Adventures in MythTV
Posted on January 17, 2005
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 62 views |
This weekend I finally gave a concerted effort at getting MythTV running on what used to be my Windows box. I started with Fedora Core 3 then regressed back to Fedora Core 2 when two hours of fucking about with display drivers couldn’t even get the initial post-installation screen to show up. FC2 installed just fine but the update to 2.6.10 was completely hosed - every reboot would hang while trying to load CUPS. Finally, through a slow and painful process of trial & error and manual updates I managed to get a stable install of 2.6.9 in place. Elapsed time: one day.
Up until then I’d been following Jarod Wilson’s excellent MythTV on Fedora instructions but alas they’ve been bumped to reference FC3 and though the FC2 instructions are still online they make heavy use of ATrpms and it appears that Axel is no longer distributing rpms for kernels < 2.6.10 (at least I couldn't find them nor grab them with apt-get) which left my apparently old, yet stable, 2.6.9 high and dry. That was sufficient to convince me that I'd wasted enough time for one weekend and that it was time to go outside. Elapsed time: 1.5 days.
However while complaining to a friend he suggested KnoppMyth, an all-in-one Debian and MythTV install that loads from a single CD. Despite the totally craptastic websites devoted to the project (clearly web design is not their forte) I had KnoppMyth installed and operational in just over two hours.
Admittedly two hours is probably a very long time for such an thing but I had to install KnoppMyth twice since I forgot to enter “tv” at the installer boot screen the first time around (I’m using a Hauppauge 350 for the input/output) which evidently meant that the system wouldn’t install the software (ivtv) required to output to my almost 30 yr-old television. No real loss, that, now that I think about it but nonetheless….
Half an hour for configuring the MythTV backend, half an hour for configuring the MythTV frontend and it’s working… kind’a. But not really.
It’s fetching the correct channel listings for my cable provider in Toronto but they’re off by three hours; it seems to think I’m in California (I do believe I just need to tweak the XML time offset thingy on the backend…).
The weather data works great and looks very sweet however I’ve never really cared about the weather ever since I discovered that what’s outside my living room window is pretty much always in agreement with what’s on my telelvision yet requires no pushing of buttons.
The TV tuner only seems to get channel 57 and even then it comes in like it’s being received via a pair of tinfoil-wrapped rabbit ears perched atop a bullet-ridden, rusty Airstream in Alaska. I can change the channels, so sayeth the channel changer display, but what I actually see onscreen remains the same… and fuzzy, very fuzzy.
Output to the TV… ha, right. Maybe next month.
It seems to record to disk just fine however I don’t really want to record channel 57 in all its fuzzy glory, offset three hours off from the actual time, so that 160 Gigs of space I’ve allocated towards recordation sits pretty empty right now.
The 350’s infra-red remote worked right out of the box, thanks to LIRC. Controlling your computer with a remote is very sweet. I never thought that surfing the web could actually feel lazier until I did it via remote.
I’m sure the audio out would probably work if I’d bother to hook it up to the stereo….
And I should probably now buy a DVD burner for it too….
All-in-all, a successful weekend with MythTV and I’m still on track to have in up and running by the end of February. If it’s not by then, I’m cancelling my cable.
Comments
Leave a Reply