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Television Media Software Entertainment

Additional Software for a Homemade PVR? 66

Posted by Cliff from the it's-the-extras-that-make-it-special dept.
MankyD asks: "I'm almost done loading up a new Gentoo installation paired with MythTV and a hardware MPEG2 encoder. I'm looking forward to finishing but before I let it loose upon my television, I was wondering what else I should compile in. Samba File sharing? A webserver (for watching shows on the road)? A CPU/Memory monitor? An additional media player? Not to start a flamewar, but should I do KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, or some other window manager (especially when viewed on a TV screen)? What bells and whistles can I add to make my system that much more complete?"
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Additional Software for a Homemade PVR? More

Additional Software for a Homemade PVR?

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  • First thing I do is make sure it works. ;) Then tinker the hell out of it, and *THEN* add everything but the kitchen sink, maybe a Duke Nukem Forever server.
  • I use WindowMaker on my Myth box -- nice and lightweight, and plenty of key bindings for changing stuff from the couch.

    --saint

  • Build Your Own PVR (Score:5, Informative)

    by planetjay ( 630434 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @03:53PM (#13716444) Homepage
    Everything you need to know is at Build Your Own Personal Video Recorder [byopvr.com].

  • MythTV and Window Managers (Score:5, Informative)

    by ratboy666 ( 104074 ) <fred_weigel AT hotmail DOT com> on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @04:00PM (#13716506) Journal
    Optimally, it would be nice to run MythTV with no Window Manager at all.

    But... the application itself works fine, but when it invokes mplayer... focus won't change.

    So, we try "twm". Very lightweight. With the appropriate init file, everything is good -- except there are problems focusing WITHIN windows created by qt (that is, the application setup windows).

    Gnome is far too heavy, as is KDE. Generally, you really want the GUI to *be* MythTV. I use "mwm". Gets out of the way, and generally stays there.

    Ratboy.
    • I use (or have used rather) ratpoison. Worked great as far as focus is concerned.

    • I use "mwm". Gets out of the way, and generally stays there.

      My myth box runs evilwm, at least when Myth is running.

      Although I hadn't really planned it that way, I've actually found myself using my Myth system as a computer for work, occasionally. So, I have a few user accounts on the system: The "mythtv" account, which is automatically started up when the machine is booted, runs evilwm and Mythtv and nothing else. If you exit MythTV, though, you drop back to KDM and can log in as one of the other ac

      • Gentoo users have to plan their needs a little further in advance ;-)

        Not really - I just added MythTV to my general multimedia Gentoo box, and at no point was the system off-line or unusable while I was setting it up (once I added the pchdtv card, of course). I use Debian, Gentoo and Mandrake, and pretty much for any of these distributions it is equally easy to add the necessary software.
        • I think this person meant that Gentoo users must wait many times the amount of time because of compiling everything from source. I'm personally thinking of switching my Gentoo server over to Ubuntu or Fedora in the near future simply because of this one downfall.
    • I built my myth box with Gentoo, and the Gentoo MythTV HOWTO [gentoo-wiki.com] recommended EvilWM [6809.org.uk]. It's very minimalist. No focus problems, and so low-profile it's practically invisible. Ctrl+Alt+Enter opens a shell if you ever need one.
    • I use metacity, I've not had any problem with that. I didn't need to configure anything for the window manager, other than the Xsession.

  • Are you using the right distro? (Score:4, Informative)

    by EvilMagnus ( 32878 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @04:02PM (#13716529)
    Don't get me wrong, there's nothing *wrong* withe Gentoo, but if you're going to use MythTV and your machine isn't some tiny embedded Cyrix chip, why not use Knoppmyth? It's a heck of a lot easier to install than Gentoo/Myth-from-source, and adding stuff post-facto is trivial, what with it being a branch of Debian. And if you want to dive under the hood and tweak stuff, you still can.

    What capture card(s) did you settle on? What's your box's spec? Are you doing anything to mitigate heat/noise? Don't be a tease, give us the details! :)

    • Heres a link to some knoppmyth info if you're interested.

      Linkey [mysettopbox.tv]

    • Re:Are you using the right distro? (Score:4, Informative)

      by MankyD ( 567984 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @04:39PM (#13716865) Homepage
      It's a relatively powerful system for what it does. P4 2.53Ghz, Hauppauge PVR-350, 1Gig Ram, 300 GB sata drive, and a NVidia 6600GT (parts left over from upgrading my desktop to an amd64 PCI-e system.)
      • Shiney!

