MLUG

Ubuntu 7.10 + mythtv

2007-11-30T06:20:00.000-08:00

Last month I thought I would return to give Ubuntu a shot at mythtv. This time it was the new release ubuntu 7.10. Last time I tried ubuntu the drivers were so bad for my Nova-T and it was hard to setup that I gave up.

This time around though things were very different. I mainly returned to using this because I've started development on mythtv with Bill, and he suggested that we use ubuntu 7.10 as our OS for development. After setting it up on my notebook with a USB TV stick (Avermedia Vector A808) I was quite impressed at the ease and features which ubuntu 7.10 offered.

Installation was pretty simple, it consisted of these steps
1. install ubuntu
2. install mythtv package using 'sudo apg-get install mythtv' or the gui package manager
3. edit the ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt file and enter the password given to you through the setup of mythtv
4. build the mysql database by copying the command from the information box after the install of mythtv.
5. run mythtv-setup
6. run mythfrontend

This was it and it lead me to think why do we have mythbuntu at all and this seems much better than mythdora also.

Keeping everything standard makes installing software, getting help and configuring the OS much easier.

It was also easy to make ubuntu auto login and start mythfrontend.

Transcoding in better quality

2007-10-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we spent some time looking at transcoding under mythtv and how we can get better results.

We tried the following with their pros and cons listed underneath them.

mythtranscode
+ uses cut list
+ smaller file size but not by much.
- don't know how to run the profiles
- quality wasn't great
- no aspect ratio

nuvexport
- really crap quality
- wrong aspect ratio
- unsure of parameters
+ 1/3 the filesize

$ nuvexport

acidrip/mencoder
- no audio
+ small filesize
+ keeps aspect ratio
+ good quality

So we really wanted to get mencoder working as it seemed like the best. Someone also said to us that "nuvexport just calls mencoder/ffmpeg and mencoder and ffmpeg are both built on libavcodec, the same as mythtranscode so likely you just need to play with the settings more".

After playing with the settings for 4hours this was getting pretty frustrating.

To fix the no audio problem when encoding in mencoder we had to update mplayer to the latest SVN release. This is done by the following:

Make sure you install subversion first. (this is done through the Add/Remove programs in the menu or 'yum install subversion').
$ svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
$ cd mplayer
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

We finally found a command in mencoder which produces really good output:

Works, aspect, with sound, good quality, small size, with index and seeking.
$ mencoder /mnt/recordings/test.mpg -oac mp3lame -lame opts "abr:br=128" -ovc lavc -lavcopts "vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:v4mv:vqmin=2:vbitrate=1500" -vf "pp=de,crop=0:0:0:0,scale=480:-2" -o "/home/mythtv/outfile.avi"

However putting this into mythtv has yet to be done successfully. To enter these types of command you have to:
stop your backend
# service mythbackend stop

go into mythtvsetup -> general, hit next till you see user jobs, then enter the commands in there. You can setup different quality etc.

I've put this command in, even hardwiring the intput and output doesn't work! I've tried putting this into a simple script then calling that from mythtv, which doesn't work. There has to be something simple to fix this. I'm going to ask a few questions and get this working. At least now I can run it on the command line and compress some of my recorded shows so it will take much less space.

blu-ray and 5.1

2007-10-11T05:47:00.000-07:00

Last night I burnt 9.8GB to a blu-ray BD-RE disk successfully and read the data from it.

I also got SPDIF (5.1) DTS and Dolby Digital working with mplayer on the command line through the optical cable. I haven't yet got this working through Mythtv. It nearly does though. I'm close but at 1am in the morning I had to give up.

Mythdora-Transcoding

2007-09-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

We got Mythdora to transcode so now we can convert our recorded programs into xVid, DVD or DIVX automatically.

First stop the backend
# service mythbackend stop

Go to setup
# mythtv-setup

Hit Next 6 times till you get to Job Queue (Host-Specific) section:

In here make sure you have selected the following:

In here make sure you have selected the following:
"Allow Commercial Detection Jobs"
"Allow Transcoding jobs"
"Allow 'User Job #1' Jobs"
"Allow 'User Job #2' Jobs"
"Allow 'User Job #3' Jobs"
"Allow 'User Job #4' Jobs"

Hit Next

Now select 'Save original files after transcoding'

You can also enter the commands and description on the next page.

