MythTV is a suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems.
MythTV has a number of capabilities. The television portion allows you to do the following:
Custom mini-distributions are available to make it easier to install MythTV. A mini-distribution removes many of the "general purpose" workstation / server software packages that may be installed by default if you use one of the big-name OS packages.
See http://mysettopbox.tv if you'd like to install a custom version of Knoppix optimized for MythTV.
See http://linpvr.org/ if you'd like to install MythTV onto a VIA Epia M machine.
See http://bit.blkbk.com/ if you'd like to install MythTV on an XBox.
See http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ for instructions tailored to RedHat's Fedora Core distribution.
The upgrade from previous versions should be transparent. Any changes to the database structure should be applied automatically.
It is strongly recommended that you back up your database before installing a new version of MythTV.
See Saving or Restoring the database for instructions.
This HOWTO document is maintained at the primary MythTV website: http://www.mythtv.org by Robert Kulagowski mailto:rkulagow@rocketmail.com.
This document is available as a single-page HTML document at http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-singlehtml.html or as a PDF at http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO.pdf.
This HOWTO is for MythTV v0.18.
The following conventions are used throughout this document.
boldface - used for program names.
typewriter - used for program paths.
emphasis - Pay attention here.
It's recommended that you join the user list at http://www.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users. The developer list is at http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-dev. Please keep the developer list strictly for development-related issues.
Searchable archives for the lists are available at http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/.
There are two IRC channels dedicated to MythTV which can be found on irc.freenode.net
The mythtv channel is where the developers discuss code. It is
not a user-support channel. Please don't ask non-development
related questions there.
If you feel you need to contribute to a bug database, use the MythTV Bugzilla at http://www.mythtv.org/bugs/.
Contributions to the HOWTO are welcome, especially if you find a grammatical or spelling error, or if the wording of something is just plain confusing.
If you'd like to make a new contribution, feel free to email it to me mailto:rkulagow@rocketmail.com, but as the maintainer I retain the right to edit or choose not to use your submission.
If you would like to submit an update or contribution, please send it as
either SGML or as plain text. NO HTML. The source used to create
the HOWTO is in SGML / Linuxdoc. See the Linuxdoc HOWTO at
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Howtos-with-LinuxDoc.html for information
on the linuxdoc format itself, or look at the mythtv-HOWTO.sgml
file as an example.
Do not be afraid of SGML. A quick look at the source of this HOWTO will show that it is not difficult, so at least try to submit as SGML.
SGML patch files are the easiest. Run a diff -u origfile newfile > doc.patch and mail it to the address above.
This HOWTO document will focus on manually building MythTV in a North American environment. If you have installation instructions for a different region or Linux distribution, please send them to the author so that it can be included in other versions of this document.
You must ensure that any firewalls (either hardware, or a software firewall installed by your distribution) will not block access to the ports that will be used by the MythTV clients and servers on the "inside" LAN. The ports for MySQL (TCP port 3306) and mythbackend (TCP ports 6543 and 6544) must be open. It is strongly recommended that you do not expose the MythTV and MySQL ports to the Internet or your "Outside" LAN.
Hardware selection is a complex topic, one this HOWTO will only discuss briefly and in general terms. The following subsections offer some general guidance but stop short of offering specific recommendations.
For a good MythTV experience, you must understand that MythTV exercises your hardware more than a typical desktop. Encoder cards generate DMA across the PCI bus. The CPU is busy encoding / decoding video. Hard drives are constantly reading and writing data. Building a MythTV system on older / "spare" hardware may be an exercise in frustration. Using hardware that is marginal for the intended application will cause many, many hours of frustration!
For more detail about actual configurations that others have used, Mark Cooper has setup a hardware database at http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/. The website will let you browse what other users have reported as their hardware configuration, and how happy they are with the results.
If you have specific questions about the suitability of specific hardware choices, you can consult the archives of the mythtv-users mailing list at http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/ or post a question to the list.
Selection of CPU type and speed is one of the trickiest elements of hardware selection, mainly because there are so many tradeoffs which can be made. For example, if you have plenty of CPU, you can use higher bitrates or capture sizes, etc.
MythTV has two modes of operation. First, it can function as a software video encoder, which means that it uses a fairly generic "dumb" video capture card to get frames of video, encodes them using the CPU on your motherboard and writes them to disk. High-end video capture cards and devices like the TiVo and ReplayTV have dedicated encoder chips which use specialized hardware to convert the video stream to the MPEG-2 format without using the motherboard CPU. The main CPU has the responsibility of running the Operating System and reading and writing the encoded frames to the disk. These tasks have fairly low CPU requirements compared to encoding video, which is why a device like a Series 1 TiVo can run with only 16MB of RAM and a 54MHz CPU.
There are many variables that go into the question: "How fast a CPU do I need to run MythTV"? Obviously, the faster your CPU, the better your experience will be with MythTV. If you are using the software MPEG-4 encoder and performing the "Watch TV" function, where the CPU is both encoding and decoding video simultaneously to allow Pause, Fast Forward and Rewind functions for live TV requires more CPU then just encoding or decoding. MythTV also supports multiple encoder cards in a single PC, thereby increasing the CPU requirements if you plan on simultaneously encoding multiple programs. As a general guideline, plan on 1GHz per encoder if you are doing software-based encoding, less if you are using a hardware-based encoder.
Here are a few data points:
The second mode of operation is where MythTV is paired with a hardware-based video encoder, such as a Matrox G200 or a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250/350. In this mode, because the video encoding is being done by a dedicated video processor, the host CPU requirements are quite low. See the Video Capture Device section for details.
If you have a Via M10000 series or a Hauppauge PVR-350, MythTV can use the hardware-based video decoder for playback, which further reduces CPU requirements.
A MythTV host that is both a backend and a frontend and using software encoding with a single capture card should run adequately in 256MB of RAM. Additional RAM above 256MB will not necessarily increase performance, but may be useful if you are running multiple encoders.
Encoded video takes up a lot of hard disk space. The exact amount depends on the encoding scheme, the size of the raw images, and the frames per second, but typical values for MythTV range from 700 megabytes/hour to 2 gigabyte/hour for MPEG-4 and larger for MPEG-2 and RTjpeg.
Writing video to disk is sensitive to timing issues; RTjpeg requires less CPU with the tradeoff being larger files and needing to write to the disk faster. MPEG-4 requires more CPU, but the files are smaller. At the default resolution, MPEG-2 creates the largest files of all with almost no CPU impact.
See the Troubleshooting section for more information.
MythTV creates large files, many in excess of 2GB. You must use a filesystem that will allow you to create large files. Filesystems known to have problems with large files are FAT and FAT32.
Because MythTV creates very large files, a filesystem that does well at deleting large files is important. Numerous benchmarks show that XFS and JFS do very well at this task. You are strongly encouraged to consider either of these for your MythTV filesystem.
Because of the size of the MythTV files, it may be useful to plan for future expansion right from the beginning. If your case and power supply have the capacity for additional hard drives, read through the LVM and Advanced Partition Formatting sections for some pointers.
In order to capture video, MythTV will need one or more video capture devices with Linux drivers. There are a number of classes of hardware available for capturing video.
This class of card is the simplest and is usually the cheapest. There is no on-board encoding of the analog video; hardware known as a Digital-Analog Converter (DAC) takes the video and presents it to the computer in an essentially raw digital form.
For a list of video capture cards known to work with Linux, please see
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/video4linux/bttv for a partial
listing; even if your specific card is not listed, it may be that the vendor
is actually using a standard reference design and placing their own name on
it. See the video4linux mailing list (
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/video4linux-list) for
more information and for specific hardware questions.
The most common inexpensive cards available use the Bt848 or Bt878 video capture chip; examples are the "Hauppauge WinTV Go" card and the "AverTV Desktop PVR" card, both of which use the bttv kernel module.