        I'd just make sure that you got all the codecs you could think of for mplayer (things like the AAC plugins for Xvid, the .mkv wrapper stuff, maybe .m4a playback compatibility) and Samba. For bonus points you might want to make sure you had a decent CLI bittorrent client, and some nice way to get torrent linkies to all your favorite fansub sites. :)

        The most compelling reason, to me, for having a myth box is the ability to play back absolutely *anything* - so I'd seek to maximise that by going nuts on
    • actually, knoppmyth has some built in support for epia via nemehmia C3 CPU mini-itx mobo's. (which kinda is a slower cyrix embeded chip, when you think about it, right?) ;)

      But knoppmyth is a cool solution to getting mythtv running quickly without nearly the dependencies headaches/etc.

      But if someone likes and is comfortable with gentoo there's no reason not to use the distro you like/comfortable with (well the only reason NOT to is that there's better mythtv specific documentation for x,y, or Z distro like
    • Some people are just more comfortable with Gentoo than Debian.

      Back on topic, load up MAME (and other emulators), grab some ROMs, buy a couple USB gamepads, and you've got a great console too.

    • I used KnoppMyth with MythTv 0.17. Then I had to do tons of mods in order for it to work with my IR Blaster and Satelite Receiver. Not to mention the ivtv problems I had to solve. Now, I find that if I want to upgrade, KnoppMyth reformats my root filesystem.

      Great, I can go through all that hassle again. What the hell are they thinking.

      I'm now building a new box with Gentoo, thank-you-very-much.

      Gerald
      • Ha! That's good to know. Sorry to hear about your pain. :)

        I do this kind of thing for a living (systems integration), so to me this is both a Fun Project and a example of Why Linux Isn't Ready Yet. Too much stuff needs individually tweaking or is held together with crazy-glue. I could probably make it work, but I'm not a normal end-user.

        And in no sense should an 'upgrade' require a reformatting of the root filesystem. That's just sloppy.

        • That's a distro problem - not an operating system problem.

          Steps for setting up mythTV on Fedora Core 4:
          * Assemble your computer
          * Install Fedora Core
          * Setup atrpms repository (preferably by setting up your yum.conf to be the one provided by fedorafaq)
          * yum upgrade
          * Choose to use KDE
          * yum install alsacore alsautils
          * alsaconf
          * install lircd (if you need it)
          * install ivtv (if you need it)
          * yum install mythtv-suite (installs frontend, backend, a bunch of plugins)
          * disable artsd in KDE options
          * Follow the step-by
          • ...sna?

            Which problem are you refering to? The 'reformat-root for upgrade?' That's an application problem, not OS or distro. The knoppmyth installer scripts have a couple of gotcha bugs in them. Nothing show-stopper to work around, but it's enough breakage to stop someone who's not comfortable with *nix and troubleshooting from using them.

            Example: if your HDD isn't the master on the IDE chain knoppmyth's install scripts won't correctly handle partitioning, even though the code, at first blush, supports this.
          • This sounds like the solution for me, a simple step by step. I wanted to play with the latest Fedora anyways, now I have an excuse. :)

            BTW, are there any gotchas with an HDTV card like the HD3000 [pchdtv.com] or is there a better HD card out there?

  • What I would add (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 ) <mspong.gmail@com> on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @04:19PM (#13716666) Homepage
    An RSS reader (maybe as a screensaver the way Tiger does it).

  • Keep it simple and minimal (Score:5, Informative)

    by powdered toast dude ( 800543 ) * on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @04:27PM (#13716747) Journal

    I recommend keeping it as lightweight as you can. My MythTV system sports not much more than:

    • Fluxbox (very very lightweight WM)
    • xine (I prefer it to mplayer)
    • various cdr/dvdr tools (e.g. cdrecord-prodvd, dvd+rw-tools)
    • apache2 for mythweb (mythweb installs nicely under gentoo's webapp-config

    and various dependencies of those. The fewer moving parts you have, the less likely you are to break something in the future.

    Oh, and I almost forgot -- once it's working, STOP MESSING WITH IT. ;)

    $0.02,
    ptd

  • Get a Mac Mini and Elgato EyeTV (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm not sure what I can add to the subject
    "Get a Mac Mini and Elgato EyeTV"
    The Mac Mini is small, quiet, uses very little power and the Elgato products are fantastic.
    Scrap your Intel box and Gentoo

  • MythTV (Score:3, Informative)

    by MadChicken ( 36468 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @04:55PM (#13717011) Homepage Journal
    I think you'll find MythTV is remarkably complete in itself. Another poster mentioned KnoppMyth, which includes MythPhone (A SIP videophone client), MythWeb (essential) MythGame, Samba, NFS, etc...

    The only thing I'd add after is ProjectX [slashdot.org] for fixing buggy IVTV captures and DVDStyler [slashdot.org] for authoring discs.

    I installed MythStreamTV [sourceforge.net] which was cool but I never use it, so I don't know if it was worth the effort.

