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[Sneaky]

I'm resurrecting an older PC to put Fedora Core 6 and MythTV DVR software on it, and these are some notes and help for anybody trying the same.

I have an Asus motherboard with ATA100 controller, and AMD 1.2ghz chip.
I upgraded the RAM from 384 meg to  896 meg with  512meg SDRAM from Bellevue's computerstogo.com for $60. Best Buy had 128meg SDRAM strips for $69!
I thought I'd have to upgrade the harddrive, but its an empty 40 gig Western Digital, so I think I'm safe for now with that.
I purchased a Hauppauge PVR-350 card to decode the TV signals, and it has a TV Out on it so I didn't have to purchase a separate card for that. I got it for $130 shipped from mwave.com.

I downloaded all the FC 6 disks, and made sure the checksums were accurate using sha1sum.
I had problems burning the disks with the software I had, regarding an ISOLINUX Disk Error 80. After a lot of ruined CD's, thinking it was either my controller, or the BIOS, I found an answer on fedoraforum.org.
Note to anybody using ISORecorderV2RC1 to burn FC disks.... don't.
I ended up using CDBurnerXPPro3, which is free, and works well.

So then I installed FC6, which went a lot smoother than previous Linux distro's I'd worked with.

At that point, I went to what seems to be the Holy Grail of installing MythTV and FC, Jarod's HOWTO site:
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

And followed the instructions, upgrading FC6 to the latest build via yum (much better than installing RPM's or using up2date).

Then I added atrpms.net and freshmeat.net to the yum repository to get the MythTV packages and related drivers that I'd need. I had a frustrating problem trying to find the mythtv-suite in the atrpms.net packages, and since I hadn't used yum that much, I thought the problem was on my end. It turned out the problem was a temporary DNS mishap on atrpms.net. Once that was resolved, everything installed easily.

The next frustrating part came from configuring mythtv. For some reason, when I'd run mythtvsetup, I'd get a "main" configuration page, but no text listing the 6 options. I could hunt and peck using the mouse to see if I click the right option, but it got frustrating, because I couldn't even tell what the title of each page was in the configuration.

After a couple of restarts, I started to see a "Prescaling theme images" message, which must be the task of generating the text images for the theme, which I was missing. Once I started seeing that progress bar, then the images showed up. I eventually changed the theme to "Myth Center", and it seems the images scale faster, or maybe it's just me. Maybe the problem has to do with a font library or something, but I'm glad I'm past that now.

I registered an account on labs.zap2it.com to retrieve show listings, antennae (temporarily) and satellite DirecTV guides for my area. I then setup that information in the mythsetup, and waiting a goodly amount of time for it to update mythtv with the schedule, and ran the mythfilldatabase command to get the schedule and settings in myth.

At that point, I was able to start the mythbackend, which seemed to start without a hitch.

Once I got mythbackend running, and added to the server startup, I worked on the mythfrontend piece, which does the display and encoding of the TV signal. For testing, I have 2 pc's setup with a KVM switch, one Windows XP, and the other the Myth Box. I can research problems and do emails with the XP machine, and test things out with the MythTV box. If things go awry on the MythTV box, I can ssh into it and attempt to fix things.

So temporarily I have the mythtv box outputing to the monitor through the video card on the machine. I ran mythfrontend and don't recall having any real problems with the display. I was able to watch TV over the air via the antennae (I'm going to tackle the satellite receiver last), and the remote that came with the card seemed to work ok, and the TV schedule was available. I was also able to record some snowy NFC football and play it back.

Then I setup the mythtv user to automatically log in on startup, and launch the mythfrontend, and then gave the mythfrontend procee root priiority so the performance is a little better.

My current task as of right now, is to get the TV out working on the card. I have a small 12 inch TV that I have hooked up to the PVR 350's TV Out, and I'm trying to get that working. I can get audio from the card, but no picture.

I've followed all the instructions, but I think my kernel is a little newer than the documentation requires. There's a saa7127 module involved, and I don't have that driver module in my kernel, so I'm investigating that.

MythTV runs as an X application, so I "think" I have the xorg.conf file set up correctly to output to the TV, rather than use the PC's video card, but that's something else I have to test once I get the saa7127 module resolved. Right now, I have an xorg.conf file for the TV, and an xorg.conf for the PC, and I switch them when I want to test the TV-Out function.







 

[Sneaky]

okay.....