NOTE: The ATI TV Wonder series and the ATI All-in-Wonder series of cards are not the same. The All-in-Wonder cards will not work with MythTV.
Newer cards may use the CX23881 series of chips; a driver is available at http://bytesex.org/cx88/.
After you have installed a suitable capture device, you can check that
the kernel sees it with lspci. Look for an entry labeled "Multimedia
video controller". To get more detailed information about the card, use
lspci -v or lspci -vv. Ensure that your system is loading
the bttv modules by typing:
# lsmod |grep bttv
You want to see the bttv module listed.
While inexpensive video-capture cards simply capture raw frames, leaving encoding to software, some higher-end cards incorporate hardware-based encoding. Using either a G200 MJPEG encoder card, or a MPEG-2 encoder card supported by the IvyTV project http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/ such as the Hauppauge PVR-250, PVR-350, Avermedia M179, Hauppauge "Freestyle" or Yuan M600 cards will allow you to use dedicated hardware encoders rather than your CPU. (The PVR-350 can simultaneously be used as an output device.) Using the on-board MPEG-2 encoder drastically reduces the CPU requirements for encoding.
NOTE: Motherboards with the Via chipset are notoriously bad with DMA and have caused numerous issues with ivtv, including hard locks. See the ivtv website (url url="http://ivtv.sf.net" name="http://ivtv.sf.net") for the latest information on what works and what doesn't.
Here are some data points for encoding:
Here are some data points for decoding:
DVB is a video standard primarily found in Europe. MythTV supports DVB; see the pages maintained by Martin Smith martin@ethics-gradient.net at http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/mythdvb.html for more information. To see if your DVB card is supported, see the list of cards at http://www.linuxtv.org/download/dvb/CARDS for more information.
In the United States, you may use a card such as the TwinHan to obtain unencrypted Free-To-Air satellite channels.
Currently there are two HDTV card with Linux drivers which are known to operate in the United States - the HD-2000/HD-3000 cards available from http://www.pchdtv.com/ or http://mythic.tv/ and the Air2PC-ATSC-PCI available from http://www.cyberestore.com/product_info.php?cPath=28&products_id=103 or http://mythic.tv/.
The Air2PC is supported using the linux-dvb drivers.
To playback HDTV content, plan on a powerful CPU. "How powerful?" depends on a number of factors, such as the capture resolution, whether the video is progressive or interlaced, and whether your display card has hardware-assist support for Linux. For 720p content (1280x720), a 2.4GHz P4 should be sufficient.
For 1920x1080i->1920x1080p with the better deinterlacing methods done in real time a 2.4GHz CPU is taxed, but should work if you use "Bob and Weave" deinterlacing, or if you have an NVIDIA card with MPEG-2 hardware accelleration. If you enable the hardware accelleration, you may be able to use a 1.8GHz processor.
You may use the Firewire output of the DCT6200 or the SA3250.
The Plextor ConvertX PVR devices are supported through Linux drivers available from http://www.plextor.com/english/support/LinuxSDK.htm. MythTV uses the Plextor to capture hardware encoded MPEG-4, so the host CPU requirements are low.
NOTE: MythTV support for the Plextor devices is in CVS as of 2005-03-19.
There are no known consumer-level capture devices which will allow you to capture the HDTV output (either DVI or HDMI) from a set-top box commonly found with digital cable systems or satellite systems.
There are no known consumer-level capture devices which will allow you to capture component output from a set-top box.
The system needs a sound card or an on-board equivalent on the motherboard to play back and in most cases, to record sound. Any sound card that can be operated by the ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) kernel modules will work with MythTV. However, some cards and drivers will provide better quality or compatibility than others. In particular, many audio devices included on motherboards can be problematic.
The usual practice for capturing the audio associated with the video
is to run a cable from an audio output on the video capture card to
the Line input on a sound card. However, some video capture cards
provide on-board audio capabilities that work with the kernel
btaudio module instead, thereby eliminating the need for a
cable. This is useful if you will be using multiple capture cards in
a single chassis, since each capture card will not need its own sound
card. Note that a separate sound card is still required for playback
when using btaudio, and that often the audio recorded in this
way will be mono only. See the
btaudio
section for more information.
MythTV will work with just about any video card. However, it is highly
recommended that you use a card which supports XVideo (XV) extensions. If
your card does not support XV, color conversion and scaling will be
performed by your CPU rather than the video card. This is very CPU
and memory intensive and will often result in dropped frames and a
corresponding degradation of quality. Check the XFree86 documentation
for details if you are uncertain about your preferred card. You may
also run xvinfo; look for your video card to be listed as one
of the adapters.
If you want to use MythTV with a standard television, you will need a physical connection from your video card to your TV set, which can either be a TV-out port on the card itself or an external adapter that converts the VGA signal to an appropriate video signal. "Appropriate" depends on a number of factors, such as video standard (NTSC vs PAL) type of input connection (Composite vs SVideo), etc.
Note that with some video cards and X drivers, XVideo extensions are only supported on the VGA output, and not on the TV output.
The next section deals with a number of cards that are known to have TV-out ports. The list is unlikely to be complete, so if you know of others, please post a message to the mythtv-users mailing list so the information can be included in future versions of the HOWTO. The list is organized by manufacturer.
Reports here are based on what users of the cards have posted on the mythtv-users mailing list, so if you need configuration details, please search the archives at http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/ using the card name in your search string.
ATI makes many cards with TV-out capability, but ATI offers no official support for their use with Linux. The standard XFree86 ati driver does not support TV-out.
The enhanced ati.2 X driver created by the GATOS http://gatos.sourceforge.net project offers some support for TV-out, but only in its "experimental" version, available through CVS. There have been reports from people who say they have made this driver work with one or another ATI card. For example, Bruce Markey mailto:bjm@lvcm.com writes (on the mythtv-users mailing list): "I got this to work. You can quote me on that. I've used TV-out on several models of ATI cards both All-In-Wonder and regular cards with TV-out." See the "Adventurous Setup" section of http://gatos.sourceforge.net/watching_tv.php for details. Also see http://www.retinalburn.net/linux/tvout.html for more information.
Specific cards:
The standard Matrox driver included with XFree86 does not support TV-out.
Older Matrox cards can be used with a proprietary X driver provided by Matrox, and it does simultaneously support TV out and XVideo on some cards. See http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/files/lnx_21.cfm for details.
Newer Matrox cards can be run with a set of kernel patches (for kernel 2.4.19) and a customized X driver, but this arrangement does not support XVideo on TV-out. See http://www.bglug.ca/matrox_tvout/g450_tvout_howto.html for details.
Specific cards:
Some NVIDIA cards with TV-out can be run using the standard nv driver in XFree86, combined with the userspace application nvtv to control the TV-out port. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/nv-tv-out/ for details. Recent versions of the NVIDIA driver have better support for overscan and other features useful with TV-Out, so the nvtv application may not be required.
Some NVIDIA cards can be run with a proprietary NVIDIA X driver made available by NVIDIA. See http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux for more information.
Specific cards:
The standard savage X driver supports TV out on some Savage cards. Unfortunately, XVideo support for the Savage 2000 card (a very common and inexpensive Savage card with TV out) is broken. See http://www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html for details.
Specific cards:
MythTV supports the TV-out and MPEG-2 decoder functions in the IvyTV driver.
The PVR-350 is unique in that it also supports audio output. However, as of MythTV 0.17, the IvyTV drivers do not support volume control. There are two courses of action you may take:
Some devices with on-board TV-out capability, such as XBoxes converted to Linux and some laptops, can be used as MythTV frontends to display on a television screen. Please consult the mythtv-users mailing list for messages that report the details of these special arrangements.