  • Systm/Revision3 guys did an episode on MythTV (Score:3, Informative)

    by mTor ( 18585 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2005 @04:56PM (#13717019)
    Check out what Revision3 guys did with their box: http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/ [revision3.com] You can download the whole episode off their site.

    While you're there, they also have an episode on how to make your own HQ A/V cables: http://revision3.com/systm/avcabling/ [revision3.com]

    Enjoy!
  • mythweb... and samba for filesharing on your network.

    Maybe MAME and other emulators if that's your thing.

    e.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I use WindowMaker for the window manager. There are probably others that would work well.

    Other tools you might find useful for a box dedicated to media: mplayer/mencoder, transcode, dvd::rip, etc. If you have an Nvidia video card, the nvtv application is useful for setting up the overscan.

    I record all my shows at a high bitrate with my PVR-250 encoder cards, and about once a month I set up a batch transcoding session with mencoder to transcode all of these to lower bitrate MPEG4 for more permanent sto

  • Freevo (Score:1)

    by Ziba ( 575399 )
    I run Mythtv AND Freevo [sourceforge.net] on the same box. Mythtv has some great recording options, freevo has a "browse files on drive" philosophy which works well with my movie and music directories. A different X session for each and a little flipping in between and I've got the best of both worlds. I'm also running Jinzora2 [jinzora.com]. It can be persnickety, but it generally does the job as a web based jukebox for playing music at work from home.

  • My advice... (Score:4, Informative)

    by voxel ( 70407 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @01:24AM (#13719977)
    First and foremost, don't run MythTV. Really, you are asking for headache after headache. I know I am going to get responses saying I'm the idiot etc, but really... If you want a PVR that WORKS, forget about MythTV. -OR- *Buy exactly what KnoppMythTV recommends for hardware*, no less, no more.

    The problem really isn't MythTV. It's Linux driver support. For Hauppauge PVR150 cards (very popular, and great cards), you need the BETA ivtv drivers. After a solid week of tweaking this and that, getting a backend/frontend MythTV system working, I finally sat down and watched a show... Twenty minutes into it, the backend crashed. This is after putting in 40 hours easily into the setup. I got up, pulled the plug, went to bed. The next morning, I woke up, installed Windows 2000, and SageTV. Ever since then its been wonderful.

    SageTV has two commercial skip packages, one stolen from MythTV land (comskip) and one ShowAnalyzer made specifically for Windows and all the various PVR applications (BeyondTV etc).

    SageTV also has a web-server so you can do all the same things you can do with MythTV.

    SageTV has a real show-progress bar where you can actually see how far you are in a show. It even shows the commercial areas on the progress bar.

    SageTV even shows the TV video on the background (transparencies) of all the menus.

    SageTV has REAL tuner management. In MythTV if you have 2 tuners, each recording a show, and you hit "Watch Live TV", you get the response "Sorry, all the tuners are busy, go away".. You then have to go to the videos list, find the recording show, then select it to watch. Then cancel the show if you want to watch live TV, then go back to the menu and hit Live TV again.

    With SageTV, you hit LiveTV and its recording two shows, it will simply show you one of the tuners, if you try to change the channel, it will ask you, which of the two shows you want to cancel in order to change the channel. NICE!

    Also, with MythTV, if you come home from work, turn on the TV, see your 4 hour ring buffer full and its in the middle of a movie, you hit RECORD and it wipes out the movie up to where you are now then starts recording, LAME! SageTV will tag the entire beginning of the show/movie to be part of the show/movie recording, so you get it all.

    MythTV is limited to a SINGLE recording directory, you can use LVM to span your disks to join together hard disks, but you can't use network disks then. (Im sure theres some hacky way to do it though). With SageTV, I can use the hard disks all over my house in all my computers on the LAN. So I got my two 250gb cards in my server machine, a 160 gig disk on another machine and a 300 gig disk ona linux machine with a Samba server.. SageTV records to ALL of them.

    SageTV has great HDTV support for ATI HDTV Wonder, AverMeda A180's ($80!!), and Fusion 5 HDTV cards! I'm doing pure HDTV now with an antenna picking up 36 stations in the bay area.

    SageTV because its on Windows, you can use ATI Video cards for TV OUT.. With NVIDIA and ATI you can use Nvidia PureVideo decoders for PixelAdaptive hardware deinterlacing, features of new GeForce6 and ATI cards for kick-ass deinterlacing... With MythTV you get Software-Bob that eats 100% of your 2.6ghz CPU.. blah.

    Best of all, its STABLE.

    Now, mind you I am not talking about Sage v2, I am talking about Sage v3.0.11-PR11 Beta. http://sagetv.com/beta.html [sagetv.com]

    Read the discussion forums, and try it out. I did, and love it. I could go on and on about why SageTV is better than MythTV... SageTV even has a MUCH better expansion API called SVT's, to totally create custom interfaces and features within the clients.

