Linux + MythTV = Win :)

As of late, there has been a lot of speculation about Home Theatre PC's. Originally, I had my heart set out on MS Windows MCE until Fragwizard on IRC pointed out MythTV. It's a terrific program, watch, record, pause and rewind live TV! I purchased a DVICO Fusion HDTV card because I was told it produced exceptional quality. Next, I needed a case that didnt stick out like a sore thumb, so I chose the Antec OvetureII. I'm pretty familiar with Gentoo, so that was the distrobution of linux I decided to install. I'm lead to believe that the MythTV programmer actually uses Fedora, however any linux distro will do. As a result, I now have a fully functional HTPC that's free of licencing, DRM and far more flexible than Windows MCE. Not to mention a 30c cone costs more than the software on this box . After a few days, I decided to grab a second TV-Capture card so that I could record other programs whilst still watching live tv. This time round, I opted for the Twinhan DVB-T plus, because in my honest opinion it produces the same quality picture and it's half the price (Maybe that's something to do with the screen?). Anyhow, you're welcome to take a look at my setup here.

Cheers,
Tate

 

what remote is that ? do u use LIRC ?

 

The remote control came with the DVICO TV Capture card, it's an IR USB dongle. Yes, I use LIRC.

 

how much did it cost all up ?

 

i'd hate to see the bill for that plasma screen added to the hardware price,
(edit: depreciation is good for humility ... Plasma is a lot cheaper now at $2-4k)

still, its a ~$1000 system with modern parts, prolly 50-60 hours of time to install, etc. ~$1500 if you upgraded it to athlon 64 venice, a new motherboard with extra sata connectors, and a few 300gb sata drives.

i think you'll find that most people who have tried with mythTV will prefer to use gentoo, fedora and debian are ok, but there's the hassle of finding and installing those 3rd party libraries in debian, and fc3/4 are obtuse about installing non rpm libraries when necessary. its my preference, but non-rpm/deb installs can get messy in the long run when it comes time to update for security/bugs/new features, etc.

anyway, the next adventure is to get the xml tv listings

 

ouch, i'll stick with my tivo.

aussie XMLTV

 

i doubt that, maby for a complete n00b. it would only take a few hours to get it up and running provided u know what u want to do and how to do it.

i also think he or his parants all ready had the screen, so the cost of the TV dosnt not come into play. Im sure they didnt buy the screen for the HTPC box. they bought the screen to watch TV and DVD's.

using gnu/linux to run a HTPC is awsome. not only its it 100% free it will aways continue to be

each to their own . pity your tivo cant act as a file server/or web server. not to mention the million and one other things this HTPC box can.

when i make my HTPC box in a few weeks ill stick with my gnu/linux

 

I'm not one to blow my own horn so to speak, but I've got a similar setup that looks like this:


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It's not gentoo or mythtv or mediacentre, but does the job!

 

1. AMD Athlon Sempron 2800+ ($135)
2. Asus A7VX8-MX Motherboard (Previous Machine)
3. 768MB PC3200 RAM ($85 - 256mb from previous machine)
4. Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 40GB HDD (Previous machine)
5. Western Digital (WD200JB) 7200 200GB HDD (Spare)
6. Sapphire ATi Radeon8500 LE (Previous macine)
7. DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T Plus TV Capture Card ($190)
8. Twinhan DVB-T TV Capture Card ($99)
9. LG 16x DVD-RW +/- Drive ($75)
10. Antec Overture II Desktop Case ($170)

That comes to a grand total of $754. We pretty much had an old machine lying around, therefore I decided to upgrade it. Reflecting back, I believe that this hardware is an overkill. I've since realised that the Twinhan DVB-T ($99) card is sufficient. I wish I had purchased two of these, rather than the expensive DVICO. Secondly, 512mb of ram is ideal. Even with MythTV + Apache, SSHD, Samba and other services/daemons running I'm sitting at 243mb of ram. MythTV than uses the rest of the ram for Cache, which is why phpsysinfo will display 99%... it's all buffer. No point having unused ram is there ? I believe that you could easily get away with a slower processor as well, maybe something like a P4 1.6ghz or Athlon 1800+. That said, I'm not sure what effects it'll have on HDTV. At the moment, I can view channel 7 HD fine, and the quality is AMAZING! However, Ch9 and 10 seem to play up a little bit. I get 85%+ signal/noise, so reception is out of the question.

I use Gentoo because that's what I'm familiar with. MythTV will work on top of any distrobution of linux provided you meet the package requirements. As you said, it's easier to manage packages with Debian or Gentoo. Fedora now has Yum, which is a similar thing but for RPM. On an interesting note, I have noticed that a great deal of MythTV setups based are on Fedora. I'm also inclined to believe that developer uses Fedora as well.

