Mark's Myth TV Page

• Motherboard: BioStar M7VIZ v8.x
The M7VIZ has on-board sound, video, and networking, in addition to 4 USB ports, and the standard array of those archaic DB-25, DB-15, and DB-9 connectors. The sound is an AC'97 6-channel audio chip, which I am not using, because the interface is all analog. (Who wants to run 3 twisted pairs anywhere?) The video is a Unichrome 2D/3D system, which I also am not using, because I need a TV out card. The network is a VIA chip which uses the via-rhine driver.

My old motherboard was an ASRock K7VM2. It also has on-board sound, video, and networking, 4 USB ports, etc. It was a pretty good fit because it had pretty basic sound and graphics so I didn't feel as bad about not using them. However, the on-board network adapter quickly failed (after about 3 months). Later on, it developed this really weird problem where my PVR-250 would become inaccessible after putting the AGP graphics card into a high-resolution mode. After many hours diagnosing it, including swapping out video capture cards and graphics cards, I bought the new motherboard and everything began working again. Email me if you're interested in what the symptoms were.

• CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+
It was cheap at the time.
• Memory: 256MB DDR266
Kingston. I had a bad stick at first and they were pretty good about replacing it. I used a Knoppix distribution and MEMTEST86 to figure out the problem.
• Video: nVidia GeForce4 MX440 128MB (Apollo Bloody Monster)
Naturally, to do TV out, you are extremely limited in which video cards you can choose. I originally had a Matrox G450 card, but I had so many problems making it work that I sold it and got the nVidia card.
• TV Capture: Hauppauge PVR-250
Has an onboard MPEG2 encoder. You can actually

cat </dev/video0 >out.mpg

and get raw MPEG2 video as simply as that. Sweet!

Contrary to what some websites have said, the PVR-250 does not also have an MPEG2 decoder onboard.

• Sound: Creative SBLive
Uses the emu10k1 driver.
• Drives: 40GB, 80GB, and 200GB
I just buy what's cheap at the time, as long as it's a name brand. I have two Maxtors and a Western Digital.
• Optical: None!
I used to use my Myth box for viewing DVDs, but you can get a new DVD player for $29, so why bother doing it with Myth? Plus, this lets me remotely locate my box.
• Power Supply:
The list above seems like an awful lot to cram into one of those Micro ATX cases with those itty bitty 150 Watt power supplies, doesn't it? Well, with my old motherboard, for some reason everything worked for a good 18 months. Once I got my new motherboard, my power supply lasted about 3 minutes until I smelled smoke and it shut off. Now I've shoehorned a 250 Watt ATX supply in there, and boy does it look like a Frankenstein. I'd have bought a new case and a full ATX motherboard if I'd anticipated this...

• AGP Mode: 4x
• AGP Aperture Size: 64MB
• Onboard VGA Share Memory: None
• Primary Graphics Adapter: AGP
• Onboard Serial Port: DISABLED
• Onboard Infrared Port: DISABLED
• Onboard Parallel Port: DISABLED
• Ohboard MIDI Port: DISABLED
• Onboard Game Port: DISABLED
• Onboard AC'97 Audio: DISABLED
• Onboard MC'97 Modem: DISABLED

• In /etc/inittab, delete (or comment out) all but one of the /sbin/mingetty lines. No need to have multiple virtual terminals if they will never be used.

• In /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf, change the DisallowTCP line to "DisallowTCP=false", removing the comment character (#) on the front. I keep my Myth box behind a firewall and I like to be able to open X Windows from it on my iBook every now and then. The default configuration is to disallow X Windows over TCP; this allows it.

• If your Myth box is behind a proxy, add a line to your .cshrc (or whatever is appropriate for your shell) indicating such. For most programs it's an environment variable named http_proxy, set to "http://yourproxy:3128", for example.

First, you have to download the nVidia Linux drivers. You might do well to hit the archives page and download all previous versions of the driver, just so you can swap them in and out.

• If you are running X, exit X by executing 'telinit 3' as root. This will tear down X and leave you with a text console.