Update on the saa7127, for somereason my kernel (2.6.19.1.2895.fc6) in FC6 doesn't have it so I reinstalled the package that contains it via yum from atrpms.net. See the ivtv-users mailing list for specifics, I can't remember the name, but search for saa7127 if you're looking for it, or I'll update it later.

After saa7127 was running, TV-out worked great. The only things I hadn't had working was the satellite input, and the remote. I messed with the remote a little bit, and done learnt how the lirc module works with various remote controls. I finally got the hauppauge pvr 350 remote working the best I could with myth (customizing a lot of buttons), but didn't have much luck with my DirecTV remote, which "supposedly" works with the pvr-350 IR receiver. The hauppauage remote has a number of different models, and its first to use the "ivr" function to make sure the IR receiver is receiving commands before trying to rewrite you lircrc file to your liking.

At this point, I tried out the myth box on my little POS 13 inch Panasonic TV, and everything seemed to work pretty well, except the fact that I needed to adjust the horizontal shift about 50 pixes, for no apparent reason. I'm not worrying about that because this isn't the TV I'm using it on anyway.

Then I set up the satellite via the S-Video connection and tried things out. Surprisingly, the quality was good and had no problems except that there wasn't any sound. I did all of this under the influence, and didn't realize until the next day that because I was using the S-Video input, I still needed to route some sound to the card, so that's what the problem was. Unfortunately, sound required a 1/8 inch jack, and I didn't have a red/white RCA cable to 1/8 inch jack adapter readily, so Brother Fox and I ran to Radio Shack to pick that up. Once installed, sound worked flawlessly.

Total expenditures to date, approximately 256 (tuner card, memory upgrade, new cd-rom, Y Connector 1/8 inch jack, power strip)

At this point, I had the following to resolve....
1) Change the wired connection to the router to a wireless connection
2) Get that damn DirecTV remote to work

I had used a wired connection to my router, and KVM switch to switch between the usable PC and the linux myth box. Now, I planned to put the wireless G card (linksys POS) that I had into the mythbox so that the schedule could be downloaded unattended, and I didn't have to run cable. If I didn't have to download an updated schedule now and then, or have to SSH into the box to fix something, or make adjustments, I wouldn't need an wireless connection I don't think. This is another reason why I refuse to plug a phone into any of my direcTV receivers. I have wireless, why can't the receivers use that. I don't have a phone jack by the receivers, and I'm not installing one.

Anywho... I installed the wireless Linksys card, and installed the "ndiswrapper" module to get the box to recognize the drivers and get everything working with it. As soon as I found the right .INF file, ndiswrapper seemed to get everything working with the wireless card, recognizing it was wlan0, but I can't connect to the internet, or my local network, even though I think I have everything configured with the card to match my network connections. This is what I'm trying to fix now.

[Sneaky]

Anywho... I installed the wireless Linksys card, and installed the "ndiswrapper" module to get the box to recognize the drivers and get everything working with it. As soon as I found the right .INF file, ndiswrapper seemed to get everything working with the wireless card, recognizing it was wlan0, but I can't connect to the internet, or my local network, even though I think I have everything configured with the card to match my network connections. This is what I'm trying to fix now.

Ahhh.. the problem with NIC connecting to the network and internet was that I use WEP (I used to use WPA, but I have an extender too, and it doesn't support WPA, but that's another tale), and the WEP key I entered for the card (in HEX) didn't start with a 0x. Once I added that, I was cookin' with gas.

SIDENOTE:
Now I can rip out the wired NIC from the mythbox, and put it in my music server. My music server will only connect to the xbox via a wireless connection for some reason. I'm going to try this different NIC in the music server to see if the XBOX will recognize this one, otherwise, I have to talk to xbox support again. I want to use the wired NIC in the music server just because I think I'll get better performance going from music->wired->router->wireless->xbox.

[Sneaky]

OK, the latest updates....

The wireless connection still works ok, but I added a monitor to the mythtv box because X windows was slow and not that legible on the 12 inch POS TV screen. I have 2 xorg.conf files that I use when I want to use the monitor instead of the TV. There might be a better way to switch between the two, but it works ok temporarily.

I never got the directv remote working with the hauppauage pvr 350 card, but I did find out that other remotes other than the hauppauge do work with the card. I'll have to do more digging into that later.

I got a serial connection from dtvcontrol.com to connect the directv box to the serial port on the mythbox. It was about $21 with shipping. Without it, I didn't have a way to change the channels on the directv receiver.