I don't understand why you'd need a top of the range Athlon64 system for a HDTV box? You're just watching Digital or HDTV (which is already broadcasted in MPEG2) and playing DVD's. A much slower machine is quiet capable of performing tasks like this. The biggest killer, if anything is HDD capacity. If you want to record more tv shows at perfect quality, then you'll need many gigabytes.

In regards to the plasma screen, flightcrank was spot on. We already had it. It's an LG 42", one of the early models. They retail for about $3k these days anyway, not $7.5k. The installation was mostly painless, some quirks along the way, mostly because I was not 100% sure what I was doing.

Gentoo is a source based distrobution, therefore all the packages are compiled from source and this takes a while. Configuring stuff took only a few hours? I'm quite confident I could do it in even less time now.

Don't forget, this isnt just a TV watching box, it has a webserver, fileserver and when I get some free time, I'll setup a mail server tatey.com. I'd like to move my mail off the computer, and on to this box. That way, it doesn't matter where I am, I can check my email. The other benefit is that webmail is independent of the OS, so I can be in linux, windows or Mac OS and still have access to my email.

At the end of the day, if you've got decentish spare box lying around, stick in a tv tuner card, intalll linux + mythtv and you win!

On another note, I also use TV_GRAB_AU to grab the XML channel information.

 

That's interesting FrIdGe

Few questions:
What application is that?
What distro are you using?
What TV-Capture do you have?

 

The application/disro is my own frankenstein creation of about 20 months now, based almost entirely around php/apache/dhtml/javascript to make up the interface, with mplayer in the background. There are better options out there if you know what you're doing (which you do) but this is meant to be an "instant" solution. As in you go to a lan party or something, pop this cd in an unused computer and play whatever videos, then eject it when you're done. Works as a permanent thing also though.

TV capture is unfortunately analogue right now as that's the only type of card I have. It has digital support in it, but I need a card that doesn't require firmware to work - does that $99 one you suggest need it? The tv card side of it is a little sad at the moment though, it has channels and it can record and such, and pause but no rewind/fastforward of tv. I figure I should fix other parts first.

 

By the way for those asking about required speed, I have had videos running on a k6-2 500 incredibly smooth. For hi-def tv you need a 1.5ghz or so, but for normal divx videos anything will do really as long as you have a video card with some sort of 2d acceleration (anything X11 has a module for basically) - old sis cards are perfect for it.

Actually to make it easier, here's an example list:
ark
ati
atimisc
chips
cirrus
cyrix
glint
i128
i740
i810
mga
neomagic
nsc
nv
r128
radeon
rendition
s3
s3virge
savage
siliconmotion
sis
tdfx
tga
trident
tseng
via

 

That sounds like a pretty cool custom distro you've got there, the interface looks pretty

The Twinhan DVB-T card is supposedly analogue AND digital. I just compiled the DVB drivers as modules (bt878) and it works like a treat. Udev sees it as /dev/dvb/adapterX/X. In regards to your question, it doesnt appear to need any firmware for it to work. As for timeshifting (pause, rewind, forward) isn't that up to the software, not the actual tv-capture card itself? The way I understand it is that MythTV (in this case) decodes the signal, and then creates a buffer where it captures the video. You can then "pause" and the video is still being written to the buffer. When you come back in press play, it just picks up where you left off and continues playing back from the buffer. The same applies to rewinding and fast forwarding. Even if you're playing straight live tv, it's still playing from the buffer, it's probably half a second or so behind because of that.

 

Thanks for the kind words if you're bored at all and want to read any more details, try www.gistos.com if it's working. ...and please let me know if it isn't!

The only dvb device I have tried was a usb thing (nova-t maybe?), and I spent a week messing around with usb drivers and hotplug to load the firmware and such and gave up. Some bluetooth dongles are the same.

Myth will be using either mplayer or xine (or vlc even) for its video...I was looking through the man page for mplayer earlier for something unrelated and came across hundreds of buffer switches so I might have to play around with them a little. Currently I can pause but when I unpause it goes straight to real-time. And it only pauses the image, not the sound. It'll give me something to do this weekend

 

MythTV uses MPlayer, however I think you can use Xine if you want to. Personally, I've never had an issue with either of them. Everyone else seemed to be using MPlayer, so I stuck with that.

Your site *does* work, I was going to suggest you should make a project page and release the software publically. Which you've already done .