User Job #1 Description: Convert to Xvid
User Job #1 Command: /usr/bin/nuvexport-xvid --nice 19 --input="%FILE%"
User Job #2 Description: Convert to DIVX
User Job #2 Command: /usr/bin/nuvexport-divx --nice 19 --input="%FILE%"
User Job #3 Description: Convert to dvd
User Job #3 Command: /usr/bin/nuvexport-dvd --nice 19 --input="%FILE%"

# service mythbackend start

VIA EPIA board

2007-08-21T01:44:00.000-07:00

My mate which has been working on this project with me has recently brought himself a VIA Mini-ITX board, with small power supply and CF card to IDE.

This we hope will work nicely with mythdora 4.0. It has an onboard mpeg2 decoder which will help.

Last sunday we spent some time configuring this and trying to get something to run on the small CF card we had (512MB). Andy is getting a Sandisk UltraII 4GB drive soon and we'll install Mythdora on that. The idea is we will use that along with a 1TB NAS drive so that it's all fanless and low powered.

I'll post specs and pictures soon.

Mythdora4.0 Continue, close to the end

2007-07-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

We started early, with a plan. The plan was:
1. Get a remote control working
2. Work out why the EPG isn't working
3. Work out a budget for our custom box

If we had time we would get games working under various emulators.

Remote control
We have a MCE remote control

We plugged in the MCE receiver and 'dmesg' command shows us that we have a: lirc_mceusb2 and it links to device: uhci_hcd.
It also said we have the 'Phillips eHome' model so it looks like we the newer style of remote, with the research we did. Here is a link:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MCE_Remote#Configuring_the_Buttons

Here are a summary of the commands we used:

Check that the receiver is in plugged in.
# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0471:0815 Philips

Load module
# modprobe lirc_mceusb2

Checking with lsmod
# lsmod | grep mceusb2

Did a search on lircd.conf files
# locate lircd.conf

Found a mce related one and copied that to /etc/lircd.conf
# cp /usr/share/doc/lirc-0.8.2/remotes/mceusb/lircd.conf.mceusb /etc/lircd.conf

Starting lircd
# lircd

Check the buttons are working
# irw

Then get lircrc from http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=8048
and dumped this into the file: /home/mythtv/lircrc and made symlinks

Bugs with lircrc file
VolUp on the mplayer, it is VoleUp, change this to VolUp
When playing music Fast forward is backwards, and Rewind is forwards, I also noticed it does this when playing a video

# cd /home/mythtv
For mythtv control do:
# ln -s lircrc .mythtv

For mplayer do:
# ln -s lircrc .lircrc

EPG update
I entered mythfilldatabase in 'crontab -e', but this wasn't working for some reason. I think it may have been a busy time when I was trying to update my EPG.

We entered the following into /etc/crontab:
0 16 * * * mythtv /usr/bin/mythfilldatabase

It's wise to use a time which isn't popular, so don't update between 2am and 6am because that's when everyone is trying.

We tested this and it seemed to be working.

Budget for custom case
We are using an old Pioneer CD Player and we are looking at a via motherboard etc.

We are thinking of this hardware at the moment:
VIA mini-itx EN12000EG $309 eyo.com.au
1GB DDR 400 $80 msy.com.au
Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112 $38 msy.com.au
picoPSU-120 ~$90 mini-box.com
CF to IDE adapter & power cable. ~$18 mini-box.com
Sandisk CF 2GB $45 i-store.com.au
Hauppauge Nova-T WinTV DVB $60 USED - Brad.

OR swap the VIA mobo for:
VIA mini-itx LN10000EG $198 www.pioneercomputers.com.au

This would allow us to have a fanless, quiet, low powered and cool looking box. I will try and get some photos soon.

At the end we even had time to get quiet a list of games working
Sam n Max ScummVM
Doom Dosbox
Wolf3D Dosbox

We had heaps of problems with ZSNES and SNES9X.
ZSNES has problems with audio
SNES9X has problems with fullscreen.

Mythdora 4.0

2007-06-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

This is the best distro for myth we have tested so far.

It uses the latest myth version 0.20 on Fedora Core 6.

It auto detected the Hauppauge WinTW Nova-T DVB and everything was installed already such as myth packages for, video, pictures, music, game, internet streaming, phone, etc.

It didn't properly work with the graphics card, sometimes it's all discoloured when running mythfrontend. I still cannot work it out.

We could watch tv, record tv, what the video collection, listen to music, view images, burn dvd's straight out of the box.

