Myth TV Build

[nweaver]

So my MCE2k5 trial didn't work so well.....my Leadtek capture card was unsupported, and my video card was a bit long in the tooth. So I am going to try MythTV now. Unfortunaly, I can't use my main desktop box, as my wife won't learn any linux. (She is windows fanboy trollbait). So I am forced to gather some old stuff laying around. I am HOPING that Linux is a bit more forgiving then MCE. If this is working well, I will build an HTPC for it.

System Specs
P3 500 (Slot 1)
Old intel board
all the ram I can stuff (have 2 512 sticks, not sure if it will read. Also have 3 256 that i am pretty sure it will read)
GF3 TI 200 AGP Card (think the board is 4X, might only be 2X) (Has SVIDEO out)
SBLIVE Value, maybe SB128 (Not worried too much about sound for this trial)
Leadtek WinfastTV2000XP (I am pretty sure this is supported by Myth, was looking the other day)
SCSI controller w/ 3 9GB 10K RPM drives in raid 5 (Have it laying around at work, I can borrow it for a few weeks to try this out).
3 Com NIC

My first question is: Any blaring hardware issues? (other then slow performance). Can I do time shifting with this setup, or will it be too slow? (I might be able to use a faster box, but no AGP slot on it). I MIGHT be able to swap to a BP6 motherboard, and run dual overclocked 366@550 cellies, and that board DOES have AGP

Second question is: Distro? I normally use RH9 or Gentoo. I have never used Debian, a little experience with Suse (used at work a bit). I have access to all Suse distros, RHEL 3 and 4, and can download anything I need (gotta love works OC3). I don't want to use Gentoo, as I don't want to waste 2 days compiling. (Althought I love emerge, it's not as needed on a TIVO type box I think). I am leaning toward Debian, as I would like to try apt-get. Also, I would assume the 2.6 kernel for the lastest support, but I have no experience, is Myth Stable in 2.6?

Third Question: I had one, and I forgot now....oops.

 

[Treyshadow]

For a mythTV box I would have to lean you towards Fedora as there are several good "how to" articles on the web.

MythTVology

 

[oog]

i still used gentoo for my htpc, even though i used fairly old hardware. i'm just used to it. yes, it took a while, but you can skip a few steps and get something working by starting with a stage 3 install.

you might be able to see what you can get working with knoppmyth before you go with a full install.

 

[nweaver]

knoppmyth, huh? Live CD I assume, I'll have to check that out. If it's a live CD, maybe I can use my main box still, for a few days.

 

[coolred]

Not sure if your still looking, but knoppmyth is not a live CD, it can be installed to your hard drive. I just installe dit to my secondary rig. Its not steup for PVR capabilities yet, and may not be for a while. I just wanted to see what myth TV looked and felt like.

 

[drag]

Your CPU is too slow.

I don't think that it will be able to do the 'live' tv timeshifting.

You see with a card like the one your using you have to use software encoding to make the recording to the disk, then on top of that you'd need to decode the stream to play it on TV.. and it all has to do it faster then the FPS that TV plays at (30 or so frames per second) so it's pretty cpu intensive. You should be able to do recordings with that, but even then you couldn't do it at the full quality that you can get with a faster CPU.

The harddrive rocks though.

The video card doesn't matter so much. A older ATI (9200 and lower numbers) are supported well, as well as any PCI nvidia card should work perfectly well. Even onboard devices should be fine. TV itself is recorded at around 640x480 (give or take, TVs are quite a bit different from monitors) and DVD's are recorded at 720x480 (compresses nicely to TV resolutions for good picture).. So you don't need a rip-roaring card to play this stuff at high res.

If you buy a hardware encoding card like a WinPVR they suck because they need to have special drivers installed and that can be difficult (but those pre-made packages and directions for Fedora can make it relatively easy), but on the other hand you can have much lower CPU usage since they take care of the video compression in hardware instead of using your CPU.

Then if you combine that with a faster CPU (like around 1.5 to 2.0 ghz) you can use the 2 video cards to do cool things like record shows simutaniously, record on one card while watching on the other, do Picture in Picture or swtich video feeds back and so forth.

If time-shifting is not important and you don't want the added expense of upgrading your hardware you may want to check out Freevo. It's does the scedualing and guide stuff, but just without time-shifting abilties.
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

 

[skyking]

Nice post, drag.
I set it up many months ago with debian and redhat.
All the research I did pointed to the same conclusion: 500MHz is too slow without a hardware decoder.

 

[nweaver]

I am going to be running dual OC'd Celly 366@550's....that too slow too? I'm also going to do a gentoo stage 2 to keep it tight and clean. I can't remember, but I think that board only supports 768, but I would think that is ok for headless/GUIless operation

 

[drag]

dual cpu helps a lot.

For reference the mythtv documentation gives some examples of hardware people have used...
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1

they state:
P3 733: encode one stream at 480x480 using Mpeg4 (divx)
AMD 1800+: almost encode 2 streams while watching one of them simultaniously.
P3 800 was able to record using mjpeg (moving jpeg, lower cpu usage with lesser quality OR bigger files) and was able to do "live tv" playback.
Dual Celeron @ 450: able to playback 480x480 (general TV resolution) mpeg4 stream made on a seperate computer at 30% cpu usage
p4 @ 2.4ghz is able to encode 2 480x480 tv streams and serve them to remote front ends.


