HTPC with Linux/MythTV

[hasu]

I am trying to move my HTPC to Linux/MythTV.

My HTPC configuration:
P4MBMS/3.06 GHz Celeron/ATI-9600Pro/ATI HDTV Wonder/Audigy2/512MB DDR. Celeron was chosen to keep heat issues relatively low.

Even though my ATI HDTV Wonder is not officially supported (in Linux), I came across couple of articles explaining how to install that. Article-1 and Article-2. If it is too difficult to configure ATI HDTV Wonder in Linux then I am open to invest in a Linux friendly HD TV tuner card. In such a situation what would be my best option?

Is there a distro which is better suited for HTPC compared to say Ubuntu? I saw GeexBox, but that is still too primitive for a full fledged HTPC. MEPIS (which is my favorite distro now 🙂) works with ATI9600Pro only in vesa mode :-(. I am yet to figure out how to get 9600 work with fglrx or even radeon driver.

If any of you use MythTV please post your hardware specs too.

 

[drag]

For HTPC Mythtv is about it for a DVR style setup.

Mythtv is a collection of programs designed to provide as much features and good performance as possible. For example you use MySQL database for keeping track of recordings, tv listings, and the like.

The principle advantages for Mythtv over other applications, in my eyes, are twofold.

First off it's designed to be used in a distributed fasion. That is you can have many multiple backends and many multiple front ends. A backend is the part that does the heavy lifting.. it does the database, the encoding, the DVR functions, the storage, etc. The front end can be a older machine (except for HD, of course). Front end is just the GUI and uses it's CPU for simply playing back the media streaming from the backend.

This is nice because you can have your big loud server in the basement and use something older/quieter/smaller for your living room. And like I said you can have multiples of each. As much as your budget allows.

Of course, like you, most people will have the backend and the front end on the same machine.

And the second advantage is total lack of DRM. You can copy, rip, and do whatever you want with whatever you want. It's also very extensable. Lots of little plugins and different little things for people to use. For example a popular thing to do is have the front end double as a Mame box for playing arcade games.


Now the disavantage is that Mythtv is not designed for average person. The people who develop Mythtv do it for themselves with no commercial asperations. So as a consiquence it's not going to be something that is going to be paticularly easy to deal with compared to other things in Linux.

And the second major problem is going to be a lack of hardware support. But you seem to have that mostly covered.

So to deal with these problems you want to find a good step-by-step guide that will help you through setting it up.

Fedora is popular http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/

So is Ubuntu. I am sure that there are a handfull of good guides for that.

Then there is Mythtv specific stuff like Knoppmyth. http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/ A lot of people like that.

It may take a couple tries to get everything how you want it. Be sure to read the official mythtv documentation also.

 

[drag]

Oh and I had a mythtv setup for a long time.

But since I moved I haven't set it up again. I will eventually, but I just don't watch much TV anymore.
Backend was my normal file servers. I have a bunch of SATA drives in software Raid5 configuration. I got a lot of stuff going on with that thing. 2.0ghz Althon XP proccessor.

Then I'd use Mythtv front end in 'window mode' on my desktop and my laptop depending on which one I used. It works pretty good as a desktop application with the only serious problem being you can't resize the window after it's been started. I'd usually run it at 800x600, which is good for normal TV.

I used a ancient ATI Wonder TV VE card (not video card, standalone BTTV-style tv capture card), and a WinPVR-250 with it's mpeg2 encoding (which is nice). The bttv-style cards used software only encoding and that CPU had no problem with realtime mpeg4 encoding. (libavcodec and ffmpeg people kick-butt)

I'd like to get this though:
http://www.pchdtv.com/

It's a HD card that is specificly designed to work with Linux. It'll do over the air capture and supports most cable capture if the encoding is non-encrypted (calling ahead is about the only way to know if hd cable is being encrypted.)

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: drag
Oh and I had a mythtv setup for a long time.

But since I moved I haven't set it up again. I will eventually, but I just don't watch much TV anymore.
Backend was my normal file servers. I have a bunch of SATA drives in software Raid5 configuration. I got a lot of stuff going on with that thing. 2.0ghz Althon XP proccessor.

Then I'd use Mythtv front end in 'window mode' on my desktop and my laptop depending on which one I used. It works pretty good as a desktop application with the only serious problem being you can't resize the window after it's been started. I'd usually run it at 800x600, which is good for normal TV.

I used a ancient ATI Wonder TV VE card (not video card, standalone BTTV-style tv capture card), and a WinPVR-250 with it's mpeg2 encoding (which is nice). The bttv-style cards used software only encoding and that CPU had no problem with realtime mpeg4 encoding. (libavcodec and ffmpeg people kick-butt)

I'd like to get this though:
http://www.pchdtv.com/

It's a HD card that is specificly designed to work with Linux. It'll do over the air capture and supports most cable capture if the encoding is non-encrypted (calling ahead is about the only way to know if hd cable is being encrypted.)

I wonder how performance would be if you set up a dedicated MythTV box and then mounted a remote folder from your file server and saved everything to that? Just thinking out loud here. One day I would like to get some good hardware for a MythTV box.

