuning, followed by looking to see if I can set up a second Myth frontend to see how well that works ... that and getting the aerial sorted out so I can put a dual-channel DVB-T card in to increase the flexibility.

One step forward, two steps back ...

Imagine my excitement when my Satellite DVB-S card turned up today. 5 minutes later and the card is installed. Mythbuntu boots and it all gets found. Channel scan turns up hundreds of channels (most marked as "scrambled"). Read a few posts on the MythWiki and I have the channels in the list ... and thereby starts the problems

Firstly ... so many channels, many without proper idents to let you know what's what. Organising them into any sort of ordered list is just a nightmare I don't want to consider right now! So, on to watching the TV and things get a little funky - mostly because I didn't have a working remote, and trying to control live TV via VNC is ... painful ... to say the least! So, I finally get the "rocketRed" flash network controller working and things get a bit easier ... until you want to read the channels in the EPG ... fonts are just so far out of whack that they only display a small fraction of the channel names.

Moving on, I tested the recording features. To start with, all good. A few programs set up to record automagically ... and they do. Even the advert detection seems to work well, however now I have a hard drive full of mpg files, even though I only have four recordings ... and they are taking up about 12Gb! A little digging and googling later I work out how to transcode the recordings which saves a little space - just need to work out what's what in the files to see if I can get rid of any.

Next step - waiting for the remote control I ordered off eBay to arrive, and then look at seeing if I can install the TV aerial somewhere useful so I can look at putting a dual tuner DVB-T to give me some more scope, as well as either sourcing a much larger hard drive for the system, or making a new backend system with much more capacity in.

In the beginning ...

Ok, so many moons ago, I came across this fledgling project called MythTV, which as you will probably know is an open source attempt at a PVR. Having always been interested in emerging projects, especially around multimedia, I decided to give it a go.

Back then, I had an old P3, a Hauppauge Nova-t card (not even digital .. just analogue), and I threw it all together. It worked, after a fashion, but being that TV signal in my area is notoriously poor, the results were ... well, limited really.

So I put the idea away, and in the meantime ended up with a Sky+ box and all the trimmings. It worked well for what I wanted at the time, though there were always some things that I wanted to do that would have ended up buying more hardware etc ... not always the best way to go.

Then, last week, I checked the MythTV RSS feed, and my interest was rekindled. Looking around at the options, I decided to download Mythbuntu, being a Ubuntu kind of a guy, throw together some hardware and see what the results were.

First, I found an old compaq P4 small form factor desktop. It's reasonable quiet, and about the right size to fit in the TV rack without looking out of place. I then raided my old hardware and found a GeForce MX4000 AGP card that happily fitted in the low form factor socket on the Desktop. Being a mad kind of guy, I decided to skip the whole "install it on the desk, then put it in place" philosopy, and instead linked it straight to the TV to see what I would get.

And lo, there was picture!

So, in goes the Mythbuntu disk, select install, then everything goes black ... I wait ... still black ... So, a quick restart and selecting "Use safe graphical installer" option on the disk, I try again

And lo, there was more pictures!

The install went smoothly. Even down to picking up the card and enabling the nVidia driver for it, with the TV out. Within 30 minutes I had a working MythTV system, albeit very stand alone as I didn't have any network there. Another rummage around my stuff found an old Belkin 54g wireless USB dongle. In it goes, and surprisingly the network manager notices it, and gives me the option to install ... once I had found how to get to the application menu (ok, so I cheated a little and hit "alt-F2" to bring up the run dialog, which also then shows the system bar!).

Ok, so things are going well. So far I have a box that runs MythTV, connects to the wireless network, and that's about it. Next stage - looking for second hand cards on E-bay. A quick search and I find a Hauppauge Nova-S satellite card for the right price. That should be here soon, then I can give the whole freesat thing a go (remember - no aerial signal here).

So far, so good. Having a bit of a play and I find some issues that I have yet to deal with.

1. So far, the DVD player isn't working ... ok, so that's not entirely true. The DVD player plays the first track on the DVD (no menus) and then quits out. More research required on that methinks.
2. I made the mistake of password protecting the wireless setup ... which meant I had to allow it to connect each time the box booted up. Another play with the settings and I managed to sort that issue.
3. Annoyingly the music player doesn't seem to like linking to a secondary folder, unless of course you want to copy all the music over, but as I only have a 40Gb hard drive in there, I want to keep as much of that as possible for recording TV etc.

So more work required yet - but that's the joy of these projects. Also, depending on the test of the Satellite card, more hardware to be sourced and installed (a remote control for example), but so far it's been pretty smooth.