A few days with MythTV

As I mentioned briefly before, I’ve been setting up a MythTV system at home. MythTV is a Linux-based open-source PVR system. Used properly, you’ll end up with something TiVo-like. Used improperly, you’ll end up with a massive headache and a sore throat from screaming at your computer.

I should start with a bit of background. I have two TiVos, and I love them, mostly. I loved them a lot more before the hardware on one box started flaking out, and before they started sucking up to the TV networks. What I really want is a way to record the TV shows that I watch and then share them between our two TVs, so I can watch the same show on either TV, and then delete it when I’ve finished watching it. With newer TiVos, you can copy shows between TiVos, but it’s just a copy–if I record it upstairs, then I can copy it downstairs and watch it, but I’ll need to delete it in both places once I’m done with it. I’d also like to be able to listen to music and watch DVDs on the same hardware; the ability to rip DVDs would be nice. I’d like the ability to expand my storage is critical–I have roughly 1 TB of disk space in my house, and I’d like to be able to use as much of that as possible for storing video. Finally, and really most importantly, I’d like to have the ability to fix things when they break–I haven’t had any luck with that with TiVo–one system crashes daily, and there’s nothing that I can do to fix it, short of spending hours sitting on hold with their tech-support system.

What I really want is the TV equivalent of iTunes–I want to be able to take the big mound of DVDs that I have sitting around, RIP them, and move them to the basement, next to the big mound of CDs that I used to listen to. I want to be able to pick and choose from upcoming TV events and add them to the library, just like DVDs. I want to be able to watch the movies on any TV in my house without remembering where it’s stored or worrying about the kids scratching the fragile little things. I’d really like it to Just Work, just like iTunes and the iPod, or like TiVo usually does. And I’d like it to work for *me*, not for network companies, record producers, or movie studios.

The closest that I can come to this today is MythTV. It supports recording TV, playing and ripping DVDs, playing MP3s, and displaying digital images. It networks nicely. It’s open-source and expandable.

It’s also a complete bitch to install. Once it’s installed, using it isn’t exactly a walk in the park, either.

I’m certainly not afraid of Linux in any of its incarnations, but I’d had a number of people tell me what a pain MythTV is to install, so I decided to try KnoppMyth, a Linux distribution customized for MythTV. It’s based on Debian, my favorite Linux distribution, and it comes with MythTV pre-installed and configured. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to use KnoppMyth to take MythTV for a quick spin. I even had a spare small-form-factor system with a Celeron 2.4, a Bt878-based TV capture card, and a DVD drive sitting around.

Here’s a short list of what went wrong:

  1. The KnoppMyth installer locked up in the middle of the install when I told it to do an automatic install.
  2. When I tried again with a manual install, it didn’t default to installing onto any particular hard drive partition. I had to monkey with it briefly to tell it to install onto the boot partition that I’d just created. If I skipped through with just the defaults, I got an error later on when it tried to format a drive named ‘’.
  3. Once it had finished installing, even though it had formatted two partitions for /myth and /cache, it failed to mount them. This resulted in errors that I had to fix by manually editing /etc/fstab.
  4. The MythTV setup procedure consists of an xterm that asks a handful of questions. Without a mouse, it’s non-obvious how to select the xterm so you can type into it (Alt-Tab, space, if I recall correctly), and then it’s not obvious what to do–I had to re-run the installer repeatedly to get my channel listings correct, for example, because nothing said that I needed to go to http://labs.zap2it.com/, register, and get a username and password.
  5. Once MythTV was running, I was still unable to access the DVD drive at all–putting in a disk and hitting ‘Play DVD’ would cause the menu to flicker slightly, but it didn’t play the DVD or return an error. A bit of digging showed that the /dev/scd* devices weren’t owned by the cdrom group, so MythTV couldn’t access them. Once that was fixed, DVDs played correctly (plus or minus CSS problems, but we’ll ignore that little issue–it’s political, not technical).
  6. DVD ripping complained about the transcoding daemon not running, and never seemed to actually do anything.
  7. Dropping video files into /myth/video didn’t seem to make videos visible to MythTV.
  8. Live TV video worked, but recording TV produced files that were way too dim to view. Live TV audio didn’t work, even though it should have been available directly from the Bt878 decoder chip, but loading the btaudio driver doesn’t seem to produce any effect that I can see.