External adapters convert standard VGA output to a form suitable for display on a television. The output format varies by region, since different countries have different TV standards. People on the mythtv-users list have mentioned these adapters:
There are a few ways of installing programs on Linux systems; you can either use a pre-compiled package, or install from a tarball after satisfying any prerequisites.
A number of people have created pre-compiled packages for MythTV that may make your installation easier.
If you use any of the pre-compiled packages you may not need to perform any additional configuration steps in this HOWTO. The next logical step is configuring MySQL, which you may or may not have to perform. See your package documentation.
Red Hat Linux (9, 8.0 and 7.3) and Fedora Core (2 and 1) packages for MythTV and all of its add-on modules and some themes have been packaged by mailto:Axel.Thimm@ATrpms.net and are available at http://ATrpms.net/topic/multimedia/. All of the prerequisites for MythTV (such as XMLTV) are available as RPM packages. If you have problems with the RPMs, please contact the ATrpms lists at http://lists.ATrpms.net/ or file a bug against http://bugzilla.ATrpms.net/.
Given the large number of dependent RPMs you are advised to use tools like apt or yum for automatic retrieval and installation of the required RPMs. ( http://ATrpms.net/install.html) In this case a special meta-package called mythtv-suite will allow you to install all of MythTV and its add-ons, plus all dependencies.
If you don't have apt or yum on your machine, download and install the atrpms-kickstart package from http://ATrpms.net/name/atrpms-kickstart/. Install the package with:
# rpm -Uvh atrpms-kickstart*
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
# apt-get update
# apt-get install mythtv-suite
Further documentation on using ATrpms packages can be found in Jarod Wilson's ( mailto:jcw@wilsonet.com) HOWTO at http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ Just like 3rd-party packages, any 3rd-party documentation problems should be brought up with the 3rd-parties (maintainer, lists, bugzillas etc.).
Thac has created RPMs for MythTV for Mandrake 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 which may be obtained from http://rpm.nyvalls.se/ If you have problems with the RPMs, please send him email directly at thac@nyvalls.se.
Debian packages for MythTV and most of its add-on modules are maintained by Matt Zimmerman mailto:mdz@debian.org and are available at http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian/dists/unstable/mythtv/. Installation instructions can be found on those pages as well. All of the prerequisites for MythTV are available as Debian packages, most of them from the official Debian archive.
If you have followed the instructions on the above page you should have added
deb-src http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian unstable mythtv
to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Running apt-get update and then
executing apt-get build-dep mythtv should install all the
pre-requisites required to compile MythTV.
The Debian packages are configured such that MythTV programs should be
run as the mythtv user, which is automatically created during
installation. This user has access to write new recordings to disk in the
default directory, read and write the database, access the audio and video
devices, and everything else that MythTV needs to do.
See /usr/share/doc/packagename/README.Debian for more
information, including copies of the MythTV documentation. The
mythtv-doc package contains a copy of this HOWTO in
/usr/share/doc/mythtv-doc.
You may use the graphical tools that come with your distribution, or you can use command-line utilities. Either system will get the job done, and it all depends on your comfort level with Linux.
In order to compile MythTV, we need to make sure that the software it needs is installed. As of 2003-03-15, this list includes mysql, gcc, freetype2-devel, XFree86-devel, qt-devel and lame. If you're going to use a remote control with MythTV, you're going to need the cdialog package in order to compile lircd if your distribution doesn't have a pre-packaged lirc. If you are using XMLTV as a grabber, you will need perl.
NOTE: Qt v3.1 or higher is required. NOTE: If you are going to be using RPMs to install various components, you should be aware that not all packages include the necessary headers for compiling packages. If you're having trouble compiling, ensure that you've installed the -devel version of a prerequisite. NOTE: Other than where noted, Mandrake 9.1 and 10.0 users may follow the Mandrake 9.0 instructions.
On systems running KDE, a tool which will allow you to see what packages are available and if they're installed on your system can be accessed by clicking K->Configuration->Packaging->KPackage
While the graphical tools are nice, the command line tool is actually easier to use. It's strongly recommended that you use the command line tool.
There are many inter-related modules, so make sure that you've got the main package for each one, and not a sub package for an unrelated item. For example, there are many modules that have "perl" in them; some are a part of the apache web server, others are a part of the perl distribution. In each case, we're looking to make sure that the primary module is getting installed.
Click the magnifying glass or press CTRL-F and enter "perl" as your search term. You should find it under the "Perl" folder. You need at least the perl 5.80 base package installed. If not, click on the "Mark" button.
If you are going to be installing MySQL on this system, search for mysql - it should be under "Databases". Make sure that mysql and mysql-clients are installed. If not, click on "Mark".
Search for gcc. You're going to need gcc and gcc-c++ installed.
Search for freetype2. Make sure that you've got freetype2 and freetype2-devel installed.
Search for XFree86-devel.
Finally, check for qt. You'll need libqt3-devel (under folder "KDE and Qt") and libqt3 ("Libraries").
Make sure that cdialog is installed if you want to use MythTV with a remote control if you need to compile lirc from source.
alsa-utils is needed for setting the volume. MythTV now has native volume support, but you may have a special configuration that necessitates an external program to adjust your volume settings. If this is the case, then you can disable native volume support.
If you marked anything to install, click on Install Marked. Click "Yes" or OK if you get a message about satisfying dependencies.
This section details the various methods for installing prerequisites from the command line.
urpmi is the simplest tool for installation of packages from the
command line, but properly configuring it can be difficult. The
following website
http://addmedia.linuxfornewbies.org/ will allow you to choose
a mirror site and then present the command-line configuration text for that
mirror. You will most likely need to add a "Contrib" mirror to your setup.
If you add a site from the "Penguin Liberation Front", you will be able to
load the lame library without compiling from source.
The simplest tool for installing packages from the command line is urpmi.
Open a shell, and execute the following, all on the same line. You may get asked a number of questions regarding dependencies. It's best to answer "YES".
$ su
# urpmi mysql gcc gcc-c++ freetype2-devel cdialog alsa-utils
# urpmi XFree86-devel perl
# urpmi libqt3-devel
NOTE for Mandrake 9.1+ users: execute the following command. # urpmi libqt3-mysql
[root@pvr root]# urpmi mysql gcc gcc-c++ freetype2-devel libqt3-devel alsa-utils XFree86-devel perl
everything already installed
In that case, you're ready to move to the next section. Once you have completed installing the pre-requisites, exit out of the shell and start a new one to ensure that any environment variables setup by the installation have a chance to take effect.
If Qt has not been installed on your system: Edit
/etc/make.conf and locate the "USE" variable. If the line is
commented out, remove the comment. The line should have at least:
USE="mysql alsa"
# emerge lame mysql qt
If you have already installed Qt: you will need to rebuild because the
default installation doesn't include MySQL support, a requirement for MythTV.
To enable SQL support, add "mysql" to your USE variable in
/etc/make.conf and rebuild Qt by running
# emerge qt
All the necessary files will be downloaded and built. Even on a fast machine this may take a lot of time if you need to do a full Qt build.
See http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian/dists/unstable/mythtv/ for up-to-date information for Debian.
Build-dependencies for MythTV can be satisfied by adding the following to
your /etc/apt/sources.list
# MythTV
deb http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian unstable mythtv
deb-src http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian unstable mythtv
# Christian Marillat's packages (mplayer, lame)
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
sh-2.05b# apt-get build-dep mythtv
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
debconf-utils debhelper file fontconfig gettext html2text intltool-debian
libaudio2 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6
libfreetype6-dev libglib2.0-0 libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev liblame-dev liblame0
liblcms1 liblcms1-dev libmagic1 libmng-dev libmng1 libmysqlclient-dev
libmysqlclient12 libogg-dev libogg0 libpng12-0 libpng12-dev libqt3-headers
libqt3-mt-dev libqt3c102-mt libvorbis-dev libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2
libvorbisfile3 libxcursor-dev libxcursor1 libxft2 libxft2-dev libxrender-dev
libxrender1 mysql-common pkg-config po-debconf qt3-dev-tools xfree86-common
xlibmesa-gl-dev xlibmesa-glu-dev xlibmesa3-gl xlibmesa3-glu xlibs xlibs-dev
zlib1g-dev
0 upgraded, 54 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/24.0MB of archives.
