successfully set up a MythTV system

I cried, I wailed, I got the shits. I wanted to throw this box over my balcony and watch it smash in to a million little pieces. But now, its working!!!

Initially I was using knoppmyth. Its supposed to make life easier when it comes to installing mythtv. Well, for mythtv yes. If you use hardware that’s different from the developer though, life will be very difficult.

In the end, I installed ubuntu and apt-get’ed all the myth packages. I must point out though, that when I started this goal, mythtv was at version 0.18. Its now at 0.20, which has progressed in leaps and bounds in terms of ease of setup.

Ubuntu linux did help with my hardware though. The DVB tuner which I had just seriously wouldn’t work, at all under knoppmyth. I installed ubuntu linux, and bamm, it worked. That was a lesson learnt. And also knoppmyth did something weird when it formatted one of my large filesystems. The filesystem would say it was out of space, even when there was more than 50% free. Something to do with the maximum number of files on a filesystem. I reformatted that partition under ubuntu linux, and its been all good since then.

I’ve got two tuner cards in my mythtv box and it happily records on one while I watch on the other. And all the videos that I’ve downloaded look fantastic on on HD LCD screen.

Now that I’ve got a fully functional mythtv box, it was worth all the pain.

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php – the quintessential guide to setting up mythtv using Fedora Core 5 and mythtv. I was running in less than 2 days. the hard part is getting lirc (the remote control software) to work.
http://http://g-ding.tv/ – kind of like KnoppMyth, but using Fedora. A livecd for getting up and running quickly.

Good luck!!

So I rebuilt my mythtv box to ubuntu 5.10 and installed the mythtv 0.19 debs from thehunter.ws. So easy to setup. It scanned all my channels, added them into the database and everything just worked! Currently the performance is a bit crap, but I think that more has to do with it buffering to a really crappy filesystem which needs to be recreated.

I give this new version of mythtv two thumbs up!

I used Gentoo Linux for the OS on my MythTV box. It works great and was “easy” to set up. “Easy” as in I already had experience with Gentoo before. I have heard good things about KnoppMyth, so that might be one thing to look into.

I still haven’t bothered getting the digital tuner card going in my MythTV PC after all this time.

I know the aerial on roof is OK since I borrowed a settop box from my brother-in-law Jamie. It picked up a full strength high definition signal. So now atleast I know its that the drivers for the card are sucky more than anything else. Speaking to one of the guys at work, the 2.6.12 version of the linux kernel is looking pretty good for the tuner card, so that’ll be something I’ll definitely be trying.

Also, the next step will be to blow away the KnoppMyth install and go for debian. There’s just too many little things about KnoppMyth that bother me. Its a half-baked distro. Its nice that I didn’t have to go through the effort of getting the MySQL part of MythTV going, but it feels like that’s about it.

It has been handy to watch programs that I’ve downloaded though and playing MAME on from time to time.

I bought my htpc back in April. Its now July and still haven’t got it work. I’m making changes to the mythtv database.

Generally howtos and forums haven’t been much use at all. It all just seems to bury me in deeper and deeper into a sense of complete defeat.

Its been a long time since I’ve wanted to just f*&king smash something into a million little pieces. This is one of those times.