• As root, run the installer. nVidia has a canned installer (shell script) but it seems to work OK when I use it. Note: You must re-run this installer if you upgrade or rebuild your kernel.

• In the "Module" section, comment out or delete this line:

  
  #	Load	"dri"
  

  No idea why.

• Add a "ServerFlags" section:

  
  Section "ServerFlags"
          Option  "AllowMouseOpenFail" "yes"
  	Option  "BlankTime"          "0"
          Option  "StandbyTime"        "0"
          Option  "SuspendTime"        "0"
          Option  "OffTime"            "0"
  EndSection
  

  I think the first line allows X to run without a mouse. The rest of the lines tell X to disable screen blanking when idle. You don't want to have to hit a key every 10 minutes or so while you're watching TV. Note: This doesn't work.

• In the "Monitor" section, change these parameters to:

  
          ModelName    "0"
          HorizSync    31.5 - 57.0
          VertRefresh  50.0 - 70.0
  

  This lets you play better with a TV rather than a monitor.

• In the "Device" section, X should have autodetected your nVidia card and set it up to use the "nv" driver. You want the vendor-supplied driver, so change that line to:

  
          Driver       "nvidia"
  

  Also add these lines to that section:

  
          Option        "NvAGP"         "1"
          Option        "NoLogo"        "true"
          Option        "HWCursor"      "true"
          Option        "RenderAccel"   "false"	?? 
  

  I think the last 3 lines are optional. I have commented them out and it still works.

• In the "Screen" section, X probably set things up for 16- and 24-bit depth configurations. I just use 24-bit depth, so I deleted the 16-bit "Display" subsection. Then, to the 24-bit subsection, I added:

  
          Modes         "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
  

  This is actually a simplification of the default setup. Since we're watching TV on this box, we really ultimately need only one mode.

• Also add these lines to the "Screen" section (outside any "Device" subsection):

  
          Option        "TVStandard"        "NTSC-M"
          Option        "ConnectedMonitor"  "TV"
          Option        "TVOutFormat"       "COMPOSITE"
          Option        "TVOverScan"        "0.3"
  

  You might want to play with the TVOverScan parameter to see if it gets the picture bigger or smaller. Its range is 0.0 to 1.0, I think. I can't see that it has any effect at all.

• lame
• libdvdread
• faad - I had to change a few lines in the Makefile to start with a single tab instead of spaces to get it to make. Also, you'll need to copy the file common/mp4ff/mp4ff_int_types.h to /usr/local/include so Myth can compile.
• libcdaudio
• libid3tag
• libmad
• fftw
• mplayer

Next you need to get Mythtv. I am using v0.17, which I checked out from the CVS repository. Here's how you do it:

	setenv CVSROOT :pserver:mythtv@cvs.mythtv.org:/var/lib/mythcvs
	cvs login
	(use mythtv as the password)
	cvs checkout -r release-0-17 .

After that cranks a while and finishes, you need to build it. I like to get all my ducks in a row before starting, so I wrote a script to kick-start a few things. You may want some different options, so the kick-start file is a good place to put them so you will remember them. NOTE: You might need to configure the sound card before doing any of this.

	(cd mythtv; ./configure; qmake)
	(cd mythbrowser; qmake)
	(cd mythdvd; ./configure --enable-all; qmake)
	(cd mythgallery; ./configure --enable-opengl; qmake)
	(cd mythgame; qmake)
	(cd mythmusic; ./configure --enable-all; qmake)
	(cd mythnews; qmake)
	(cd mythvideo; qmake)
	(cd mythweather; qmake)

	(cd mythtv; make all; sudo make install)

	(cd mythbrowser; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythdvd; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythgallery; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythgame; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythmusic; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythnews; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythvideo; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythui; make all; sudo make install)
	(cd mythweather; make all; sudo make install)

Looks like you need to install the init.d file manually. As root:

	cp mythtv/contrib/etc.rc.d.init.d.mythbackend /etc/init.d/mythbackend
	/sbin/chkconfig mythbackend on

	/sbin/chkconfig mysqld on
	mysql -u root <mythtv/database/mc.sql

Next you'll need to run mythtv/setup/setup and set things up.

