Wednesday, April 25, 2012

mythtv

In pursuit of the perfect working mythtv frontend HDTV experience...

(Updated Apr 2012 - migration to MythTV0.25 on U11.04)

Summary

This blog entry is supposed to document useful information and the not-so-obvious trials and tribulations of trying to get MythTV to work with Ubuntu 10.10 on Zotac Zbox.  Since time has passed, I found myself intrigued by newer editions of XBMC and MythTV both of which were eventually unsupported on U10.10.  So I took the plunge and migrated to U11.04.  (U12.04 is freshly out but I didn't want to push my luck, specifically around NVIDIA chipset/driver support... it turned out I was lucky this time and everything upgraded fairly seamlessly.)

So, these notes are in part written down in case I have to repeat the exercise and in part to offer some help/insight into the process.

Myth 0.24+fixes circa Feb2011 - due to hardware and software limitations on Zotac/NVIDIA chipset I found myself downloading and manually compiling/installing MythTV 0.24 on a 2.6.36 kernel.  More information here.

Myth 0.25 circa April 2012 - I took the plunge and upgraded using the Ubuntu Upgrade Manager.  Usually this is an utter disaster.  However, from U10.10 to U11.04 things were 'fairly' smooth. I chose to upgrade a perfectly working system as other frontend laptops/netbooks were running newer Ubuntu releases for hardware support and by default ran MythTV 0.25 frontends.

Currently Working Frontend System using MythTV 0.25
  • Ubuntu 11.04 with 2.6.38-14 kernel
  • NVIDIA 260.41.06
  • MythTV 0.25 ppa installed via Ubuntu apt-get
  • Zotac System ZBOX HD-ND02 Atom 330 (IONv1) with single 2Gb DDR3 RAM. (Two 1Gbs DIMMs are actually recommended for performance using this chipset.)
  • HDMI connected to a Panasonic TYFB8HM Adapter for TH-50PH9UK 50" plasma screen at resolution 1360x768 (aka 768p or 1080i) for "best" picture quality instead of full HD resolution.
  • No LIRC remote control, using smart-phone apps and/or keyboard
Other frontend systems include:

Backend System
  • Dual-core 4200 AMD based desktop in an Antec case with 3Tb of disk space
  • Hauppauge HVR 1800 capture card
  • Channel Master CM 7778 Titan2 VHF/UHF Preamplifier with Power Supply (CM7778) ~$90
  • Channel Master CM 4221HD 4-bay HDTV/UHF Antenna (CM4221HD) ~$80.
  • DLINK gigabit hub connected to the main frontend system.  Typically ~2.6MB/s for a single HDTV channel.
  • Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato for wireless clients utilising ~2MB/s per channel with occasional drops to 1.5MB/s.
It is easy to make your own bow-tie antennas.  I originally made a bow-tie and a hoverman in testing but decided that it was cheaper/easier/better-built to buy a double-bow-tie with reflector.  It also had all the mounting accessories.

The CM7778 amplifier is reportedly better than the CM7777 when there is a range of signal strengths for different channels and one is very strong. They are also very well built.

What is there to Watch?
tvfool.com has a utility that can show you the nearest transmitter directions and channel line-ups with suggestion antenna types/placements.

As of Sept 1st 2011 when in Canada the analogue transmitters were switched to digital there are about eight channels now available.  On my system, about four are watchable due to signal strength and only two actually interesting. ;o) EIT has gone for about 4 out of 8 of them including CBOT again and CBC replied to me saying they have had a lot of problems and do not plan to support EIT on the CBOT channel.


Ubuntu upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04

I leave the Myth 0.24 notes up here as some were related to compiling and installing MythTV while other notes are related to NVIDIA, VDPAU and MythTV which I did not seem to have to do when migrating to U11.04 and MythTV 0.25.

The Ubuntu upgrade did require me to:
  • Reset the MythTV Playback profile to VDPAU Normal (I have not needed to tweak Temporal/Advanced etc) but I am still running the system in 720p over HDMI and suspect the same video/playback issues remain if I were to try 1080p.  (See original installation notes)
  • On the first few logins I found I had no Desktop menu bars.  I found (online) a suggestion to create a launcher for terminal, then issue sudo killall Xorg.  This dumps you back out at the login where you can select "Ubuntu Classic".  As usually  in a Ubuntu upgrade the Unity crap fails to install properly.  Now I am back to the non-Unity (classic) desktop environment.
All MythTV settings were intact and I could watch tv with no problem.

I did notice the NVIDIA driver migrated from 260.19.06 to 260.41.06.  I have no idea what the difference is but very surprised it successfully upgraded with no loss of desktop.

Original installation notes can be found in this post.

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