MythDora — MythTV 0.2 In a Box

peterdaly writes "MythDora 3 is the first MythTV 'in-a-box' style distribution to include MythTV 0.20. Based on Fedora Core 5, MythDora 3 is designed to format your hard drive then install everything needed for a fully functional MythTV System. Here is a walkthrough of the entire MythDora installation process, including screenshots and a screencast."

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[rGauntlet]

Well, right now MythDora using Myth 0.20 and KnoppMyth (Which I use, and prefer) is on 0.19. Aside from the Debian vs Fedora, that's the main difference I think. The issue I had with MythDora was that it ships with a single-processor kernel, SMP disabled. KnoppMyth worked with my simple SMP rig right outta the box, no recompilation required. If you care and find yourself with nothing better to do, and trust me there are far better things to do, my read on it is on my website [yeraze.com].

Re:Why does Myth think it's an OS

[LordSnooty]

There are many dependencies needed to provide a fully-functional set-top box affair - video codecs, players, DVD apps, games, tuner card drivers, version of X, fonts issues etc. Even an educated linux user can find a mythtv install daunting, so packages like this are a godsend.

Also I'd imagine that most mythtv installs are deployed on single-use machines - the set-top box that does TV and nothing else. Thus Knoppmyth or this example are very much useful. Just slap it on and go.

Re:Why does Myth think it's an OS

[Dynedain]

Because there are so many extra components you need. Outside media players, codec libraries, driver packages, various MPEG decoding/encoding libraries, etc, etc.

I tried getting MythTV installed from the Knoppix disc. Plenty of things didn't work. It took me a few days to track down DVD playback problems. I then had to mess with getting the NVIDIA binary drivers installed and xconf configured properly. And then after that I still didn't have sound support (lack of drivers for my onboard soundcard). Oh, and I still had to deal with subscribing to a program guide service (with a one month renewal process). It got to the point where it was no longer worth my time. $150 for Windows MCE, and $40 for the NVIDIA mpeg encoder and I was up and running with everything working within a few hours.

People who want to use MythTV or Windows MCE, for the most part want it run as a dedicated Tivo-like appliance. They are going to be doing little if any desktop computing on it. For that reason, it makes perfect sense to have a full OS configured specifically for it, with default large fonts and display in the GUI, drivers and codecs pre-installed for most media types, auto-boot directly into the TV/Media interface, etc.

Sure, it's nice to be able to install something like this on top of your pre-existing, pre-configured OS. But for most people who want to use this technology, they'd rather wipe the machine and start clean.

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[Abcd1234]

For a backend machine that will be performing recording, commercial detection, and transcoding, possibly of one or even multiple HD streams simultaneously?

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[harryk]

Just a thought, I think someone else might have noted it though... KnoppMyth, while being stable, is out of date, atleast currently. Which is unfortunate because I think using the knoppmyth as a live CD for the front-end works great, assuming you have a .19 backend.

The other thing to note is that the 'live' CD is only good for the front-end. I've read on the site that they are trying to get a back-end running on a CD, but I think its still under development.

just my 2cents
harryk

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[harryk]

From the MythDora website, atleast with this release, they are indeed using an SMP kernel. Perhaps an upgrade is in order. It would be of my opinion that since they are effectively releasing a new distro, they should update the yum repositories to reflect their own, so that performing a 'yum upgrade' would grab packages based specifically on their distro as opposed to the raw Fedora distro. just a thought

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[businessnerd]

Other than some of the arguments already stated about Knoppmyth using an older version of MythTV, there are other reasons that MythDora is a good thing. I am currently running MythTV on a Fedora Core 4 x86_64 system. It took me a couple tries to get to a point where I could live with it, and one of those tries was Knoppmyth. Since I was having so much trouble getting things configured properly (remote, some DVD issues, etc.) I decided to give KnoppMyth a try in hopes that it would be a simple and quick setup that would not require any further tweaking. Unfortunately, I have some unique hardware that interfered with this theory. First, while SATA is technically supported, it isn't supported very well. I had to jump through some hoops to get it to work. Also, my monitor is an old Gateway Destination monitor which is just a 27" CRT that weighs more than Texas. KnoppMyth did not like this monitor and all text was incredbly small and illegible. Tweaking with X and with resolutions didn't solve the problem so I went back to Fedora, where I knew all of my hardware was supported. Doing the Fedora install a third time went a lot smoother than the first and a lot of the original problems went away and I had a very usable system. It's been chugging along nicely for almost a year now with some small quirks. Lirc doesn't work, but the arrow keys and number pad have equivalents on the remote control, so i can navigate the interface, select options and change the channel without a problem. Exiting things requires the keyboard. I will be doing some hardware upgrades soon, and will probably do a fresh install. I will seriously be looking a MythDora because I know that because it's fedora based, hardware compatibility will not be an issue and hopefully things like Lirc will function better out of the box. Furthermore, since I also use this system as a media server to my other computers, I will need to do some further tweaking of my own. Since Fedora is the distro I know best, especially for some of the backend server type of things, I will be more confident that all of my server needs will be taken care of quickly with less down time trying to figure out the ins and outs of a Debian distro.