Most of these are just stupid integration issues; there’s no reason for them to exist in any even slightly polished product. KnoppMyth is at version 4r5; you’d think the CD ownership settings would have been fixed by now, right?

At this point, it had taken me about a half day to get MythTV to work, and all I could do was watch broadcast TV via rabbit ears and play DVDs. I could have accomplished the same thing by plugging the rabbit ears into a TV and buying an $18 DVD player (that was the cheapest “black friday” ad that I saw this year).

I probably would have dropped the project if an InFocus X1a projector hadn’t fallen into my hands. The InFocus is a 800x600 DLP projector that works with composite, svideo, HDTV, or VGA sources, but it’s happiest with VGA. So I had a project–mate the MythTV box to the projector. A few quick tests with MythTV’s DVD player shows that it looks way better then the same DVD via NTSC from my old RCA DVD player. Finding Nemo was gorgeous.

So, here’s all that I’ve had to do to get this to work right:

  1. Go to Fry’s on Black Friday to find a 25-foot stereo 1/8” plug to RCA cable.
  2. Pick up the cheapest USB remote control gizmo they had there.
  3. Recompile LIRC to support the StreamZap remote that Fry’s had sent me. This required re-creating KnoppMyth’s patched kernel so that the StreamZap patches would build.
  4. Figure out how to debug LIRC problems. Hint: use irw, because strace on lircd is pointless.
  5. Set up key mappings for MythTV and mplayer for the new remote. Half of the keys aren’t mapped to anything right now, because I can’t find the right feature to map onto.
  6. Set up NFS so I can store videos and music on my home file server.
  7. Copy 15 GB of music out of iTunes and into MythTV.
  8. Point MythTV to my home picture library.
  9. Upgrade like half of the software on the box to get MythPhone and Torrentocracy to compile. I ended up hand-patching Torrentocracy, and it still crashes MythTV whenever I try to use it.
  10. Figure out how to import videos. It turns out to be trivial–just copy the file into /myth/video, then go to the “Utilities/Setup” menu, then “Video Manager,” and then edit the metadata so the video has a reasonable name. Once you’ve done that, it’ll show up in the menu under “Media Library”/”Watch Videos”. Yes, this *is* a new meaning of the word “trivial” that you haven’t seen before.

Things that still don’t work:

  1. Playing DVDs or DVD rips with AC3 audio produces really quiet audio.
  2. Ripping DVDs doesn’t always work right. Of my two test disks, one just fails silently in the middle of the process, while the other seems to work, but has video from the “making of” feature combined with audio from the main feature.
  3. Recording TV is still broken, I think.
  4. TV audio is still broken.
  5. Playing DVDs results in frame drops, which produces jerky video. Playing the same DVD ripped to the hard drive works fine, which leads me to suspect DVD read speed issues.
  6. I can’t skip chapters in DVDs, but I can fast forward and rewind several minutes at a time.
  7. DVD menus don’t work.
  8. Image gallery slideshows are weird–they overlay the image on top of the menu’s background, when a black background would make a lot more sense. The image gallery in general doesn’t look quite right, but that might just be a theme issue.

So, what does work?

  1. I can play DVDs with audio, if I turn the stereo up really loud.
  2. I can watch live TV, if I can lip-read.
  3. I can listen to MP3s.
  4. I can watch .avi files that have come from various sources.
  5. I can browse JPEGs.
  6. I can do all this using a remote control instead of a keyboard.

Not a whole lot in other words. But I’m making progress–I’ve had a couple suggestions that might fix the DVD audio problem, and I suspect that the DVD ripping problem isn’t much harder. Once that’s done, at the very least I’ll be able to import a handful of the kids’ shows and have something useful.