After unpacking 78.7MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
Before you compile MythTV from the current source tarball or from CVS, you may need to modify your system configuration in a few ways.
In general, if you install MythTV from pre-packaged binaries for your Linux distribution/version, you don't need to be too concerned about the issues in this section of the HOWTO - the install script for the packages should take care of them. However, this section is still recommended reading which may help if the packager skipped a step in their packaging.
MythTV is written in C++ and requires a fairly complete, but standard,
compilation environment, including a recent g++ compiler, make, and
appropriate headers files for shared libraries. Any standard Linux
distribution should be able to install a suitable compilation environment
from its packaging system. Section 3.2 of this HOWTO provides some details
of how to install the required environment for many distributions.
Subsequent sections of this chapter address the few oddities that you may have to adjust by hand before you compile MythTV.
The reference compilation system for MythTV is Debian.
The runtime manager for shared libraries, /lib/ld.so, gets
information about the locations and contents of shared libraries from
/etc/ld.so.cache, a file created by ldconfig from
information in /etc/ld.so.conf. Because MythTV installs some
shared libraries in /usr/local/lib, that directory needs to be
added to the list of directories for ld.so to search when doing
runtime linking of programs, if it is not already there.
You do this, as root, by editing /etc/ld.so.conf, then
running ldconfig. There are many ways to do this; one that
works is to enter this series of commands:
$ su -
# echo /usr/local/lib >> /etc/ld.so.conf
# /sbin/ldconfig
# exit
$
The compiler needs to be able to locate QT binaries and libraries in order to compile MythTV. QTDIR needs to be set and the directory holding the QT binaries needs to be added to your PATH. Your distribution may already be making these changes as a part of the installation of the software prerequisites detailed earlier.
One way to do this is as follows:
Open a shell and execute the following:
$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/games:/usr/lib/qt3/bin:/home/mythtv/bin:/usr/lib/qt3/bin
$ echo $QTDIR
/usr/lib/qt3
$ which qmake
/usr/lib/qt3/bin/qmake
For Mandrake, you should see a value like /usr/lib/qt3 for
QTDIR and /usr/lib/qt3/bin should be in $PATH.
For Gentoo, you should see a value like /usr/qt/3 for QTDIR
and /usr/qt/3/bin should be in $PATH.
If you don't, do not proceed past this step until you have resolved this error. You may need to manually specify the QTDIR and PATH at the shell prompt before compiling.
Also, check that there has been a link created in
/usr/lib/qt3/mkspecs (/usr/share/qt3/mkspecs for Debian)
called default. If not, you'll get errors during the compile. See
the Troubleshooting Section for more information.
The following instructions work for Mandrake 9.0 and 9.1 using
bash as the shell, and may be applicable for a distribution which
uses /etc/profile.d.
/etc/profile.d/qtdir3.sh
file, but it doesn't include the addition of the PATH variable. If you're
running Mandrake 10, don't create a mythtv.sh file as detailed
below; edit the qtdir3.sh file and add the PATH statement within
the if / fi block./etc/profile.d The example
filename is "mythtv.sh". Use what you feel is appropriate.
Open a shell, and switch to superuser mode.
$ su
# cd /etc/profile.d
cat > mythtv.sh
export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt3
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/qt3/bin
^D
# chmod a+x mythtv.sh
# exit
$ exit
Red Hat Linux 9 use a default locale with UTF-8 encoding. Date::Manip, a perl module used by XMLTV, is not UTF-8 safe. As a result, whenever you run setup or mythfilldatabase you will get a lot of UTF-8 warnings. There is an http://membled.com/work/patches/DateManip/ updated version of Date::Manip at the XMLTV site fixing this and other XMLTV related bugs.
Debian source packages are available from the same place as the binary packages. These can be used to build customized packages, and to automatically satisfy MythTV's build-time dependencies.
[...]
sh-2.05b# cd /tmp
sh-2.05b# apt-get source mythtv
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
Need to get 3085kB of source archives.
Get:1 http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu unstable/mythtv mythtv 0.11-4 (dsc) [507B]
Get:2 http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu unstable/mythtv mythtv 0.11-4 (tar) [3071kB]
Get:3 http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu unstable/mythtv mythtv 0.11-4 (diff) [13.9kB]
Fetched 3085kB in 0s (8120kB/s)
dpkg-source: extracting mythtv in mythtv-0.11
sh-2.05b# cd mythtv-0.11
[customize settings.pro, etc.]
[edit debian/changelog and increment the version number]
sh-2.05b# dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -b
[...]
dpkg-deb: building package `mythtv-backend' in `../mythtv-backend_0.11-4_i386.deb'.
dpkg-deb: building package `mythtv-frontend' in `../mythtv-frontend_0.11-4_i386.deb'.
dpkg-deb: building package `libmyth-0.11' in `../libmyth-0.11_0.11-4_i386.deb'.
dpkg-deb: building package `libmyth-0.11-dev' in `../libmyth-0.11-dev_0.11-4_i386.deb'.
dpkg-genchanges -b
dpkg-genchanges: binary-only upload - not including any source code
dpkg-buildpackage: binary only upload (no source included)
sh-2.05b# ls -l ../*.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31734 Sep 6 19:07 ../libmyth-0.11-dev_0.11-4_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 408444 Sep 6 19:07 ../libmyth-0.11_0.11-4_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3324966 Sep 6 19:07 ../mythtv-backend_0.11-4_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15350 Sep 6 19:07 ../mythtv-common_0.11-4_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17978 Sep 6 19:07 ../mythtv-database_0.11-4_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 422232 Sep 6 19:07 ../mythtv-doc_0.11-4_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4900474 Sep 6 19:07 ../mythtv-frontend_0.11-4_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12372 Sep 6 19:07 ../mythtv_0.11-4_all.deb
If building from CVS instead of the source package, then the QTDIR
environment variable must be set when building. On Debian unstable, QTDIR
should be set to /usr/share/qt3. Edit the /etc/profile
file using your favorite text editor and add something like:
PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games"
QTDIR="/usr/share/qt3"
.
.
.
export PATH QTDIR
MythTV will need access to the video4linux devices on your system. By default, your distribution may restrict access to these devices to the logged-in user, so if you will be automatically starting mythbackend from a script rather than an interactive terminal session you will need to make some adjustments.
NOTE: The following instructions are accurate for Mandrake.
Check for a file called /etc/security/console.perms. Open the file
in your favorite text editor and look for a line that has:
<console> 0600 <v4l> 0600 root.video
<console> 0666 <v4l> 0666 root.video
What we're doing is allowing read and write access to the files in the video4linux directory.
Get MythTV from the mythtv.org web site. There are two installation methods you may choose from. The first is to download the latest release in tarball format and compile. The tarball release of MythTV should work on a wide variety of systems and should be the preferred method for new users. If you wish to use the CVS version of MythTV you may obtain it from CVS this way:
$ mkdir mythtv
$ cd mythtv
$ cvs -d :pserver:mythtv@cvs.mythtv.org:/var/lib/mythcvs login
Logging in to :pserver:mythtv@cvs.mythtv.org:/var/lib/mythcvs
CVS password: mythtv
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:mythtv@cvs.mythtv.org:/var/lib/mythcvs checkout mythtv
.cvspass file the very first time you run it. This is normal.
If you wish to stay up-to-date with CVS, you may replace "checkout mythtv"
with update mythtv after you've done your initial download.