Plus, competition is good. KnoppMyth does the same thing, essentially, but MythDora does it differently, which may be good for some and bad for others. But the good thing is that we have this choice.

Core 6 mythtv in my living room

[Beelub]

I'm running a Fedora Core 6 box in my living that runs mythtv full time and is serving me as general purpose linux box. It's working out very well for me, (though admittedly I'm a bachelor and have no wife in charge of my decor). Twinview with myth on the TV and computer stuff on the monitor. With mythweb running, it can't be beat.

It's easy to set up. "yum install mythtv-suite" installs -all- the myth packages including mythweb and such. Pretty minimal configuration involved. I'd say that starting with a blank box I'd just built, it took me about 4 hours to install Fedora and myth both from scratch.

Re:Why does Myth think it's an OS

[itsdapead]

Why has installation of Myth always been non-trivial?

Er, lets see: do you use satellite or terestrial TV? Is that analogue or digital? European-style DVB or the US equivalent? Does your tuner card need a firmware blob to work? Does your tuner card have onboard MPEG decoding? If not, does your video card have MPEG acceleration and is it supported by Xorg? How do you enable TV-out and set it to native PAL or NTSC resolution with sensible overscan? (anybody using a low power Via Epia system as a HTPC should be shuddering here) Analogue sound or passthrough digital? Do you want infra-red control - how would Sir like his buttons mapped? Do you need an IR emitter to control your STM?

I.e. its non-trivial to install because it has an impressively non-trivial feature list and works in many different environments. And, as other people have already posted, the major pain is getting all the hardware drivers working rather than installing Myth itself.

The weakest bit of Myth set-up has historically been DVB "tuning" (i.e. setting the half-dozen parameters for each channel) which got a lot better over the last few releases.

Myth is frustrating on every out-of-the-box distro

[kimvette]

. . . and considering that Fedora 5 comes with 2.6.16 (at best) it's not likely to fare any better on current-generation hardware. I'd still have to download the vanilla kernel, track down any vendor-specific optimizations, merge those in if the process isn't too time-consuming, then figure out which combination of kernel modules/firmware/tuner settings work with each rev of each card. Combine that with the suck that is Hauppauge -- I bought a PVR-150, chose it over the PVR-500 because I was skeptical and now I'm glad I saved my money on the dual tuner card. With a 500ms or so delay on the display it renders the cable guide totally worthless -- and you have a recipe for a craptacular HTPC. I then ordered an uber-cheap-but-easy-to-configure MSI TV@nywhere, and I had that card up and running in literally five minutes, compared to 3-4 hours of trying various firmware and tuner setting combinations with the Hauppage. Not only that, the MSI does hardware MPEG2 encoding, hardware-assisted MPEG4, plus NO appreciable delay in the display. Not only that, the MSI works with standard TV apps like xawtv and kdetv, whereas the Hauppauge works ONLY with Myth.

Or, install Windows Media Center and have it all work out of the box. MythTV may be GORGEOUS and offer tons and tons of functionality Windows Media Center will never provide, but Windows Media Center can be installed and fully configured out of the box in a half hour to 45 minutes.

I like Myth, really, and plan to put time into getting it to work perfectly, but it's hard to put aside an entire day to devote to setting up a TV/PVR application.

Re:Myth is frustrating on every out-of-the-box dis

[cesman]

Vendors choose to support Windows because of the large user based. This is no surprise... What is a surprise is that a lot of tuners cards that do work on Windows won't work with MCE. Why is that?