EPG
We've tried to configure the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) and we have it half working. We are using shepard as it's a perl script which auto updates itself and gets all the EPG information for free. We have SBS News, Seven and all the HDTV channels working.

We are very close to getting this working and it really helps with recording anything you want so you can watch it later.

Video, Music, Gallery
When we linked to the shared drives we had to use this type of command:
//10.1.1.2/pictures /mnt/pictures cifs defaults,guest 0 0

For the video we have changed to xine (default) to mplayer instead because it's so much better.

Games
Used ZSNES, this worked quite well but fullscreen is a bit hard to get working correctly.

Joysticks were detected on /dev/js0, tested this with:
$ snes9x -joydevl /dev/input/js0

Remote control
I got a new remote control receiver called a ma-620, and nearly got it working the other night at the mlug meeting.

PCLinuxOS 2007 continue... (with problems)

2007-06-10T05:54:00.000-07:00

Today we started to extend some of the features for our mythtv box, but there were many problems along the way. At the end of the day we had only made a few minor adjustments.

I'm also currently capped on my internet plan :(, so downloading things has been painful.

Autostart
First was to make mythbackend startup at boot time. mythtv automatically does this when you install, but it tries to run this as the mythtv user, well we don't use that user so we had to fix this up.
We had to make sure the 'mythtv' user had a shell.
As we have been starting our mythbackend with mythuser we had to delete /mnt/store/nfslockfile.lock

Now we typed the following to test it will work
# su mythtv
$ service mythbackend start

Also whilst we were in the area we made PCLinuxOS auto load in as mythuser

Emulators
We tried a few emaultors, and had the following problems.

ZSnes
downloaded the source for this off their website as it's not included in synaptic
untared it and configured it.

This had an error with libSDL, after doing a lot of googling people suggested we tried libSDL-devel. So we installed that. This didn't work either :(.

I knew a different SNES emulator and we decided to test this

Snes9x
Downloaded this from their site, untared and ran configure.
This bombed out with
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C++ compiler cannot create executable.

I installed g++, then tried again. This time it got a little further but still didn't finish compiling. It ended with a list of errors from the 'make' starting with:
Error: previous declaration of 'SDSP1 DSP1' with 'C++' linkage.

MythBrowser
Next we tried to get an easy to use browser to work within mythtv. There is a package called mythbrowser, this looked good, but turned out to be pretty pointless.

It worked, but you couldn't use a heap of keys such as 'm' or '2', 'space' counted as an enter. This was done by default. These are known as keymappings and are supposed to help the user, it only creates problems! To fix this you must install mythweb, but that will not install under PCLOS 2007.

We tried using firefox instead with the kiosk add-on you can make firefox start in fullscreen mode, and through the setup of mythbrowser you can tell it to use firefox, only problem is if you have multiple firefox windows open and closing them you need to use alt-f4, not really nice.

MythControl
This is for remote control bindings with myth.

The problem wasn't with mythcontrol it was with LIRC and how to configure it with our unknown undocumented onboard IR device. After a lot of work here, not getting anywhere fast we decided to leave this until I get my USB to IR device soon.

Mytharchive
This is used to burn DVD's basically. This works! but not straight away. As our cd device is /dev/hdc and the mythtv settings for this don't work we had to make a symlink.

# ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd

Now it will work, all we tested was burning a large AVI file in data mode to a DVD-RW, and we were happy.

Maybe next week we will test the rest of the burning. You can burn normal files, and AVI files to Video DVD's so people with normal DVD players can watch these as well.

TV Problems
After all this the TV part started to play up with timeouts, this was bad. I hate going backwards for a days work/hacking.

This was the dmesg error we were receiving.
cx88[0]/2: cx8802_timeout

EPG

Next we tried to get an EPG working, this seems near impossible. I remember we got half of one working under mythedition, so maybe we could look at that Hard drive and work it out.

It's all to do with this tv_grab_au file and how/where it phases xml data from about the TV stations. Seems like there are a few people making custom scripts for melbourne TV stations. Some use existing listings others use paid services such as icetv.

It's hard to setup and we haven't had any luck yet. This would be a nice feature as we would be able to see what's coming up on the TV and schedule recordings easier.

Conclusion

At the end of the day we have got the burner going and it's quicker to start up now.

All the other stuff we hit dead ends. We haven't had time to download MythDora4.0 as i'm capped, my mate is going to try this week so hopefully we will give it a go next Sunday.