My personal experiance is that my 2ghz AMD (2400+) cpu is able to encode 1 stream from a ATI TV Wonder VE (not the ALL-in-Wonder, but a seperate vid card) AND get a stream from my WinPVR-250 AND watch live tv no problem.

My ATI TV Wonder VE uses the same general design as your Hauppage card.


Remember that to 'time shift' you have to:
1. retreive tv signal from tuner on a PCI card, (yours and mine BTTV style card only does this)
2. encode that signal to a digital format (mine WinPVR-250 does this for me in mpeg2. If you use software you can use either MJPEG or MPEG4 (divx-style))
3. record that signal to a harddrive
4. read that signal back from the harddrive (so your scsi setup would be very nice for this)
5. decode that signal to be displayed
6. display that signal on your monitor.

All at the same time.

That way when your watching your TV on the computer you can fast forware and 'rewind' thru the media file just like any divx recording you have on your harddrive.

Thats how Tivos, Mythtv, and Windows MCE works.

MCE requires that you use a hardware encoding card to keep cpu usage low.. The only exception is that if you have a AIW ATI card then ATI offers a software encoding system that makes MCE think that it's a hardware encoding card but people even with fast

Mythtv has the advantage over MCE that you can use TV Tuner-only cards and use software codecs. Plus you can have many cards and many backends and frontends were MCE is restricted to only a couple.

Tivo has a low-power CPU, but has special hardware encoders AND decoders to make them very fast relatively. Since it's a special purpose PC (runs Linux BTW) it can do it cheaply.. Add-on cards for Windows and Linux tend to be more expensive.

That's why I suggested Freevo. Freevo doesn't do time shifting all it does is:
1. capture tv signal
2. display tv signal on monitor.

So it's a lot more easy-going.


Realy it hasn't been until very recently were general purpose PCs have been powerfull enough to do this...

If you can upgrade your setup to use dual 768 cpus you'd be sitting pretty. But it may just be cheaper to buy a low-budget AMD setup. Even their cheaper 32bit cpus that you can buy new are plenty fast enough to do what you want.

 

[nweaver]

yeah, my board only supports BPGA Celerons, so 533 (non OCed) are the fastest, and then I move from 100 Bus to 66 bus, and I have not been able to get 533's to hit 100 FSB even in single mode.

This is more of a trial, and if I decide to do it full time (read: my wife likes it and wants it to work better) then I'll probably either buy a cheap dual proc server from ebay/dell or build a cheap AMD rig (about 1.6 ghz or so).

 

[drag]

Also you can do things like have a seperate front end and seperate backend, or have multiple front ends and backends.

Also before e-baying keep in mind that you can pick up a Dell Poweredge "starter server" for 300 dollars and that will provide plenty of power. So you can stick that in your basement or in the back room or whatnot so you don't have to hear it and get a nice quite PC or a modded Xbox or something to watch TV on.

Then you can do things like watch tv on a laptop (if your using 802.11g I beleive. b may not be fast enough).

If you show your wife how she can record and save all her favorite shows, cut out the commercials and then watch them in any part of the house then I figure she'll quickly become addicted to it. Then you'll have to explain to her things like:
"Well I can only record one show at a time because we only have one input card.. If I were to buy many cards then you can record all the shows you want and still be able to watch TV"

And if your lucky she would WANT you to spend a extra 60 bucks or so on new capture cards and haddrives time to time.

Then you could record shows to cds and such so she could send them to friends... so on and so forth.

(there is even a mythtv frontend for windows... here)

 

[nweaver]

sweet, I appreciate all the good comments drag. I am hoping that with a week or 2 of not missing her favorites, and being able to pause it when it's time to put the kids to bed will make her want to spend some $$ on it.

 

[Carl Uman]

I've also been thinking about doing this but just don't have the time to commit to the project. I'll be watching for you updates

 

[shud]

Any advice on what Linux distro to use? Debian seems to have good support, but any suggestions would be nice.

Does having Gnome installed over the distro before trying to set up MythTV help? I'm a total Linux rookie so I figured a GUI might help me a little in the beginning.

 

[dawks]

Check out Systm's episode 2 for some details on creating a MythTV setup. They actually run through the setup and configuration process, and talk about hardware/features.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Originally posted by: shud
Any advice on what Linux distro to use? Debian seems to have good support, but any suggestions would be nice.

Does having Gnome installed over the distro before trying to set up MythTV help? I'm a total Linux rookie so I figured a GUI might help me a little in the beginning.

Having just recently delved into MythTV myself, having an in-depth guide to walk you through the installation helps a lot. The Fedora Myth(TV)ology guide is very thorough and made my installation relatively painless (KDE is recommended). Once I got the backend (w/ frontend) running I installed the frontend on my Mandriva machine and had minimal problems using it plus connecting to and using the backend. I would recommend the Fedora install first (using the aforementioned guide), and if you still wish to install on Debian then wipe the slate clean and go for it. It will be much easier the second time.