• Create a mythtv user, if you have not already. As root, do a

  useradd -s /bin/tcsh mythtv

  This will create the mythtv user and set its default shell to tcsh. If you want to use a different shell, adapt instructions here accordingly.

• If your Myth box is behind a proxy, you will want to add the line

  setenv http_proxy http://yourproxy:3128

  to the mythtv user's .cshrc file. The name of the proxy and the port number may vary, depending on your proxy.

• Next we want to tell gdm to automatically log in, rather than ask for a username/password. Edit the /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf file and change these parameters to these values:

  	AutomaticLoginEnable=true
  	AutomaticLogin=mythtv
  

• There is some weirdness with Myth and Gnome (NOTE: It seems to be working fine for me), so we need to make sure myth runs under KDE. The easiest way to do this is to launch the Desktop Switcher app and select KDE. It will instruct you to restart X; do it.

• Once the mythtv user is logged in, we want it to launch mythfrontend automatically at login. To do this, we add a new file ~mythtv/.kde/Autostart/startmyth:

  #!/bin/sh
  /usr/local/bin/mythfrontend &
  

  Also, make sure that file is executable:

  chmod +x ~mythtv/.kde/Autostart/startmyth

• Also, go in to the Control Center and disable any screen savers that are on. This is different from the X parameters we changed above, which do screen blanking after a time.

Copy my Makefile and ivtv.rc files into that directory.

You might need to edit them to match your current version. The Makefile automatically gets firmware from Hauppauge's web site.

	sudo make all install
	chkconfig ivtv on
	service ivtv start

	chkconfig isdn off; service isdn stop
	chkconfig pcmcia off; service pcmcia stop
	chkconfig mdmonitor off; service mdmonitor stop
	chkconfig hpoj off; service hpoj stop
	chkconfig sendmail off; service sendmail stop
	chkconfig canna off; service canna stop
	chkconfig cups off; service cups stop
	chkconfig cups-config-daemon off; service cups-config-daemon stop
	chkconfig iiim off; service iiim stop

	mkdir /var/www/html/myth
	cp -R /home/mythdev/stable/mythweb/* /var/www/html/myth
	chown -R apache.apache /var/www/html/myth

	alias /myth /var/www/html/myth
	
	<Directory /var/www/html/myth>
    		AllowOverride None
    		Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
    		Order allow,deny
    		Allow from all
	</Directory>

	chkconfig httpd on
	service httpd start

	CONFIG += using_alsa
	ALSA_LIBS = -lasound

• Playing TV and Recordings
In the General Setup options under Audio, I set the Audio Output Device to

	ALSA:iec958

and the Mixer Device to

	hw:0

I still haven't gotten Myth to control the volume yet though. alsamixer seems to have very little effect on my digital audio sound.
• Watching Videos
The player application to watch videos also needs to be told to use the digital audio. Under Media Settings->Player Settings, I had to add the following options to mplayer:

	-ao alsa:device=iec958

FC3 is pretty much set up to do Bluetooth, so all you have to do is turn it on. Make sure you have X running (runlevel 5) and do this:

	chkconfig bluetooth on
	chkconfig hidd on
	service bluetooth start
	service hidd start

The second item I got is a video modulator that, I think, has been discontinued. It takes the TV output of my nVidia card and broadcasts it on to the TV cable from channel 65 to 99. The concept is great, because it means I can locate my Myth box in the basement (as long as it's underneath my living room so the Bluetooth is in range), and watch the Myth output on some unused cable channel. It works in theory but the power on the modulator is so weak that I get a fuzzy picture. So this little gizmo's useful life will end after I run some wires (2 75-ohm coax cables for video and digital audio). It's just as well, because that little thing won't do digital sound, and once I get my HD tuner card I'll need it.