If you are in North America you will use the DataDirect grabber which is built-in to MythTV. You do not need to install XMLTV, but you need wget version 1.9.1 or higher.
Get XMLTV from http://xmltv.sourceforge.net. Download the latest version (0.5.39).
NOTE for Mandrake users: If you have added a "PLF" mirror, you may skip the next step and type: # urpmi libmp3lame0 libmp3lame0-devel NOTE for Red Hat users: If you are installing with apt or yum, you may skip this step, it will be taken care of. Otherwise get lame and lame-devel from <url url="http://ATrpms.net/name/lame/" name="http://ATrpms.net/name/lame/">. After downloading, be sure to install both: # rpm -Uvh lame*
Get lame from http://lame.sourceforge.net/. Download the source code to v3.96.1 by following the links from "Using" through "Download...".
Open a shell and switch to the directory where you saved lame.
$ tar -xzf lame-3.93.1.tar.gz
$ cd lame-3.93.1
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make test
$ su
# make install
# ls -l /usr/local/lib
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 381706 Nov 4 14:22 libmp3lame.a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 674 Nov 4 14:22 libmp3lame.la*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Nov 4 14:22 libmp3lame.so ->
libmp3lame.so.0.0.0*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Nov 4 14:22 libmp3lame.so.0 ->
libmp3lame.so.0.0.0*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 360197 Nov 4 14:22
libmp3lame.so.0.0.0*
# exit
$
RPMs for XMLTV and all of its dependencies can be obtained from http://ATrpms.net/name/xmltv/. The web page has a list of all the dependent packages you must download and install.
# rpm -Uvh xmltv* perl*
If you install from this location you may skip to Manually building MythTV.
RPMs for XMLTV and all of its dependencies are located in Mandrake's "contrib". If you have added a contrib mirror, try installing XMLTV:
# urpmi xmltv xmltv-grabbers
# urpmi perl-xml-twig perl-xml-writer perl-datemanip perl-libwww-perl
and skip straight to the XMLTV compilation step.
$ tar -xjf xmltv-0.5.39.tar.bz2
$ su
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install XML::Twig
cpan> install Date::Manip
Date::Manip is up to date.
cpan> install LWP
cpan> install XML::Writer
cpan> exit
Change to the XMLTV directory and compile it:
$ cd xmltv-0.5.39
$ perl Makefile.PL
You may get errors about modules not being installed. You will need to resolve any missing dependencies at this point, or your grabber may not work correctly.
$ make
$ make test
$ su
# make install
# exit
Zap2It DataDirect is a service provided by Zap2It, a subsidiary of
Tribune Media Services. TMS is one of the primary providers for program
listing data in the United States and Canada. There are a number of
advantages to using DataDirect rather than the standard XMLTV
tv_grab_na grabber.
tv_grab_na grabber is no longer supported and will not be
fixed when problems occur.If you wish to use Zap2It DataDirect, you'll need to establish a user account. Go to http://labs.zap2it.com and click on the "New User? Sign Up" link. Read the license terms, and if you agree with them click "Accept". The next screen is the subscription registration. In the "Certificate Code" field, enter ZIYN-DQZO-SBUT.
Fill in the survey, then proceed to the lineup choices and configure your account for your particular location and the channels that you have. This configuration will be imported into MythTV when you first run the setup program.
See the section called Migrating from XMLTV to DataDirect for instructions on moving to to DataDirect if you are currently using XMLTV. If you are starting from a fresh installation, the simplest thing is to immediately start using DataDirect.
Unpack MythTV
$ tar -xjf mythtv-0.18.tar.bz2
$ cd mythtv-0.18
$ ./configure
As of MythTV version 0.18, there is no need to edit the
settings.pro file to set compile-time options. The
configure script will configure MythTV appropriately for your
system. If you wish to change options, run ./configure --help to
see what is available and to override and automatically detected options.
See the config.log file after running configure to see
previous runs.
On a single cpu machine, you would type the following to compile MythTV:
$ qmake mythtv.pro
$ make
If you want to build MythTV on a multi-CPU machine (or with distcc), specify "-j numjobs". In the following example, we will have two concurrent jobs executing. Do not set the number of jobs too high, or your compile will actually take longer to complete than it would if you did a "normal" build.
$ qmake mythtv.pro
$ make qmake
$ make -j 2
If you are using distcc, and you had two other host machines (red, blue) participating, you would do something like:
$ export DISTCC_HOSTS='localhost red blue'
$ qmake mythtv.pro
$ make qmake
$ make -j 6 CXX=distcc
The actual speed-up, if any, is dependant on a number of factors, such as
number of CPUs / hosts, etc. The distcc documentation recommends
using a -j value of twice the number of CPUs available to keep all
of them busy.
Some timing information. The following should only be used for
illustration; your actual results may vary. The test involves a complete
make distclean to the final binary.
In the above example, we see that with a single CPU, a multi-stage make does not significantly decrease compile time.
Once the compile is done, switch to superuser:
$ su
# make install
# exit
cd'd to above.
MythTV supports real-time scheduling of the video output thread if it is installed SUID root.
This is an optional, but recommended step, if you understand the potential negative impact. As a positive, It can make the video display more smoothly, especially if you are decoding HDTV.
If the tradeoff is acceptable:
$ su
# chmod a+s /usr/local/bin/mythfrontend
# exit
$
NOTE: Making this change will affect your ability to run mythfrontend within gdb for debugging purposes. If you need to debug, you will need to run as root.
Since MythTV uses a client/server architecture, multiple frontend computers can simultaneously access content on a Myth system. Live TV, watching and scheduling recordings, etc. are all possible from multiple frontends.
To get a better picture of what is needed to run a frontend, note the following:
Other than the exclusion of the MySQL server and XMLTV, the MythTV compilation procedure is the same as when you're setting up both a backend and a frontend. However, you will need to install the database access libraries.
Once MythTV is compiled and installed:
Installation of MythTV on Gentoo consists of simply emerging the desired ebuild because all of the packages are now part of the official Portage tree.
$ su -
# emerge --sync # make sure portage is up to date.
# vi /etc/make.conf
USE="mysql ...."
# emerge mythtv
If this is the system maintaining the database, make sure that MySQL is running and started at boot. Click on Mandrake Control Center->System->Services, find MySQL and click the "On Boot" button and the "Start" button if the MySQL status shows that it isn't running yet.
$ su
# chkconfig --level 35 mysql on
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql start
# exit
If this is the system maintaining the database, make sure that MySQL is running and started at boot. Click on Redhat menu>Server Settings>Services and enter the root password when asked. Check "mysqld" and then click Start. Click Save, then close the window.
This can be done from the command line by typing:
# /sbin/chkconfig mysqld on
# /sbin/service mysqld start
After installing MySQL you need to initialize the database by running mysql_install_db as root.
This step is only required on the system maintaining the database, which
may or may not be one of your MythTV boxes. If the database is on a
non-MythTV machine you'll need to copy the database/mc.sql file to it.
To setup the initial MySQL databases:
$ cd database
$ mysql -u root < mc.sql
$ mysql < mc.sql
$ su
# mysql < /usr/share/mythtv/database/mc.sql
If you're going to have multiple systems accessing a master database,
you must grant access to the database from remote systems. By default, the
mc.sql script is only granting access to the local host.
To allow other hosts access to your master database, you can either set it up for no security at all, or with more granularity. Note that the "%" is the wildcard character in MySQL.