So I set up the serial connection, and noticed that it wasn't working. I thought maybe the serial port wasn't enabled (it was), or that I was using the wrong "changechannel" script from mythtv, but it is basically the same as the "directv.pl" script that I've seen floating around elsewhere. I assume the mythtv "changechannel" script is an updated directv.pl script, the commands seemed to be the same.

Trying to get COM 1 working with the changechannel script resulted in a number of timeout errors from the script, which to me sounded like a problem with the cable, or the com port. I tried COM 2 (changing the script to look at ttyS1 instead of ttyS0) and then everything worked smooth, changing channels, turning the receiver off, blah blah blah.I don't know what the problem is with my COM 1, but whatever.

The next thing I had to play with was update the "mythsetup" input connections and give it the right changechannel parameters to have it work deligently. It took me about an hour of shutting down the backend, starting the setup, changing the input connections, restarting the backend and trying out the channel changing, but I finally came up with this command for the input connection on my S-Video In...

/usr/local/bin changechannel box_type D10-100 channel_change_type key setup_channel

At the moment, I'm using a D10-300 directv box, which will work with the D10-100 command set, as long as you update the software on the D10-300 to turn on the low speed data port on the back. To do that, I hit the reset button on the box, waited for the "hello..." screen to appear, then hit 02468 on the remote, then a message popped up saying it was downloading new software for the receiver. I might or might not have to do that with my other receivers if I end up using them because one is a "true" D10-100, and the other is the HD300 receiver, but "we'll worry about that later".

I'm trying to learn about how myth sets up its recording. I've scheduled a couple of shows, and I'll see how it does. A lot of stuff in the recording options doesn't make sense to me, but I think its just because I'm not used to seeing a DVR type of program schedule. 

I tried recording the superbowl to catch the commercials but I think the time zone was off (or the xmltv option was set to not fix the time zone) because the recording started about 6 hours prior to when I wanted it to. The other problem with recording the superbowl is that I have the transcoding set to automatically remove the commercials from the MPEG file, so I wouldn't have been able to see the commercials anyway, if I had the time set correctly.

[Sneaky]

Attached are screen prints of the mythweb addon, which let's you do some mythtv configurations and recordings from a browser...

[Sneaky]

The latest update...

I replaced the hauppage remote with a Radio Shack 2146, it has a light on it, which is really the only thing I was looking for (and the fact that it's a RC6 type remote that works with the Hauppage IR receiver).

Luckily the remote had codes for the Hauppage, so I didn't have to learn too many buttons from it. The WAF (wife approved factor) shot up 25% on that change. I think the remote cost around $30, so that's a little bit more cash invested.

Now I'm working on the transcoding issue. The 25 gig I had available for show is already filling up with not much time to watch the shows, so I'm trying to convert the shows to MPEG-4 to save some space.

In the past, transcoding left a crappy image and no sound, so I temporarily disabled it. Now I'm tweaking things with it a little bit to see if I could at least save 10-20% more space from the recordings.

I'm also tweaking a few small things such as the display size. I have X and Myth almost correctly adjusted to fit my TV screen, but the guide that overlays the broadcast is still set to the default, and with it offset to the left, it's hard to read. I'm trying to find out if the guide offsets and overscan settings are different.

I also changed something on the controller (latency?) from 64 to 128 bits. I don't remember what it was, I'll take a look at my notes. I don't think it helped out much, and may have let to a crash with the front end earlier in the week.

One problem that I can't find in the mythtv users list is the fact that if all the recording are removed from the recording list, the exit or back button (or on the keyboard) won't work on the remote. I have to kill the front end session and start over. I thought maybe this was the KDE issue of the mouse focus going to the wrong place, but I resolved that, and it still happens.

Something else on the back burner is to try to run this via windowmaker rather than KDE to save some resources.

[Sneaky]

Another expense I forgot about. While looking at the Radio Shack remotes, I decided that I'd look to see if they had a female to male extension for the Hauppage IR receiver that plugs in the back of the card. The receiver the card comes with is nice, but not very long, so I wanted to extend it to the front of the TV.

The problem I had was that RS didn't have a female to male extension for the jack, which is just smaller than 1/8 inch, but they did have 1/8 inch jack female to male extension, so what I ended up doing (and was probably overkill), was to buy a converter from the hauppage jack to a 1/8 jack, then add the 1/8 inch jack extension cable, then get another converter to convert the 1/8 inch jack back to the hauppage jack size to plug the original cable into. It works fine though. I think overall, the 2 adapters and the extension cable were about $7.50.