 

[hasu]

Originally posted by: drag
So to deal with these problems you want to find a good step-by-step guide that will help you through setting it up.
Fedora is popular http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/
So is Ubuntu. I am sure that there are a handfull of good guides for that.
Then there is Mythtv specific stuff like Knoppmyth. http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/ A lot of people like that.
It may take a couple tries to get everything how you want it. Be sure to read the official mythtv documentation also.

Thanks for the link. I was looking for similar information on this specific topic.

I read about back-end front-end configuration. It could be my dream setup if I can rip all my media into one server and watch them anywhere in the house. Long way to go before I can venture into anything of that scale! If only DirecTV supported external recording device!!

I might have to do more research to find out the hardware/network requirement. I will start with Ubuntu or Fedora first. Let me see how it goes.

 

[silverpig]

I'll keep my post short as drag has good advice, but I can add to it a bit.

Ubuntu is a snap to get mythtv going on. There are excellent guides.

I have the pchdtv 5500 hdtv capture card in my mythbox. It is excellent. If you go with ubuntu 7.04 which runs kernel 2.6.20 you won't even have to install drivers. The quality is excellent and I can pull in OTA hdtv with no problems (okay that's not quite accurate as I'm in a terrible apartment for reception, but the card does its job perfectly well).

I too want to try playing files over the network, but as it stands I've got a little over 1.3 TB in my mythbox right now. It'd be nice to get a slimline case and offload those hard drives to a server, and I'm sure it'll work for even HD content provided I go with Gbit.

 

[drag]

I read about back-end front-end configuration. It could be my dream setup if I can rip all my media into one server and watch them anywhere in the house. Long way to go before I can venture into anything of that scale! If only DirecTV supported external recording device!!

Personally, nowadays I just have a /share directory with my movies and music and share everything out over sshfs. I have it setup so that regular users can mount FUSE-based file systems so I have it setup to it to /home/drag/storage directory.

Pretty simple.

Of course if you want to use something for TV then Mythtv is going to be pretty good. Clicking around a GUI file manager isn't something that is going to generally work out well for a TV remote control. 😉

 

[hasu]

Here I'm stuck again (surprise, surprise) !!
I have a VIZIO L32 32" LCD TV with native resolution of 1366 x 768. Windows Media Center detect it just fine at 1360x768. Ubuntu 7.04 is getting it as 1280x768 at best. I tried to play with various Modelines in xorg.conf with no success. Modeline suggested by gtf 1360 768 60 did not work either. Is there a way I can get it work with atleast 1360x768?

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: drag

I read about back-end front-end configuration. It could be my dream setup if I can rip all my media into one server and watch them anywhere in the house. Long way to go before I can venture into anything of that scale! If only DirecTV supported external recording device!!

Personally, nowadays I just have a /share directory with my movies and music and share everything out over sshfs. I have it setup so that regular users can mount FUSE-based file systems so I have it setup to it to /home/drag/storage directory.

Pretty simple.

Of course if you want to use something for TV then Mythtv is going to be pretty good. Clicking around a GUI file manager isn't something that is going to generally work out well for a TV remote control. 😉

Yeah, mythtv is great for that. I've got several shows completely stored on my myth box and it's nice to be able to get into a new show by hitting enter, then down enter to watch the next one when the first finishes.

 

[hasu]

Originally posted by: silverpig
I'll keep my post short as drag has good advice, but I can add to it a bit.
Ubuntu is a snap to get mythtv going on. There are excellent guides.
I have the pchdtv 5500 hdtv capture card in my mythbox. It is excellent. If you go with ubuntu 7.04 which runs kernel 2.6.20 you won't even have to install drivers. The quality is excellent and I can pull in OTA hdtv with no problems (okay that's not quite accurate as I'm in a terrible apartment for reception, but the card does its job perfectly well).

Can you tell us the configuration of your MythBox?

I too want to try playing files over the network, but as it stands I've got a little over 1.3 TB in my mythbox right now. It'd be nice to get a slimline case and offload those hard drives to a server, and I'm sure it'll work for even HD content provided I go with Gbit.

Are you using pcHDTV 5500 to receive only SD programs?

 

[hasu]

While searching for the monitor parameters for xorg.conf I came across http://xorg-conf.org/. Even though my Vizio L32 is not listed I can get some useful info from there.

Is there a way in Linux to read EDID from the monitor (like Powerstrip in windows)?

Edit: I found a way to read EDID from monitor. http://john.fremlin.de/programs/linux/read-edid/. I will try this tonight.

Edit#2: read-edit worked perfect! I updated xorg.conf with those parameters and changed driver to ati. Now my LCD TV runs at 1368x768 -- which is what I could get in Windows MCE.

 

[hasu]

Finally I managed to install MythTV (backend and frontend) on a MEPIS box and watch some OTA programs. Video quality is so poor that you cannot even recognize the faces. I am wondering how can it be so grainy, the card itself meant for DTV and I have selected the video format as ATSC. Since the kernel is 2.6.15 it uses Video4Linux driver by default. But that should not cause such deterioration in video, I guess.