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql> grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"%" identified by "mythtv";
mysql> flush privileges;
For a more secure setup, you can restrict which machines or subnets have access. If you have a complete DNS system operational, you could do the following:
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql> grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"%.mydomain.com" identified by "mythtv";
mysql> flush privileges;
Finally, if you just want to restrict by IP subnet:
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql> grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"192.168.1.%" identified by "mythtv";
mysql> flush privileges;
If your video doesn't appear to be in-sync with your audio, it could be because you are listening to the real-time audio from your video card rather than after it's been processed and synchronized to the video by MythTV. Because MythTV is a personal video recorder, "Live TV" isn't really live - to let you pause live TV, MythTV is actually encoding the video, saving to disk, and then playing it back. This procedure puts your MythTV "live" TV about 2 seconds behind real-time, so it's important that you're not listening to the live audio. However, if you're having an issue where the audio and video aren't synchronized by small but varying amount, it's most likely because the sound driver that you're using doesn't have the DSP_CAP_REALTIME capability. This was the case with ALSA (0.5), but not with newer versions (0.9). See the Troubleshooting Audio section for more information if you're having issues with sound. Also, ensure that no other programs are grabbing the audio output, like arts or esd.
What you need to do is to mute the "line-in" of your sound card and also set it as the recording source.
There are two ways to do this. Graphically, and from the command line.
Open Kmix by clicking K->Multimedia->Sound->Kmix for Mandrake, or
RedHat Menu>Sound & Video>Volume Controlon Red Hat/Fedora.
Click on Settings->Configure Make sure that "Tick Marks" and "Show labels" have "X"'s in them. This will make it easier to find the correct audio source. Click OK.
On the mixer page, look for Line-In on your sound card. You should see two LED's - a green one at the top, and a red one at the bottom. The green one at the top is for muting; you want to make sure that the green LED is a dark green, meaning that it's "off". You also want to click on the red LED so that it turns bright red, indicating that it's "ON"; this insures that the Line-in is used as the source. Click OK, and make sure that you save the settings so that this is your default.
Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core 1 ship with OSS sound drivers rather than the ALSA drivers recommended by the MythTV team. The OSS drivers do work for many people, and for many cards. We recommend that you give OSS a try since it is already included in the vendor distribution. However, some people report problems (sync and jitter) with OSS, and in addition it does not support full duplex on some cards. Full duplex is required if you want to record and play sound using just one sound card. ALSA has good full duplex support, and also has drivers for some built-in (motherboard) sound cards that OSS does not. Installing ALSA is less painful than you might think, so if OSS does not work for you, installing ALSA is not too difficult. For those of you who do not wish to install ALSA you must do this:
To configure sound to work with MythTV, select
RedHat Menu>Sound & Video>Volume Controlto open up a mixer. Make sure your global volume (on the far left) is up. Also make sure that the "line in" section has "mute" and "record" checked and that the gain is turned up. You may have to experiment with volume/gain levels to get the best sound.
If you'd like to use ALSA, you'll need to correctly setup your
asoundrc file. Configuring this file is beyond the scope of this
HOWTO. Once ALSA is working correctly, change the output sound device in
mythfrontend->setup->Audio from /dev/dsp to ALSA:default.
This field may be edited to suit your ALSA requirements.
If you have installed the alsa-utils package, then the amixer program can be used to setup the mixer. The "Master" volume setting is only required on a frontend machine to ensure that the sound channels are unmuted and configured for outputting sound. The "Line" and "Capture" controls are required for your sound card to actually capture audio from the external Line-in. Not all sound cards have a "Capture" control, but if yours does and you don't set it then MythTV will not capture audio.
Note the spelling in the following commands.
$ amixer set Master,0 100%,100% unmute
$ amixer set PCM,0 100%,100% unmute
$ amixer set Line,0 75%,75% mute captur
$ amixer set Capture,0 100%,100% captur
$ su
# alsactl store
# exit
$
If you have multiple sound cards, then use the -c parameter to
specify which card to adjust. Note that the first card will be "0", the
second will be "1", etc.
That takes care of setting the volume correctly, and the ALSA startup script
will restore the volume after a reboot. If you find that your sound is
distorted, it's possible that the levels in the above examples are too high
for your particular hardware combination. Try reducing the percentages by
5-10% and checking again. Once you're satisfied, re-run the alsactl
store command.
You may also use the alsamixer program to set the volume. If you are using an ALSA version after 1.0.6, use alsamixer -V all . First, start alsamixer from the command line. You should start out on the "Master" volume control slider. Use the up and down cursor to set the master volume to around 75%. Next, use the left and right cursor keys to move around on the screen until you find the "Line" slider. Press SPACE to set it as the capture source, set the level to around 50-75% and press "M" to mute it. You can now press ESC to exit out of the alsamixer program. You can also have MythTV manage all volume and mute settings, but this will only affect the "Master" or PCM volume, not the capture volume. See the mythfrontend setup page for options.
MythTV does not have native remote control receiver and decoder software
built-in. Instead, remote control functions are implemented by cooperating
with lirc, the Linux Infrared Remote Control program. lirc
handles the IR hardware and passes keystrokes to MythTV, which then acts as
if the user had pressed the keys on the keyboard. The file
keys.txt describes the keys used to control MythTV.
# urpmi lirc lirc-remotes and bypass
the manual compilation steps described below by jumping to the
Completing the lirc install section. See the contrib/mandrake91.etc.sysconfig.lircd file for an example of how to
configure lircd.
To install lirc on Gentoo, all you need to do is:
# emerge lirc
lircd has two prerequisites: dialog, available in Mandrake through the "cdialog" RPM, and the kernel source. Mandrake 9.0 is using the 2.4.19 kernel, so either install the kernel sources from the installation CD or go to http://www.kernel.org and download the full 2.4.19 tar file from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/.
Install using urpmi.
$ su
# urpmi kernel-source
You should already have the source from the "Kernel Development" package you installed in section 3.2. Ensure that a symlink has been created:
$ cd /usr/src
$ su
# ln -s linux-2.4 /usr/src/linux
# exit
You're going to need to download and compile lircd. Go to http://www.lirc.org and download lirc; as of 2002-11-07, the version available is 0.6.6. Grab the remotes.tgz file as well.
$ tar -xjf lirc-0.6.6.tar.bz2
$ cd lirc-0.6.6
$ ./setup.sh
Each remote is different; some remote receivers connect directly to your capture card and not to a serial port, so make sure that you've got the correct one.
You then click "Save Configuration and run configure" to continue.
Make sure you read the last text generated by the configure step. It will tell you if you require a kernel recompile, and what the name of your kernel module will be (if necessary). For instance a home-built receiver may require a kernel recompile, so you would be notified that you will have to load the lirc_serial module. If you did not get any such messages skip the kernel recompile steps below and go directly to making and installing the lirc driver.
Once the configuration step is complete:
$ make
$ su
# make install
# chmod 666 /dev/lircd
At this point, if you're using a serial receiver, check that there's a
lirc device in /dev:
$ ls -l /dev/li*
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 5 Jan 27 09:00 /dev/lirc -> ttyS0
srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 Jan 27 15:01 /dev/lircd=
prw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 27 09:00 /dev/lircm|
As you can see, there's a link from /dev/lirc to ttyS0, a.k.a. "COM1", which is appropriate for the Pinnacle Systems PCTV Pro. However, you may notice something like this:
crw------- 1 root root 61, 0 Dec 31 1969 lirc
make
install step has created a character device for you, don't replace it
with a link to a COM port.
So, if the link or character device was not created (but should have been),
ensure that you ran the make install step as root. If it still
doesn't work, then there are three options. The first option is to re-read
the lirc documentation to determine whether your IR receiver is a
character device or should be a link to a serial port and to create the
link/character device manually. In this example, the IR device is connected
to ttyS0. If it were connected to "COM2", then use ttyS1, etc.
$ su
# cd /dev
# ln -sf ttyS0 lirc
# exit
$
# mknod /dev/lirc c 61 0
See the lirc documentation for additional information. The lirc installation should create this for you, so manually creating it indicates that your lirc installation may have other issues.