I have a huge usability rant to make here, but I’m going to put it off a few days–I actually have some hope for MythTV, ever though it’s proving to be a massive time sink. It’ll take a few days to get all of my ducks in order, though–I need to finish a couple minor projects and do a few little tests. Fundamentally, I want to believe that MythTV can be fixed, but it’s so far from usable today that I’m amazed that it has the number of users that it does.

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 29 Nov 2004 23:14:58 GMT

Read full article 19 comments


Comments

  1. Anon 25 days later:

    OMG! you have hit the nail on the head..

    I too am a first time Myth user - and before I go any further I’d like to point out that I consider myself fairly competent technically.. but by gosh is Myth a nasty piece of work to install and get running.. and the interface really is quite terrible.

    Okay, lets for now ignore the installation issues (I had a similar amount of issues to yourself) and concentrate on usability..

    MythMusic - what can I say, apart from what the hell were they thinking?

    I’ve got my CD collection ripped to mp3’s and they’re all categorised in a directory structure by artist/album/track - pretty much all the songs have ID3 tags. I figured if I moved this tree under /var/lib/mythmusic that myth would pick it up and use it.. how wrong was I? after about 15 minutes worth of “updating database” I finally managed to get into the player area - where rather than being able to select a song and play it, I had to go back out, create a playlist in the “select music” section, and only THEN could I get any music to play.

    The playlist editor is nasty - It’s about as contrived a way of selecting songs as I could possibly imagine - grouping artists into ABCDE, FGHIJ, KLMNO etc and then making you scroll through each artist one-by-one (no apparent page up/down).. this might be okay for people with small collections but when you’re talking 1000+ CD’s it’s nasty. The whole reason I moved my collection to MP3 was to make it easier to work with…

    Once you’ve got the playlist into the player, you /can/ select what song you want to play individually, but again there’s no hint of a page up/page down mechanism so getting to a song in a hurry is a nuisance.

    Oh yeah, “Import CD” crashed Myth for no apparent reason (cdparanoia works fine in command-line mode), trying to get myth to understand the concept of a satellite decoder coming in through an external input wasn’t overly straightforward, the key mappings are inconsistent between the various applications (and even within a given application), the channels on the tuner card are out by one compared with other applications, trying to get myth recordings onto DVD is a nightmare and the list goes on and on…

    I too cannot believe that so many people sing Myth’s praises.. I’d love to help with development and fixing some of the problems described above, but I can’t help but think that things are just too broken in myth and maybe it’d be easier to start something new that doesn’t have the sort of baggage that Myth does..

    Something designed from the ground-up to be user friendly and not such a bitch to get working properly… something that an average person could get used to in a day or so… Sorry, but MythTV simply isn’t there yet.

    I’m off to try Freevo :)

  2. Osma about 1 month later:

    I completely agree - MythMusic user interface blows. I can’t believe anyone who actually likes to listen to music had anything to do with the design of it.

    DVD menus not working is a case of MPlayer not supporting that. I worked around that by reconfiguring MythTV to use Xine as the DVD player - that works like a charm, EXCEPT that Xine doesn’t have the same keyboard shortcuts as MythTV/Mplayer, so hooking both up to a remote control in a logical fashion takes a lot of work (can be done, though).

    Don’t have a clue why you’d have problems recording TV. I did at first, but that was all related to digital TV being a bitch to set up under Myth - with an analog tuner I think it would have been really easy.

  3. Scott Laird about 1 month later:

    I have a pretty good grip on why TV recording isn’t working–first, I don’t really care if it works or not. I’m just using a cheap antenna with it, so the quality is too poor to matter. Next, I think I told it to use the wrong audio device, which is screwing stuff up, but I haven’t bothered restarting MythTV to get to the configuration program so I can change it.

    I’m planning on ordering a HDTV card later this month; once I have that in hand, recording will be a much higher priority.

  4. Thomas about 1 month later:

    Make sure your new HDTV card is compatible with linux before you order it.

    I have been working with mythtv for quite some time now. it is a pain to get setup, but that has gotten alot better. Once it is setup properly, life is good.