As for the remote control, this will take some work to get this working I feel, but is high on our priority of things.

Priority of tasks left with current PCLinuxOS 2007
- Remote control
- EPG
- Emulated games
- Game pad
- make mythbrowser easier to use
- mythstream (internet TV and Radio)

PCLinuxOS 2007

2007-06-08T01:53:00.001-07:00

Last week we tried installing myth from scratch on PCLinuxOS 2007.

It mostly went smoothly.

I added my 'cx88_dvb' driver to '/etc/modprobe.preload' like normal.
loaded driver manually so we didn't have to reboot
# modprobe cx88_dvb

Added a mythtv user through PCLinuxOS User Management and made sure this user was part of the wheel group.

Installled 'mysql'

Started mysql
# service mysqld start

Installed myth packages, 'mythtv', 'mythtv-frontend', 'mythtv-backend', 'mythtv-setup'

As we forgot to install mysql before mythtv on our machine we had to load the mythtv database manually and grant permission to the 'mythtv' user with the following commands:
# mysql -u root < /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.20/database/mc.sql mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'mythtv'@'localhost' identified by 'mythtv'

Run mythtv setup
$ mythtv-setup

We had a problem with 'tv_grab_au' script not working, this is common and has happened in all distros so far.
We had to download this file from www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~wilu/xmltv/tv_grab_au_reg
rename it to 'tv_grab_au' and run:
# chmod +x tv_grab_au
Then move this file to any directory within path such as '/usr/local/bin'
If you had this problem you will now need to rerun mythtv-setup

Fill the DB
$ mythfilldatabase

Now we could start mythtv and watch TV, we logged in as a user called 'mythuser'
$ mythbackend
$ mythfrontend

Thoughts
At the end once this was up and going adding features such as video, images, music, games was pretty simple. The TV driver is the best we have seen so far, we can change channels in 3 seconds which is acceptable. This maybe even less if you have a good hard drive, which we don't.

Weather didn't work, but we haven't spent time fixing it yet.
News was easy so now I can read RSS feeds, but adding new ones doesn't seem to work yet.

What's next
Next we will test MythDora 4.0 and see how good it really is!

I would also like to get mythstream working as it allows you to watch internet TV and Radio.

We have brought some USB gamepads which look like Playstation controllers. We want to get these working with all the emulators especially the playstation emulator with GT2

Mythtv

2007-05-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

Andy and I have started our Mythtv project, if you came to the last meeting you would already know about this.

Our system specs

Shuttle like case

3.0Ghz Intel Pentium 4

512MB mem

Nvidia AGP 128MB card

40GB IDE drive

Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T PCI

What we have tried so far:
1. mythedition-0.5
download from: http://www.tlm-project.org:6969/stats.html?info_hash=123c313667a5444fcaa1cefd8c34855891261c24

This is a PCLinuxOS .93 modified distro for Mythtv 0.19, it has all the major plugins for mythtv.

This was very easy to load, just put in the CD, install on the HD via the 'install to HD' button on the background then we loaded the driver for the TV card.

# modprobe cx88_dvb

add cx88_dvb to your /etc/modules file so it loads this driver on startup.

The problem we had with this distro is that it took 6 seconds to switch between TV channels. We think this is due to some errors.

2. LinuxMCE on Ubuntu Edgy 6.10

LinuxMCE is huge it includes everything from mythtv to home automation. Also there is asterisk on there.

We couldn't install this as it crashed out when trying to install the home automation packages, so we gave up quickly on this.

3. Ubuntu 7.04 from Scratch

We install Ubuntu from scratch and installed the packages for mythtv. Nothing needed to be compiled, and this was quick and easy going.

We followed these instructions:
http://www.parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

The problem with this is the drivers for the TV card were terrible and we couldn't watch the picture as it had to much noise in the picture. This was tested side by side with mythedition which worked very well, but was slow. Same hardware, same place, same antenna.

Next we will try PCLinuxOS 2007 from scratch, as I believe this will be the best combo, due to the fact the drivers under PCLinuxOS have been the most successful and if we build our own it should be fast enough switching channels.

2006-11-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

Nov Meeting

2006-11-24T08:19:00.000-08:00

We meet at the Computer Bank on Victoria St, North Melb. We talked about Novell, CMS, PHP, Ruby, and lots more.

Later we went to JAWA bar where we enjoyed beer and talked more about Linux...

This is what happens every month.