    The only real downside is its $79.95 after your two week trial. I put 4 hours into SageTV and got further than 40 hours with MythTV, I have High Definition video, better support, drivers, etc, commercial skip, web interface yadda yadda yadda... 40 hours for $79.95 is $2/hour... my time is worth more th
    • You forgot the $200 for the Windows license, and the loss of your freedom.
      • SageTV 3.0 has a linux version. It's still under wraps but it does exist (was shown at last years CES I believe)

        SageTV after all is Java based (not that means it was automagically portable, but probably didn't hurt their cross platform development).

        I have no idea how they'll distribute it (there's some debate as to whether SageTV 3.0 will be OEM only or avaiable for consumer purchase directly)

        the Video Without Boundries [vwbinc.com] MediaReady 5000 will/does run on SageTV 3.0 on linux (I know some of the first test mod

      • Re:My advice... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You forgot the $200 for the Windows license, and the loss of your freedom.

        If he wasted at least 40 hours of his time setting up MythTV, then that's at least $200 of his time wasted.

        And if freedom means being stuck with something that crashes vs. something that "Just Works", then maybe giving up a little freedom is not a bad thing.

        On the other hand, maybe he is an idiot.

    • Wow with all that misinformation one might suspect you work for Sage TV.
    • As much as I don't want to, I'm going to agree with you....

      I've been running mythtv for almost a year now, and I use it for all my tv-watching and recording. And ivtv is the weakest link. Everything else about the software works fine, but IVTV is always beta and always crashing. I was expecting it to be a lot better since Hauppauge [hauppauge.com] advertises MythTV and Linux support on their page.
      • This is really only an issue for the US - in the rest of the world we use DBT cards and the drivers for them are rock-solid. It also saves your CPU from having to do all the encoding...
    • All my expirience with mythTV has been: PVR-150 and PVR-500 are very stable on the ivtv drivers
      • Oh come on now. The PVR-500 is recently and barely supported by IVTV, and not well. I have never been able to get both my 500s working in the same computer, and only recently have I been able to a 500 and a 350 in the same computer, with a lot of tweaking. IVTV is a complete nightmare, and unless you get a PVR-350 and just that, it is going to be a source of pain and suffering. Not that I blame the creator of IVTV, it must be a horrendous task to support all this different hardware, but that doesn't change

    • Re:My advice... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Sazarac ( 621648 )

      I agree Knoppmyth or a Gentoo/MythTV installation can be tough, especially concerning driver support. I've been running KnoppMyth on an older Compaq DeskPro that I picked up for about $90, plus a Hauppage PVR-250, 160gb disk and a NVidia with S-Video out, for about two years now. Previously, I'd had hobbyist experience with Linux (read: webservers, mailservers, ipchains fws), and was by no means a guru. The initial installation was pretty easy, but configuring and customizing stuff like: multiple drives

    • My only issue with this is that under Vista, we are likely to see very strong DRM. Certainly with encrypted closed channels from hardware to the playback devices.

      Windows is moving away from me and towards RIAA/MPAA and to an environment where I would have to pay every time I watch something (even if I recorded it from TV) and where I have to buy all my content again with each new media format or each time my media wears out.

      So time invested in a linux solution now- prevents me from being a prisoner in 2-3
    • SageTV doesn't look to support DVB ...
  • Went the same road, as I'm also using it as a my home server, what I have also installed
      - samba, as it is a file server
      - mldonkey, for video on demand
      - mt-daapd, for itunes sharing (but I don't use it)
      - monitoring trough hotsanic (local), snmp+nagios (remote)

    Also, do not forget to configure your console to use your serial port, you don't want to move keyboard & monitor each time you want to connect to it.

  • WinMyth (Score:2, Informative)

    by anglete ( 782289 )
    If you have a windows machine around the house that you'd like to play your MythTV recorded shows on (with commercial skipping), you can try WinMyth.

    WinMyth [sourceforge.net] is a windows frontend to MythTv. It connects to your linux backend and acts just like any other mythfrontend.
  • You can download Media Portal from sourceforge.
    http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
  • I made a similar system with Gentoo and MythTV a while back.

    Mtyh, if I recall correctly, integrates well with mplayer, so make sure to have MythTV and all of its plugins: MythVideo (which depends on mplayer), MythRadio (or is it MythFM for FM Radio tuning if your card supports it), and MythMusic. XMMS is nice to have as well.

    I like to have another video player on hand in case something screws up. It doesn't usually happen, but it will every now and then. I prefer VLC. VLC has a gtk/gnome interface to it. It

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