  5. Terry about 1 month later:

    I stumbled on this site and could not agree more regarding MythTV. It appears I have a good deal more working than you do - I can watch TV, I can record live TV sometimes (other times I crash the frontend), but there are tons of weird quirks that I’ve gotten used to but are just dumb. For instance, sometimes playing a movie or DVD requires me to alt-tab into the terminal window where mplayer is being launched, then type “fg”. Sometimes it doesn’t. The interface looks nice but shows that it was designed by a patchwork of people who have no clue as to interface design. The front-end crashes every now and then, for no apparent reason. There are a host of other problems which I’ve either learned to live with, or given up on. I was never able to get MythGame to work. I ended up having to write a document for my wife explaining how to ssh into the box and restart both the front and back-ends, because how is she to know which died ?

    But the worst part about MythTV ? The smug attitude of the core developers. Honestly, I posted a question on a USERS mailing list, mentioning that I loved MythTV, but that I was experiencing some front-end crashes, and asked whether other users were experiencing the same and if so, how did they handle it.

    The lead developer - a pompous, nasty ass named Isaac Richards - flamed me for “bitching” and accused me of leeching off the community. The rest of that “community” - to use the term lightly - jumped on the bandwagon, and the people who took issue with their attitude were too cowed by this small man with a big ego that they were licking his silicon boots. Other guys posted claims that if my system wasn’t working, I must have screwed something up. A few guys did privately email me similar stories. A few braver guys piped publicly, saying that the rest of the guys were completely out of line. I imagine the lead developer to be the weakling who was kicked around and picked on all through high school, and now because he is the big fish in his little pond, he has found his own weaklings to kick around.

    I’ve been involved with a certain number of developer communities, and have lurked around a few others, but this was hands-down the nastiest, meanest group I have yet seen. If the “community” were not as awful as it is, I might have been willing to help isolate the problems and help them make their project better. As it is, I use it with one hand pinching my nose until something better comes along.

  6. Brian 2 months later:

    I have to agree with some of your comments here and disagree with others..

    I have performed 2 full builds of Mythboxes and one of those was networked throughout my house

    I have had some problems, particularly the first one.. but now I’ve JUST completed an install of Myth CVS date 01-15 from rpms in the ATRPMs library.. the install on Fedora Core 3 went well, I now have 3 tuners, a remote control and 1TB of disk recording everything I choose to watch

    Myth Music works well enough, but I can see some people not being happy with it.. MythImage works GREAT as I’m an amateur photographer, mythweb (the tool you can use to schedule over the internet and change key definitions) works just fine.

    The distribution you choose is quite important and the one with the most polished install routine seems to be Fedora 2/3

    I have to say, I’ve retired my Tivo, I can now do much more with my Myth box than I ever could with Tivo..

    Persiverance is important with Myth and Its improving month by month (Particularly the ivtv driver used by the most popular tuner cards)

    The user menu systems are customisable if you so choose, and theyre even working on a DVD archiving module

    Its not ready for the general public, but anyone that’s comfortable getting FC3 installed can use YUM to almost completely configure Myth very easily..

  7. Justin hornsby 2 months later:

    If you think mythtv is the answer to all your TV viewing & recording prayers you’d be wrong - almost.

    It CAN be a bitch to set up, but the same can be said of anything to do with Linux.

    3 years ago I tried Linux for the first time - Redhat somethingorother. All was fine until I tried to change the screen resolution & I couldn’t see anything. No login, and it was dual-booted on my only PC so there was no ssh. Sod that, I thought, deleted the linux partition & went back to using M$.

    I was happy on Windows for a good while after that, having acquired an xbox and running XBMC on it - great stuff, I thought as I watched videos over a network share. “All it needs now is some TV capture card & I’ll have a top quality VCR for next to no expense”. That was the first snag. The card I bought wouldn’t work properly in Windows, or Windows wouldn’t stay up for long enough - and quite simply I wouldn’t trust it to record anything never mind something I wanted to watch. Needing to have my VCR as a backup didn’t seem like the solution I wanted.

    So then a friend of mine suggested I give mythtv a go. “But it runs on Linux!” I said, “Linux is scary”. He told me it wasn’t that hard and he recommended I give Gentoo a try. And that’s exactly what I did.