The second option is to post your issue to the lirc list, not the mythtv-users list. The lirc programmers will be the ones that can assist you best.
The third option is to dispense with lirc altogether by purchasing an IR
keyboard (various options exist, although Chicony appears to work for some
people) and a learning remote control. The IR keyboard receiver plugs into
the PS/2 keyboard port on your PC and you would train your learning remote
to emulate the various keystrokes from keys.txt of your IR
keyboard. Using this method removes lirc entirely from the picture - your
remote will be sending keypresses that your PC "sees" on the keyboard port.
Don't Panic! Red Hat makes a kernel recompile very easy. They provide configuration files that make it so you can recompile your kernel with Red Hat defaults. And as a side benefit, your kernel will be compiled specifically for your architecture. For a more detailed description (or if you run into trouble) of how to do this go to http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-Manual/custom-guide/ch-custom-kernel.html
$ cd /usr/src/linux
$ su
# make mrproper
# cd configs
# ls
at this point you must look at the file names and determine which config file is right for you. For instance if you have an Athlon XP you should choose "kernel-2.4.18-athlon.config" but if you have a dual processor P4 you might choose "kernel-2.4.18-i686-smp.config"
# cp yourconfig.config ../.config
# cd ../
# make xconfig
At this point you will get a graphical configuration utility. All that you must do to make lirc work is go to the "character devices" section and change "Standard/generic (8250/16550 and compatible UARTs) serial support" from "y" to "m". Now if you want you can have a look around. For instance, you might wish to turn off ham radio support, or perhaps turn off PCMCIA support if you are not on a laptop. But be careful! Only change things you know you can change. If you are not sure, just stick to the one required change. Click "save and exit". Next:
# make dep
# make clean
# make bzImage modules
# make modules_install
# make install
if you are using grub, that should be it, reboot and select your custom kernel upon boot. If you are using lilo, change your lilo configuration according to http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-Manual/custom-guide/ s1-custom-kernel-bootloader.html Remember, if you have any custom kernel modules (ALSA, etc) you will have to recompile/reinstall those.
If the lirc configure program / compile did not mention anything about a
kernel module, then you are finished. If it did mention a kernel module, you
must edit the /etc/modules.conf file. Add this line as the first
thing in the file. It must come first, or it may not work.
alias char-major-61 XXX
replace XXX with the name which you determined earlier, which in this example was "lirc_serial"
$ su
# modprobe lirc_serial
# /sbin/ldconfig
Next, we're going to manually start lircd the first time. Mandrake 9.1
users, type: # /etc/rc.d/init.d/lircd start instead of:
# /usr/local/sbin/lircd
If this fails, complaining of a missing lircd.conf file, then you
must find or make one. First look for a pre-made configuration file at
http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/. Mandrake 9.1 users, look in
/usr/share/lirc-remotes. If you find one your remotes either on the
website or in /usr/share, download or copy the file, name it
lircd.conf and put it in your /etc directory. If you
couldn't find your remote, you must make your own lircd.conf file.
To make your own lircd.conf file
$ irrecord myremote
Follow the on-screen directions to train your remote and define keys. If
your remote ends up working well, you should consider submitting your
lircd.conf file back to the lirc developers. Once finished:
$ su
# cp myremote /etc/lircd.conf
now try to start lircd again:
# /usr/local/sbin/lircd
Now, we're going to add the commands necessary for lircd to run each time we boot. Mandrake 9.1 users, you can execute:
$ su
# chkconfig --level 35 lircd on
# exit
All other distributions:
# cd /etc/rc.d
# cat >> rc.local
echo "Starting lircd"
/usr/local/sbin/lircd
^D
# exit
$
This takes care of the lircd portion, which "listens" for the IR signals. If
everything went well, the install script for lircd put an appropriate
configuration file for your remote into /etc/lircd.conf This file
maps the buttons on the remote control to the IR pulses coming from the
receiver.
The next step is to convert those signals into something that can be used to control MythTV. MythTV now includes native support for lirc and can interact directly with
$ cd ~/mythtv-0.18/configfiles
$ cp lircrc.example ~/.lircrc
$ cp lircrc.example.pinnaclestudiopctv ~/.lircrc
$ irw
/etc/lircd.conf. If you don't see anything at this point, you need
to troubleshoot further by going back to the lirc home page and investigating
from there.
If it is working, then press CTRL-C to abort the program. Once you know that your remote is working, you can either recompile MythTV with native lirc support by enabling it in configure or you need to run the irxevent program, which takes the key presses and sends them to MythTV. If you use native lirc support, you don't need to run irxevent. If you are going to use irxevent, then you need to run it like this:
$ irxevent &
Take a look at the lircrc.example files in the configfiles/
directory. In my case, (Pinnacle Studio card) the channel up and down functions
weren't working, due to the fact that the button names were different than
the default lircrc.example file that came with MythTV.
The lircrc.example file has this:
begin
prog = irxevent
button = ChannelUp
config = Key Up CurrentWindow
end
begin
prog = irxevent
button = ChannelDown
config = Key Down CurrentWindow
end
/etc/lircd.conf that comes in the lircd package
defines the buttons for the Pinnacle Studio PCTV as:
channel+ 0x0000000000000017
channel- 0x000000000000001C
begin
prog = irxevent
button = channel+
repeat = 3
config = Key Up CurrentWindow
end
begin
prog = irxevent
button = channel-
repeat = 3
config = Key Down CurrentWindow
end
configfiles/lircrc.example.pinnaclestudiopctv for an example of how
to define additional buttons, and how to debug potential button name
conflicts between the lircrc.example file and how your
remote defines the button names.
By examining the button names defined in /etc/lircd.conf and using
the irw program to make sure that your remote is working, you can
create the appropriate mappings in .lircrc to get excellent remote
functionality with MythTV.
Note the repeat = parameter. This informs the irxevent
program to pass through every third keypress. By default, lirc
will only send one keypress to the application, even if you're holding down
the key. The actual repeat = number will vary from system to
system, so experiment and see which value works best for you.
Lirc has support for various IR transmitters. A popular model is the Actisys IR-200L http://store.snapstreamstore.com/accessories.html. It was originally designed for IRDA communication, but can be used to transmit A/V remote control codes. By using the lirc SIR driver, this device can easily be integrated with MythTV. I have tested this device with an AT&T DCT2000 digital cable box but the instructions can be used to configure other IRDA devices and A/V remotes.
Follow the steps in the previous section. When you run setup.sh, select option 1, driver configuration. From here select option 6, IrDA hardware. Select your appropriate device and the corresponding serial port, then Save configuration & run configure from the main menu. Once configure is done type:
$ make
Please note: unlike the Pinnacle receiver above you will be compiling lircd in addition to a kernel module for the SIR transmitter. Depending on whether you have your serial port driver configured as a kernel module you might see the following message during make:
lirc_sir.c:56:2: warning: #warning
"******************************************"
lirc_sir.c:57:2: warning: #warning "Your serial port driver is compiled into "
lirc_sir.c:58:2: warning: #warning "the kernel. You will have to release the "
lirc_sir.c:59:2: warning: #warning "port you want to use for LIRC with:"
lirc_sir.c:60:2: warning: #warning "setserial /dev/ttySx uart none"
lirc_sir.c:61:2: warning: #warning
"******************************************"
If you do receive this statement make sure to run the setserial command before you load the lirc_sir module. Follow this with the install:
$ su
# make install
You will notice that lirc installs the kernel module in
/lib/modules/uname -a/misc.
The configuration for starting lircd differs if you're going to be sending and receiving IR versus just receiving.