 

[drag]

"DTV"?


Are you re-encoding the video? Maybe your using mjpeg or something like that. That would cause the degradation.

I never had a digital video card, so I don't know how to properly set it up. But I beleive you should just be able to record the mpeg2 stream they provide directly to the harddrive and use that.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: hasu

Originally posted by: silverpig
I'll keep my post short as drag has good advice, but I can add to it a bit.
Ubuntu is a snap to get mythtv going on. There are excellent guides.
I have the pchdtv 5500 hdtv capture card in my mythbox. It is excellent. If you go with ubuntu 7.04 which runs kernel 2.6.20 you won't even have to install drivers. The quality is excellent and I can pull in OTA hdtv with no problems (okay that's not quite accurate as I'm in a terrible apartment for reception, but the card does its job perfectly well).

Can you tell us the configuration of your MythBox?

I too want to try playing files over the network, but as it stands I've got a little over 1.3 TB in my mythbox right now. It'd be nice to get a slimline case and offload those hard drives to a server, and I'm sure it'll work for even HD content provided I go with Gbit.

Are you using pcHDTV 5500 to receive only SD programs?

So my setup is a little odd right now.

mythbox
A64 3200+
512 MB Ram
7300 GS
Sb Live! 5.1 (spdif everything out to my amp)
Hauppauge PVR150
~1.3 TB of hard drives

Everything works great and as advertised except I get better looking tv if I just use the tv's tuner itself. The tv is for now a 27" 4:3 SD Wega connected via SVIDEO. I don't really use the PVR150 for much, although I did notice that using tvtime allows much better colour control options than the standard myth tv viewer.

My main rig:

Opteron 165
1 GB ram
Sb Live 5.1
7900GS
pchdtv 5500
74 gig raptor + 250 gig drive

The pchdtv card is hooked up to an indoor antenna I bought. I used to be able to get one HDTV channel OTA but it was choppy. This is because the local towers are to my northeast and I'm in a half-below ground level apartment on the southwest side of the building surrounded by concrete highrises and brick buildings. For a while though the signal was beautiful and all worked as advertised. Playback was smooth with a deinterlacing filter, recording was smooth.

I could receive just the one high def DTV signal and that's all I can comment on. I did tune in a few analog signals, but they're analog OTA and looked kinda crappy. I also hooked my cable up to the card and got a great picture on the SD channels (my cable provider is crappy and doesn't provide any unencrypted HD channels unfortunately).

Plan for the future:

Slim case for the mythbox, put large hard drives in main rig and mount via nfs/something. Get better apartment. Enjoy.

Oh and for the record, both of my rigs can play 720p x264 stuff just fine. 1080p x264 is too much, but the 1080i signal I was receiving OTA and then processing with a deinterlacing filter ran smoothly.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: hasu
Finally I managed to install MythTV (backend and frontend) on a MEPIS box and watch some OTA programs. Video quality is so poor that you cannot even recognize the faces. I am wondering how can it be so grainy, the card itself meant for DTV and I have selected the video format as ATSC. Since the kernel is 2.6.15 it uses Video4Linux driver by default. But that should not cause such deterioration in video, I guess.

I'm thinking it's not set up right. I tried my card with both analog and digital ota. With analog it's fuzzy and grainy like you'd expect. With dtv it's either a clear picture, or nothing. If your signal is borderline you'll get a clear picture with parts missing, but the parts that are there aren't fuzzy.

 

[hasu]

Originally posted by: drag
"DTV"?
Are you re-encoding the video? Maybe your using mjpeg or something like that. That would cause the degradation.
I never had a digital video card, so I don't know how to properly set it up. But I beleive you should just be able to record the mpeg2 stream they provide directly to the harddrive and use that.

As far as I know, the card itself is meant for HDTV which receives only Digital transmission. It does have a second antenna connection for analog (NTSC) but I read somewhere that it doesn't work esp with Linux. By default it uses AnalogV4LDriver. Since I could see the picture itself I think it does recognize and decode the mpeg2 stream (or whatever the compression standard is for Digital TV). Or it could be that the images are from the NTSC tuner (with no antenna connected to it), as it is using AnalogV4LDriver. I have to tinker with it a little more to determine that. I will also try some newer Kernel to see if that would make a difference.

 

[hasu]

Originally posted by: silverpig
I did notice that using tvtime allows much better colour control options than the standard myth tv viewer.

Oh! There are other options to watch/record TV in Linux?

pchdtv 5500
I could receive just the one high def DTV signal and that's all I can comment on. I did tune in a few analog signals, but they're analog OTA and looked kinda crappy. I also hooked my cable up to the card and got a great picture on the SD channels (my cable provider is crappy and doesn't provide any unencrypted HD channels unfortunately).

Can pcHDTV5500 receive both HighDef and StandardDef (and analog and Digital) with the same antenna/setup? I guess pcHDTV 5500 is best option then. Sometime back I read about dual tuners in one card (so that you could record one program and watch another without wasting a PCI slot 🙂 ). Any comments on those?

Edit: I found another media application for Linux .. LinuxMCE
This video is awesome!