    Now at that point I was a complete noob to all things linux. I knew how to cd & ls and that was about it. Within a 2 days (yes days!) I had a box up & running Gentoo Linux with a Gnome desktop. But my capture card still wasn’t working. The key was the kernel.

    To cut what might be a very long story short, I got it going in the kernel eventually & managed to use xine to verify it worked. “now I’m cookin’” I thought. Hahahhahahahah!

    Next up was the install of mythtv. It’s sufficient to say that once I’d emerged the latest version of mythtv it all just suddenly worked for me. Sure I needed to set up all the channels & the xmltv grabber but that really was small beer compared to getting little known hardware working with a 2.6.9 kernel. I used to see text like “now all you need to do is recompile the kernel” and think “ALL? are they kidding?” before running away. Not now.

    Any problems I ran into were either down to the documentation making assumptions about the user or just plain stupid mistakes on my part (mainly the latter).

    It ran & ran, never crashing even once except when it totally filled the hard disk (my bad for forgetting to mount the new /video disk in /etc/fstab - LOL). Mythweb, mythvideo & mythweather just worked…. I never used mythmusic until I made myself a frontend machine (I’d been using the xbox to play recordings up til that point).

    All was going great. I figured out LIRC, how to map keys & suchlike - even playing DVDs in xine with full menu support and using the same IR key layout as mythtv (try reading the docs folks).

    Until I decided it would be cool to make the new frontend diskless. I ran into some issues with kernel panics on the frontend so I decided to wipe the folders containing all the stuff, thus: cd /diskless rm -rf /bin rm -rf /etc and so on.

    WHOOPS!

    I’ve just completed a new install of mythtv0.16 on Gentoo 2004.3 with a 2.6.10 kernel. Apart from a few minor ebuild issues (the fault of broken dependencies in portage which were easily fixed) the install went without a hitch (my silly mistakes notwithstanding). It took a long time to install by Windows standards but that’s more down to Gentoo being a source distro.

    How to install mythtv on Gentoo: install the base system & desktop scheme. Make sure your all hardware works then su and type emerge mythtv.

    Sure it’s not as easy to setup as a VHS VCR or as pretty as XP MCE but it’s still early days yet. The amount of people developing for mythtv is miniscule compared to, say Windows XP MCE. And if you’ve seen the MCE interface & then think about which one came first I think that tells a story in itself ;-)

    I really can’t fault Isaac and all the devs who put their spare time into making fixes & improving things. They may be a few of the things folks accuse them of but think about this: without them there’d be no mythtv. They do all this FOR FREE in their spare time, sometimes even working on stuff that doesn’t affect them. Taking Windows as an example, how many programs have had crap user interfaces and were full of bugs? New holes in windows are being found all the time.

    I was given short shrift when I reported a ‘bug’ in mythmusic recently. I was pissed about the bug being closed purely because I didn’t post a backtrace, but what else could Isaac do? He doesn’t have my setup… (or my out of sync nfs share that was making mythmusic segfault). The devs need more to go on than “it’s broken” ;-)

    Can I just remind folks again that mythtv is FREE and developed by people with lots of good intentions? Sure they may not respond well to criticism, but would you if it was your hard work? Don’t bite the hand that feeds you - you may aswell get Windows on your box and moan about that instead. “Whaddya mean you want your money back?”

    I definitely agree that mythmusic needs some work on the interface (but again what do you want for free?). I have over 10,500 mp3s and it’s a bit much not to be able to import m3u playlists etc.

    The mythtv devs DO go back and look at things again when needed. The mainstay of the whole thing, the database, has been reworked at least a couple of times since the first few versions, as has the protocol between the front & backends.

    So to sum up, yeah mythtv has its faults. But all this negativity is kinda defeating the object of the exercise. Things only get fixed when someone gets off their ass and writes some code. Again though you could say the same about any Linux software.

    The mythtv documentation doesn’t cover enough bases - there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about that - but be realistic - how many different combinations of distro & kernel are there? (not mentioning hardware etc).