Or, install Windows Media Center and have it all work out of the box. MythTV may be GORGEOUS and offer tons and tons of functionality Windows Media Center will never provide, but Windows Media Center can be installed and fully configured out of the box in a half hour to 45 minutes.

Given hardware that works with Linux, KnoppMyth can be installed in under 30 minutes. One user reported getting it working in 10 minutes. That is from a bare hard drive to watching TV in 10 minutes!

A new KnoppMyth is just around the corner! It is smaller, faster and offers more features. Just be a little more patience folks. The elves are finishing up the work and Santa is tuning the sledge.

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[ManxStef]

You can fairly easily upgrade the latest KnoppMyth (R5D1) to the developer-provided packages, provided you're capable of using a command prompt, as explained in this thread:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=11558 &highlight= [mysettopbox.tv]

Unfortunately registration is required for the KnoppMyth forum (I'd encourage you to join as there's a wealth of information there and they're generally very helpful folks) so I've taken the liberty of posting the relevant info below:

[Posted by Cecil, KnoppMyth's lead developer. Note that I've added the information on how to get a terminal window and su to root.]

Not as clean as I'd like... But if you follow these instructions as root, you'll be 0.20. Make sure you backup first!

Open up a terminal in KnoppMyth by pressing Alt+X.

su
(provide your root password)
echo "deb ftp://knoppmyth.net/R5 ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
dpkg -r libmyth-0.19 libmyth-0.19-dev mythtv mythtv-backend mythtv-common mythtv-database mythtv-debug mythtv-doc mythtv-frontend mythplugins mythburn-ui
rm -fr /usr/share/mythtv/mythweb
apt-get install mythtv mythplugins myththemes mythstream mythstreamtv
rm -fr /var/www/mythweb
ln -sf /usr/share/mythtv/mythweb /var/www

During the install process, you see:

E: /var/cache/apt/archives/mythplugins_0.20a-1_i386.d eb not a valid DEB package.
E: Prior errors apply to /var/cache/apt/archives/mythplugins_0.20a-1_i386.d eb
E: Prior errors apply to /var/cache/apt/archives/mythtv_0.20-8_i386.deb

You can safely ignore this... I had to manually make changes to the package.

Now restart the backend and you should be good to go.

It's also worth mentioning that Cecil says this won't affect the upgrade procedure to the next version, so don't let that hold you back.

Re:Because not all the hardware is that simple

[xantho]

I have a Snapstream Firefly RF remote [snapstream.com], and it's the bees knees. By which I mean, it's totally awesome. I find myself getting pissed off when I have to use other remotes and actually aim them. It works fine with LIRC and seems to have most of the buttons nicely labeled for MythTV operation.

Another benefit of RF remotes in general is that you don't have to worry about finding an HTPC case with a built in IR receiver, or where to put the external receiver so that it won't look tacky. Just stick the RF receiver on the back of the thing and be done. The range is excellent (at least 40 feet and through walls).

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[arete]

First, because you need about a Ghz to make everything work at once on a single stream...

Second, because more CPUs is NOT directly related to how loud your machine is. Whether you bought good, powerful, quiet fans (case/PSU/CPU/GPU) is the single biggest factor in the noise, NOT the number of them.

Third, of course is dual-core chips...

Re:Now I wish I could get my Torrent Shows on Myth

[businessnerd]

YOU CAN! Here's how I do it. Every Myth setup has a Video section. This is a file browser that will launch mplayer or your media player of choice. In the Video Setup secion, it will ask you to define the directory for video (this is separate from your Myth recorded TV shows). Specify a directory (mine is /video/movies). Then all you have to do is just place some media in that folder. If you're downloading a DVD rip of a tv show from BitTorrent, you will be downloading a folder containing mulitiple mpeg's or avi's. Simply tell bittorrent to save the files to your MythTV video directory and the files will automagically appear in the Video browser.

In my apartment, the MythTV system acts as my file server. The /video partition (where all of the mythv media sits) is shared out to the rest of my computers via NFS. Using the computer in my office, I can browse for torrents and download them directly to the shared folder and then enjoy them from the living room couch. This is also great for my mp3's and oggs. All downloaded or ripped music goes to the Myth box and then you can listen to music either at my desk with xmms, in the living room through the stereo system and MythMusic, or from the laptop in any room (or even outside while in range of my router). The great thing about Myth is that it is a server for ALL of your media.

Been down this road!