Anything external USB sounds bad. I've heard of such devices released by DVICO, Happuage and Leadtek. But, you can't go wrong with a $99 DVB-T card. Remember unlike analogue, digital tv is broadcasted in mpeg2 and this removes a lot of the strain off the processor. It's not uncommon to find people using hardware MPEG2 analogue cards for this reason, primarily the yanks and their lack of digital tv. Everyone over there has cable anyway.

Just for reference, I picked up the Twinhan card from Computer Alliance. Have fun this weekend

 

i was probbaly going to say, you could set this up on a $300 machine if you had the leftover parts, $1k is just the 'bells + whistles' option. i figure the odds are high that ppl know how much it costs anyway...

(i had a feeling the plasma was bigger than 42" ... i wasnt paying much attention )

still, for $500, you could setup a nice new system with a mb that had onboard audio/video like the ati integrated s939 mb's, leaving a very capable multimedia system with room to move from myth to mame to big-screen WoW (e.g. check out the list of new/popular games in http://transgaming.org/gamesdb/ ), plus it's capable of anything, without scrounging for old hw.

in general, ati/nvidia cards are preferred for hdtv, since they have better DAC's for colour/res output, 2d accel, better agp support & actual video overlay accel on hardware.

having tried this before on an older system, i can say for example the s3virge ... doesnt have what it takes to even play dvd's well, so it's not just a case of having 2d accel, it needs agp + video drivers/frame buffer + x11 support too.

the advantage of the dvico over a cheaper dvb card is that it has analog signal inputs, but its not really that useful if it isn't supported in hardware. i do know that there is some history of the cheaper DVB-t cards not being able to record a full HDTV stream properly, but i don't quite know if the linux drivers have that problem. since mythTV just dumps the transport stream to HDD, then opens up a separate app (myth-frontend/MPlayer), you dont even need to have a 2ghz+ machine, just one with agp and bus mastering, so anything 500mhz and faster will do.

re fedora/gentoo, fedora makes things considerably easier, sure. as you can see by reading http://www.wilsonet.com/mythtv/prin...pandables=closed&ivtv=closed&pvr350out=closed , fedora mythtv works admirably too. it's just my bad experience with RPM and the holocaust nature of playing around with packages, dependencies and pre-packaged files. IMO MPlayer is preferable to xine, since xine can crash with bad TS files, or if the weather looks bad, etc. it just crashes. it might have improved, i tended to use the cvs versions. the only thing about MPlayer/xine is the frontends tend to be ghoulish.

for me, using XBMC to open files is easier, it tended to run faster and neater, since the xbox would be hooked up already to the speakers + tv.

 

Also wondering is the setup quiet? Are the fans noise distracting when watch?
Do you also use it as an editing machine when u want to backup and get rid of ads?

Cheers,

 

Good thread

I thought i like to spam this systm episode link. http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/media

In the near distance future hopefully. I've been invited to build/setup my uncles new home theather room and hopefully, using MythTv and linux to run on the media PC.

He mentioned that he's getting a dedicated room. So i'm gonna have some cool toys to play with and setup

 

Definately, it really comes down to what the user wants to do and what parts they already have.

No worries mate, sorry to get all defensive on you as well

World of Warcraft on big screen would be completely awesome! Infact, I should try it . That said, I know for a fact that WoW works under Cedega.

Both cards seem to peform on par for me in respect to HDTV and standard digital TV. I believe what you've described above is spot on. Bundled software and solid drivers = more $$

I have to be right next to the box with the sound turned off to hear the fans. The case came with two stock fans, an 80mm and 60mm (or something small like that). In other words, you can't really hear it. I think the HDD's are louder than the fans. Again, if you decided to put in a super powerful fan, you'd definately hear it. The whole thing is just a normal computer.

thetron: I was also sent that link from a mate on IRC, and it was what inspired to me persue MythTV/Linux. I did actually try knopmyth, but it just refused to find the correct driver for the DVICO (probably because the kernel was too old) and I figured if I have to recompile the kernel, I may as well stick on Gentoo. It then occured to me that I could also run a web server as well as screen + irssi whilst wathcing live tv and recording it. IMHO, MythTV is far more feature-packed than Windows MCE.

Cheers,
Tate

 

Hate to disagree, but I set my current mythtv box up and running in a total of about 5 hours, from fresh HDD to watching tv. and about 4.5 hours of that was just compiles going by, about 30minutes of actual configuring was needed. Although I suppose I am competent with linux, it all depends on your experiences.

You sure Tatey?
Mythvideo uses mplayer, yes, but mythtv doesn't use mplayer to show TV stuff, as can clearly be seen by the different controls and different OSD.