    When I first started out with a Gentoo Live CD I was scared. Scared that this thing was going to be an unfathomable monster. Scared I’d never learn a thing and waste a whole lot of time getting nowhere. As my experience started to grow I realised that it’s not so bad. I thought back to when I used Windows 3.1 for the first time. I hated it. “Why can’t I just do it the old way like I used to on my Atari?” I’d say to myself. But over time I grew used to it, and even got the hang of it so well everyone who taught me came to me with their questions.

    Recently I’ve helped a few noobs like me get their feet on the first few rungs of the ladder with linux & mythtv.

    That’s what this is folks - a community. You get nothing for free with most things in life and people really have no right to complain if they’ve not provided any positive input (even a bug report can be classed as positive input if the right amount of info is given).

    Just my $0.02 worth :-)

  8. Brian2 10 months later:

    it was hard for me to set up mythtv the first time I did because I was new to linux in general.

    Now I can set up a basic mythtv box in about an hour. which includes watch/record livetv, play DVD’s, and web interface (mythweb).

    A lot of stuff has gotten easier since when I started (like alsa drivers).

    It seems like alot of how much luck you have depends on what hardware you have and what distro/packages you use.

    I am a debian user so I don’t know any of the wierd knoppmyth stuff. But I think it’s a bit unfair to “give mythtv a chance” and then claim it sucks based on difficulties with 1 particular distro.

    It’s been like 2 years for me and I love my mythtv box, and am about to attempt my first HDmythtv box. Still haven’t decided between the “pchdtv.com HD 3000”, “DViCO FusionHDTV 5” or the “AirStar-HD5000”

  9. dead-on 11 months later:

    You got it all 100% correct. I have a thousand hours into myth hell trying to come up with a product that is at least as useful as a vcr/mp3 player. I should have given up a long time ago - but - all of my experience with open source has been positive. bugs get fixed, fetaures get added, life gets better. NOT so with mythtv.

    Recently I found a bug and tried to tell one of the “high and mighty” about it. Called me an idiot, refused to hear it, then banned me from his irc playgroun. Later I checked the logs and he re-created the bug. What an ass.

    It’s a bear to setup. The number of additional how to sites are an indication of this. It’s impossible to get it to look good on a tv, the music interface is clunky. It’s chock full of features you don’t need and don’t work anyway.

    I’m trying freevo and try to forget I ever heard of mythtv.

    Save yourself the trouble. Please.

    Humanity dictates that I warn others.

  10. solinym about 1 year later:

    I am a Unix guru (but not a Linux guru) and had problems getting things set up. I think you have finally fixed viewing DVDs for me — I have been using ogle from the command line for like several months now. The best instructions I have found for myth on Fedora are at wilsonet.com — even a noob can set it up, but getting everything working the way it should is still non-trivial.

  11. Kevin about 1 year later:

    almost 2 years ago When I first got my FusionPlus HDTV card I found that KnoppixMythtv didn’t support my card. So I installed Mythtv on Mandrake10.0 This worked fine untill I moved and my wife’s machine’s Video card failed and I swapped the video card from the Mythtv box to her machine. I could not get X working after running on ATI and moving to Nvidia. So I reformatted and installed Gentoo. Now I have a seamless install of MythTV I have no issues watching TV and recording programs.

    For the people who are complaining about the interface for Mythmusic the beauty about opensource is you can contribute to make it better.

  12. Mobius about 1 year later:

    I installed 18.1 on Fedora Core 3. I had no real difficulties setting up my hauppage 350 card. The ony real issue I faced was getting X to run on the hauppage - I finally gave up and bought an nvidia MX 440 card for $27 from newegg to run the display. Works like a charm with the nvidia 7667 drivers. I am using an audigy2 for sound, setup was again without issue.

    I have 220 GB recorded so far. Having hardware accel of both the encode for the recording and decode of the playback is a must.

    I am a systems administrator by trade, so I am used to fixing problems, but I also am a big believer in going where others have gone before. Using a hauppage card for the encode and an nvidia card for the decode makes things pretty simple. And a lot of saved time is owed to this site:http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php which is mentioned on the official myth docs pages.