[old_skul]

Having started with Knoppmyth, and then moved briefly to Mythdora, I settled in on a manual compile of Myth 0.19 on Suse 10.1. It was this configuration that worked best for me - because I had invested in 2 PCHDTV HD-5500 tuners. I could not get them working in Myth 0.20 at all, and finally made them work in 0.19. The feature set between the two is minimal, with 0.20 being a lot of fixes and optimizations, so there's not a lot of love lost.

Myth is not an easy thing for even the experienced admin to make work. Because of the dependencies and the hardware involvement, this is more than just installing an application and having it work. For people new to the Myth infrastructure, it's actually rather nice to have a live CD install everything that's necessary. For 90% of the folks wanting to try it, they're going to have a dedicated PC for it anyway. Of course, if you want to just throw in a tuner card and try it that way, you can compile it too.

If you're a Suse person, you can check out a HOWTO I put together for 10.1 and PCHDTV cards here [pchdtv.com]. It covers all the stuff one has to do to make a Myth box work with HD under Suse 10.1. While there are RPMs available for Myth 0.20 on Suse 10.1, the package doesn't support HD, which is what my project was specifically designed to be.

If you do plan on doing HD - be vigilant in your hardware selection! HD playback takes a considerable amount of computing horsepower. I really recommend getting an nVidia 5200 card for playback - not only are they super cheap, and sometimes fanless (read: noiseless), but they also support the nVidia XvMC playback driver, which accelerates MPEG2 streams, offloading decoding from your processor. It also does a fine job at Bob2X deinterlacing, required for watchable HD.

Re:Myth is frustrating on every out-of-the-box dis

[Abcd1234]

He probably means the buffering. The PVR-*50 and 500s don't just pop what they're capturing onto the screen in Myth in real time. They actually do about a 2 second buffer before showing something on the screen. Whether that's the drivers for linux or Myth I don't know.

That has nothing to do with the Hauppauge cards and everything to do with Myth and, in fact, ffmpeg (which apparently chokes if you give it a partial frame, and so Myth buffers conservatively in order to ensure this doesn't happen). The same would occur on any capture card, AFAIK.

And besides, how on earth does that make the guide unusable? If anything, it makes the guide *necessary* (as channel surfing is basically a no-go).

I do remember seeing something a while ago on Windows MCE where they were showing off how they had worked around the buffering and were able to just go to Live TV without any pausing. Hopefully it's a matter of time before Myth gets that functionality.

Not likely, at least not in the near future. This could be done if Myth sent the captured stream straight to the FE, while at the same time writing it to disk, but the issue is considered low-priority (and I happen to agree... the delay isn't long enough that I give a damn, and is really only an issue if you're one of those suckers that habitually channel surfs, rather than using the guide like a sane human being).

BTW, if anyone is thinking about it, please don't bring this issue up on the mailing list. It's a very long standing issue that tends to ignite expansive flamewars...

Re:Um...KnoppMyth?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

It might have been because I restarted the mythtv-backend twice in quick succession after doing the upgrade. The error I got was:

2006-12-14 20:01:46.515 Current Schema Version: 1135
2006-12-14 20:01:46.527 Newest Schema Version : 1160
2006-12-14 20:01:46.548 New DB connection, total: 2
2006-12-14 20:01:46.571 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: localhost
2006-12-14 20:01:46.573 Setting Lock for Database Schema upgrade. If you see a long pause here it means the Schema is already locked and is being upgraded by another Myth process.
2006-12-14 20:01:46.576 New DB connection, total: 3
2006-12-14 20:01:46.591 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: localhost
2006-12-14 20:01:46.613 Upgrading to schema version 1136
2006-12-14 20:01:46.638 DB Error (Performing database upgrade):
Query was: ALTER TABLE program ADD listingsource INT NOT NULL default '0';
Error was: Driver error was [2/1060]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to execute query
Database error was:
Duplicate column name 'listingsource'

new version: 1136
2006-12-14 20:01:46.640 Database Schema upgrade FAILED, unlocking.
2006-12-14 20:01:46.642 Couldn't upgrade database to new schema

Stopping the backend, running this on the database, and then restarting the backend---seemed to work:

ALTER TABLE program DROP listingsource;

So, to new users: If you're getting impatient, run "tail -F /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log" and wait until the database schema upgrade is complete before you decide to restart mythbackend for a second time.