[IzThisAllThereIz]

I could search, but would you be willing to tell me what MythTV DVR is?  I've been looking for something to record TV on my computer that I can use to weed out commercials.  Will this do?  If not, do you know something that I can use?

Sorry for coming across as computer illiterate, I'm just very tired this evening.

[Sneaky]

Yes, Mythtv is a Linux based PVR/DVR...
mythtv.org

[IzThisAllThereIz]

Thanks Dave.  I guess it wouldn't work on my Windows then.  Unfortunately, it's not as easy to find things on the web as it was 9 years ago.  Scraper sites tend to be the bain of my searching attempts. 

[Sneaky]

OK, so for the last 2 months, I was trying to upgrade this damn thing, and I think I finally got it working.

I backed up all the customized scripts and settings, and added a new hard drive (another 30 gig I had laying around) and DVD to the box so I can watch and record DVD's with it.

The first problem I had was that I thought I created a logical volume for the storage of the myth recordings, but I didn't, I had just created a partition for it. So that meant a little more work because if I had created a logical volume in Linux for it, I could have just slapped a hard drive in the thing, and tell the logical volume to use that free space also for the myth recordings.

I wasn't very happy with the video output using Fedora 6 either, I think, the nvidia drivers for my card were bad, or the card was just a POS. So I also spent about $50 on a new generic nvidia based video card.

Since I was doing all that upgrading, I decided to upgrade to Fedora 7 too. This took a while because the installation would crap out about the cdrom not being mounted, and I found out that sometimes installing Fedora from a DVD will result in the cdrom drive spinning too fast or something for the installation to keep up. That's what I googled anyway. I changed some kernel parms (noapci, nodma, etc.) on the installation start up, and things got humming along. I created a installation DVD rather than ISO CD-ROMs just to see if I'd have better luck than the first time I did it. Luckily I got the DVD ISO through a bittorrent client, and I think that does a better job of verifying the file as it's downloaded.

This time I correctly set up a volume group of drives, and included almost all the space (sans "boot" and "swap") dedicated to video storage. At this point another problem occured. During all the pre-installation steps I was trying to do to ensure a quick installation, I upgraded the bios on the myth machine. After I did that, the Fedora 7 installation routine didn't correctly recognize the hard drives. I think it tried to label them as RAID or something, I don't know what happened, but right after the complete installation, I started seeing weird kernel panics, and hexadecimal SATA based errors that I couldn't figure out. I completely reinstalled fedora 7 again, and that seemed to resolve it.

After I got Fedora 7 installed though, the PVR-350 card to get video into the box wouldn't work. on FC 6, I used the PVR-350's TV-OUT to push the image to the TV, but I guess some of the ivtv drivers that the PVR-350 uses are built into the Fedora 7 kernel now (2.6.22?) and no longer work as separately loaded modules. Actually, it was just the TV-OUT that wasn't working, which is the video4linux part of it. I struggled with this for 2 weeks to try to get working. Finally, I realized that my new nvidia video card has an S-VIDEO out on it, so I decided to ditch the TV-OUT on the PVR-350 and use the nvidia.

I wish I had thought of this sooner because it was a breeze to get video out on the nvidia card. Much better looking and less hassle than trying to get the PVR-350 TV-OUT working. If you are trying to get the TV-OUT working on a PVR-350 on the 2.6.22 kernel, spend $50 and get a nvidia gforce 6 series card instead. Just be sure to upgrade the nvidia drivers first (intructions are located on "jarod's how to" site).

At one point trying to get the PVR-350 TV-OUT working, I re-installed FC6 (Zod) to the last kernel included with it, figuring that TV-OUT worked on FC6 before, so why not now? The problem I had here was that after the FC6 install, I found out that I had been bitten by the FC6 bug that confuses a i686 machine with a i586 machine, which required me to run some scripts to fix. As part of this fixing process, the yum operation installs the latest kernel (2.6.22 again), so I realized that I was still stuck with the 2.6.22 kernel whether I was running FC6 or Fedora 7. I decided to go back to Fedora 7 because X windows seemed to run a little better with it.

The other major thing that changed between these two installations was that the schedule guide that is used to show you what is playing on your channels changed from Zap2it labs to SchedulesDirect.com. SchedulesDirect.com now charges $5 a month (hopefully less in the future) to get their schedules. It works great for me, but part of the reason I built the mythbox was so I didn't have to pay an entity to get scheduling guides. I understand why they did it, and it does really work pretty well.