    I used existing hardware left over from my last computer upgrade for most of the system, purchasing only the hauppauge card, the nvidia card, and the audigy. I did end up buying a newer larger hard drive because the one I had available for video storage turned out to be far too noisy.

    Having Thomas the Train episodes on demand for my 2year old rocks! And TNT is now catching us up on the alias episodes we missed …

  13. ds about 1 year later:

    i have to say myth is a pain but, i have found that using fedora and jarads guide it is simplified. i recommend using this method to everyone… and i have no relation to the developers or jarad. also i have found that using a xbox as a front end works great… that is probably my favorite setup for a frontend.

    donald

  14. myther about 1 year later:

    Knoppix version 5A30.2 has been working pretty good for me on a new 250G HD, amd 2600+, 512MB, pcHDTV, Nvidia FX5200(xvmc,dvi), DVD+/-RW, PackardBell remote.

    also didn’t know until config time about zap2it scheduling registration but that was easy enough. lirc required /etc/lirc/lircd.conf for the specific remote, also /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc. Had to recompile mplayer from CVS to get xvmc working for 1080i HD video streams and setup xine for playing DVDs. Xine took about 2 hours to figure out since without xxmc(xvmc w/extension) it took 90% CPU with post processing. And after seeing DVDs on a HD screen with post processing, you’ll want to use it. Now, only about 10% CPU.

    All and all, it took some online googling to find out specific things like lirc, OTA pcHDTV channel numbering, and optimized xvmc( mplayer/xine ) uses but the results are pretty nice IMO.

    BTW, running KnoppMyth on a 600MHz fanless EPIA board was pretty cool but it unfortunately, it couldn’t handle 1080i HD video.

    Between these forums KnoppMyth’s, pcHDTV, and Google, there’s tons of help for those with a bit of Linux understanding.

  15. Derek about 1 year later:

    I started out running BeyondTV in Windows. A friend suggested I try MythTV.

    My first MythTV was KnoppMyth. It worked but not without a lot of head bashing. Eventually I tried Fedora using Jarod’s guide and that worked like a charm.

    My system now consists of a backend server with 3 tuner cards (2 Hauppauge 150’s plus an ATI TV Wonder VE) that handles all the live TV recordings. The frontend connects wirelessly to my home network, and NFS mounts provides access to all my pictures and itunes music.

    Documentation for MythTV isn’t very good, but Jarod’s Guide helped a great deal. Then it comes down to a lot of time and experimentation. I must have reinstalled my systems about 10 times. And it really doesn’t take that long - about the same as reinstalling Windows.

    My problems now have to do with hardware. I’m having trouble getting my Hitachi CMP420V2 to do 848x480 (native) DVI from a nVidia 5200. For some strange reason, the Hitachi resamples the signal and spits it out as 1024x768. Even more strange, the VGA input accepts it without any problems.

    Overall, I’m very happy with my MythTV setup!

    Derek

  16. paul about 1 year later:

    Now we are version 0.19 of Myth TV , and it is still not a finished product but its getting so so close now and blows anything similar out of the water.

    I’ve setup a new MythTV system based upon gentoo linux and a PVR-150MCE capture card. The backend server part was pretty easy to setup. Quite enjoyable using my ibook on the sofa and simply using the terminal program.

    Go for supported hardware and its all straight forward. Anything else will probably work , just dont expect it to without some tinkering.

    Frontend setups are a bit of pain, as there are a lot of settings, but for my ibook it was so so so easy. One package, install, enter sever ip and password. Thats it!

    Had it running for about two months and Im very happy with it. A mac mini is going to be bought just for mythtv (as its quiet) and a video ipod to send video pod casts to.

    Now its all working , I will spend some of my hard earned money. My initial spending totalled £200 and an old computer.. My friend setup a windows MCE and has spend thousands of pounds. His system is not stable. My cheap MythTV is.

  17. Nick about 1 year later:

    I want to provide a different experience to those that didn’t have any luck with Myth.

    I was (still largely) a Linux noob. But I’ve gone from not knowing a thing about Linux to having a perfectly functional Myth setup in two weeks.

    I too started out with Knoppmyth (which tries to do everything for you), but found it “either works, or it doesn’t”. I had some things I wanted to change / fix, but found it difficult in the environment Knopp drops you into. I wanted to install Firefox so I had a browser, but that broke everything.

    I deleted everything and used Jarod’s excellent Fedora guide. I installed Fedora Core 5, which went VERY smoothly, and you get put in an environment that’s friendly for noobs (a working Firefox browser, a Windows-like file manager, etc.)

    I also took the time to read up a little on networking and Linux (learning to use text editors like VI, etc). I then installed MythTV, had to fiddle a little to install my DVB card, and the latest NVDIA driver, a Samba share, a NFS share, get the HTTP daemon working, the transcoding daemon, and a few other things.

    Now - less than two weeks later - a completely stable setup that works perfectly - and I can even log in remotely with MythWeb and schedule recording (my preferred interface now).

    I’ve copied a bunch of AVIs to it - and that’s how I watch my downloaded LOST and Sopranos episodes, and it RIPS DVDs fine - to include in the VIDEOS section.

    It’s already taken over as the main way to watch TV.

    I converted a XBOX I bought off ebay to run Linux - and that now works on MythTV as well - sees the backend fine.

    Myth is currently running on a laptop (with a 160 GB HDD), and now that I ‘get it’ - I’ll be putting together a proper server with some very large HDDs RAIDed together.

    So - to anyone that passes my this blog - don’t be put off my the negative comments. It’s NOT a consumer device - if you want something that just works, and doesn’t require you to learn something first - it’s not for you - Tivo or XP MCE is probably more suited. If you don’t mind getting under the hood a little to get things working, you’ll be rewarded.

    PS: I agree MythMusic isn’t the best interface for music. The TV interface is excellent, but the music has some way to go - but it’s probably unfair to rubbish the entire interface because of this.

  18. Delarius about 1 year later:

    Well, I’m not surprised to hear of all the difficulties getting mythtv to run. It is entirely non trivial at times. I started with Knoppmyth, this worked ok, but it didn’t like my multiple hard drives and video was a terrible pain to get working since it didn’t autodetect my turbotv card (which required manually editing and recompiling modules so that the default card it was detecting was using the same values that a turbotv should. Then there was ALSA which was a crazy and painful experience too. It did work eventually but I couldn’t stand fluxbox, and so I decided to try something else. I then installed FC4 and tried to get mythtv working on that system. It kinda worked again, but would crash on occasion and small things didn’t seem quite right, for example it too wasn’t entirely pleased with the LVM spanned hard drives. Finally I replaced the pair of 110gb harddrives with 1 300gb drive, and installed Mythdora. Aha! Apart from a few minor config issues, it works great! The only remaining bugs are

    • mythmusic, yeah, this totally sucks, it’s completely non intuitive and slow to pick complex playlists.
    • mythvideo, this one is very odd and I can’t seem to track down why it does this, but it just won’t recognise alot of files when running video manager. The files are there in the directory, but just not recognised. If anyone knows how to fix this one, please let me know.
    • channels drift, this happens from time to time, where the channels go off by one. Zap2it also seems to have problems saving my settings (once a week I log in and disable channels that turn themselves on somehow.) The fix for the channel drift is to go into mythtvsetup, delete the source for the tvtuner, then add it back again. This makes the channels happy for a week or so generally.

    otherwise I’m totally pleased with my Mythtv experience, amazing oss product. -Del

  19. Jay over 2 years later:

    I tried building mythtv on a gentoo box. I’ve built a whole working email/web server on gentoo from scratch and it was ten times easier than trying to get mythtv to work. I found knoppmyth and gave it a try after getting 30-40 hours into an install and still not having anything working. Knoppmyth for the most part works pretty well at R5D1. The only problem is they tend to pull the latest source code changes, get it compiled, and call it done. In the last version the ffmpeg codecs throw division by zero errors. To me that’s not acceptable for a released product. MythTv does a lot of things much better than anything else out there. It has problems but I think it’s definitely a keeper. It has completely changed the way I watch tv. I haven’t tried mythdora so I can’t help compare the two.