So I reinstalled Fedora 7 again, the mythtv suite from atrpms, and tried to get things working with the nvidia S-VIDEO out instead, and within a day I had it running on a TV. The only things I had to set up yet was to get the DVD player working in myth (a simple plugin), figure out how to create a DVD (using mytharchive, had a few hiccups, but I think it's working), get the directv serial box connector set up again (all the files were on a backup disk, so that took only 10 minutes). The last thing to do was get the remote control working with the lircd daemon in Fedora 7. For whatever reason this took a week to resolve. The lirc daemon would start but whenever I went to test the remote using the "irw" command, lirc would then crash. For a while during this time, one of the repositories for Fedora 7 software at atrpms.net was down, so I couldn't install the latest lirc software. After a week of pulling my hair out, I did an update on the lirc and lirc-kernel packages, did a reboot for giggles, and magically the remote started working.

So before I had a 25 gig mythbox with no DVD drive and so-so video through the PVR-350 TV-OUT. Now, I've got 60 gigs of storage, the ability to play and record DVD's, and better picture quality. Probably not worth the 2 months of trouble, but its better than a kick in the head I guess.

[Sneaky]

Well, something's been going awry with the hard drives on this box. One time, one of them froze up with some kind of ATA0.1 error followed by some hex numbers, I didn't get the chance to write it down to look it up. I rebooted a few times, happened again and again, then punished the thing by neglecting it a day, booted it up, and it works fine, at the moment.

I changed a DMA setting that I had changed earlier in the rc.local file. I'm taking a stab in the dark that that caused a problem, because it referred to the hda/hdb drives, and mine are labeled as sda/sdb, I think because of the ATA100 bus controller maybe? Who knows.

[Sneaky]

Well, I finally was able to trap the errors on one of the drives, so I know what drive it is (the "new" used one). Both drives are Western Digitals, so I downloaded the floppy based diagnostic tool, and ran it on both drives to see what the error(s) is/were, and if it could be fixed.

In the meantime, I got a new hard drive to replace the bad one, assuming it can't be fixed. You can't hardly buy an IDE hard drive less than 160 gig anymore, so I got a 160 gig from my mortal enemy, DIT computers. Normally, I get my stuff at Computers To Go in Bellevue, but that's a long long drive to save $7.00. I still feel dirty. And by the way, Computers To Go also has some 40 gig IDE's laying around to for about 50 bones.

The other thing I needed to "fix" was the wireless card on the box. Its a linksys, but I busted the antenna off while moving and testing the unit on different PC's, so I got a new wireless G PCI card to replace it. Best Buy (I know, shoulda went to C2G!) had a fire sale on their cheapo Dynex wireless G adapters for $25, so I picked one up. After a little investigation, I found out that my version of the Dynex (the "enhanced" G) isn't very compatible with Linux, while the "normal G" version is. That might explain why the "enhanced" card was cheaper than the "normal" card at Best Buy.

So now I have another task, pull a linksys wireless G adapter from another machine and use it in the Myth box, and then use the Dynex in a Windows XP machine. I just know that will somehow turn into a comedy of errors for some reason.

[Sneaky]

By the way, these were the errors showing up occasionally in Linux, which indicated to me a hard drive failing.

ata 1.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
...
...
...
Descriptor sense Data with sense descriptors (in hex)
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 28466263
sd 0:0:1:0 [sdb] 58633346 512-byte hardware sectors
sd 0:0:1:0 [sdb] Write protect is off Write cache disabled read cache enabled, doesn't support DP0 or FUA

[Sneaky]

OK, from this blog post:
http://sneakydave.com/wp/2009/07/15/biting-the-bullet-with-mythtv-0-20-1/

I've been thinking about upgrading mythtv.

The first thing I found out was that the atrpms.net site don't have any Fedora 8 libraries anymore, the oldest they have is Fedora 10, so it looks like I need to upgrade Fedora first. Which is probably going to be the biggest pain, I'm making backups right now.

[Sneaky]

Well, it looks like Fedora 11 is the current version. I'll have to upgrade to that, but there isn't a "clear" upgrade solution from Fedora 8 to Fedora 11, so I think I'll backup the /storage file system, the mysql database (everything), the /home directory the /usr/lib/mythtv directory (just in case), and burn a DVD to install Fedora 11.

I attempted this early this morning, and a thunderstorm rolled through, so I decided against trying to do some backups over a wireless connection in a thunderstorm.