# cd /etc/rc.d
# cat >> rc.local
echo "Starting lircd"
setserial /dev/ttySx uart none # (if required)
modprobe lirc_sir
/usr/local/sbin/lircd
^D
# exit
$
At this point you have to populate the /etc/lircd.conf file with the proper
codes for your A/V remote. You should be able to find your remote within the
lirc remote tar file located at
http://www.lirc.org/remotes.tar.bz2. In my case I
extracted the file from remotes/motorola/DCT2000 (gi-motorola-dct2000)
To test the lirc_sir module you can run irw to verify the codes are being received. If everything is configured correctly you should see something similar to the following:
$ irw
0000000000007ff0 00 1 gi-motorola-dct2000
000000000000bff8 00 2 gi-motorola-dct2000
000000000000f7f0 00 ENTER gi-motorola-dct2000
Once you've verified lirc is working you can press CTRL-C to exit irw and configure the channel changing script.
The path to the channel changing script will need to be entered on the mythbackend setup screen for Input Connections.
This csh script will be called each time MythTV needs to change the channel. Below is a copy of the script followed by the corresponding perl script. Make sure both are in your path. Also make sure you leave the #!/bin/csh setting and not change it to Bourne or bash. This will create a frustrating symptom to diagnose where MythTV cannot open /dev/device. Unlike Bourne or bash, csh scripts automatically close parent file descriptors before they start.
$ cd /usr/local/bin
# su
# cat > change_channel.csh
#!/bin/csh
echo "changing to $1"
/usr/local/bin/channel.pl $1 &
^D
# chmod a+x change_channel.csh
# exit
$ exit
See contrib/channel.pl for the actual file. Copy it to
/usr/local/bin/
The last statement within the perl script is the lirc rc command. This is the command that transmits the code to your cable/DSS box. Make sure to have the IRDA device within a few feet of the box.
By this point, all of the compile-time prerequisites have been installed, mysql is running and has had its initial database setup. It's now time to configure MythTV.
$ su -
# apt-get install libqt3c102-mt-mysql
# exit
Open a shell and decide where you will store your video files. By
default, MythTV will assume that you will be using /mnt/store/, but
if this directory doesn't exist, or it exists and you don't have write
privileges to it then MythTV will fail when you attempt to make a recording.
The following example is specific for /var/video, but the same
instructions would apply if you want to keep the default but don't have the
directory structure setup yet. See the
Advanced Partition Formatting section for hints on creating a
partition for MythTV.
If you create a /var/video subdirectory, change
/mnt/store/ to /var/video/ in the setup screens.
$ su
# mkdir /var/video
# chmod a+rwx /var/video
# exit
The first thing to configure is the Master backend system. If you are running multiple backend systems, the Master backend will make all decisions about which programs will be recorded on which tuners. If you have only one backend, then it will be its own master.
The Master backend will always choose the first available tuner in the same order as you add cards through "setup". In other words, the second card you add will only be used when there are two overlapping recordings, the third when there are three, and so on. Therefore, you will want to have the greatest amount of disk space on the Master backend because its tuner will always be the first choice. You will then want to add your other backends in the order of your preference for recording.
Because MythTV now uses a database to store all configuration variables, part of the bootstrap of MythTV is to indicate the location of the MySQL database server. If the frontend, backend and MySQL database server are all going to be running on the same box, you can continue to the next step. If not, you'll need to change the Host Name in the "Database Configuration" screen of the mythfrontend program.
/etc/my.cnf on the backend machine and
restart MySQL.
skip-innodb
set-variable=thread_stack=256k
Run the setup program:
$ mythtv-setup
The backend setup program will start and offer you a number of choices. It is strongly recommended that you go through them in order.
The first question will ask if you wish to clear out your existing configurations for your capture cards. Initially, you should say "YES" so that there are no surprises later.
The next question will ask you if you wish to clear out your video source information. You should answer "YES" to this as well.
Once the graphical setup starts, you'll see that there are five choices.
Use the arrow keys to move around, and press the space bar to select which option you wish to configure.
The first screen of the General configuration deals with IP addresses of the system that you're running setup on and any master backend you may have. If you've only got one machine, then the default values are fine and you can move to the next page by pressing the space bar. If you need to move around the screen, use the arrow keys to move focus between settings, not the mouse.
If you will be deploying multiple backends, or if your backend is on one system and you're running the frontend on another machine then do not use the "127.0.0.1" IP address.
NOTE: If you modify the 127.0.0.1 address and use a "real" IP address, you must use real IP addresses in both fields, otherwise your frontend machines will generate "Unexpected response to MYTH_PROTO_VERSION" errors.
It is very strongly discouraged that you make any changes to the port settings from the defaults.
Once you're satisfied with the values, move the focus down to Next and hit the space bar.
The next screen details the Host-specific Backend setup. This is where you will set the specific directory paths for this particular backend. Make sure that you've followed the steps at the beginning of this section and created a directory that exists and that MythTV will have write privileges to. When you're done, press Next to continue, taking you to the Global Backend Setup.
On the Global Backend Setup configure your backend with the appropriate settings. Use the left and right arrow keys to iterate through the choices available on each setting, and the up and down keys to move between settings. Move to Finish when you're done and press the space bar, taking you back to the main configuration screen.
You should have no capture cards defined, so the highlight will be on (New Capture Card). Press space to begin.
Choose the appropriate settings for your particular tuner. Use the arrow keys to move around and to make your choices, and press RETURN when complete. Pressing RETURN will take you back to the Capture Cards screen; if you have additional capture cards in this machine, press the space bar when the highlight is on the (New Capture Card) row to define another card.
If you have made a mistake, you can delete a card by highlighting it and pressing the 'D' key, or you can highlight it and press the RETURN or 'E' key to edit it.
Once you have no additional cards to setup, press ESC.
When you start, the highlight should be on (New Video Source). Press the space bar to begin. The first field asks for the name of the video source. You may choose something easy to remember, like "Antenna" or "Cable". Once you've chosen a name, press the down arrow to move to the next field.
If you're in North America, change the grabber to "DataDirect", then continue pressing the down arrow to move to the next field. Fill in the username and password that you have established with DataDirect, then move to the "Retrieve Listings" button and press the space bar.
NOTE: You need wget version 1.9.1 or higher to use DataDirect.
The setup program will contact the Zap2It servers and get your account information. Once you're done, you may click the Finish button and skip the next few paragraphs in this document since they only apply to users that are using the external XMLTV script to get their guide data.
If you wish to continue using the XMLTV grabber, then move to the Zip/postal code field and put in the appropriate value.
If you're outside of North America, then some manual interaction will be required with XMLTV.
Once you have chosen your provider, press RETURN to continue. XMLTV will now begin collecting the initial data for your location. The screen may blank for a few seconds to several minutes, depending on the load of the listings provider and the speed of your connection to the Internet. Be patient!
You will then be returned to the Video Sources screen. If you have multiple video sources available, such as Antenna, Cable, etc, go ahead and define them all, even if they're not all going to be physically connected to the master backend server. Once you're done, press ESC to return to the main screen.
The final configuration item is Input Connections. On this screen, you will associate the various video sources you defined earlier with a physical input to a encoder card. It's entirely possible that you have multiple tuners, and each tuner has a different input, so on this screen you let MythTV know which device will connect to which input source.
When you start this screen, you should see a listing of the various input connections available on each of the Capture cards you defined earlier. For example, you may have a capture card with a tuner, a SVideo and a Composite connection. If you wanted to associate the tuner (a.k.a., "Television") with an "Antenna" source you defined in Video Sources, you would move to the /dev/videodevice (Television) -> line and press the space bar. Using the left and right arrow keys will show you the various choices you have already created for video source. In our case, you would use the left/right cursor keys until "Antenna" was shown in the Video Source field. Press down to move to the next setting, all of which should be self-explanatory.
Once you're done, press RETURN to go back to the Input Connections screen. You would then finish associating the video sources to any other hardware devices you have available.
Press ESC to return to the main menu, and press ESC again if you have no further items to configure, thereby returning you to the command line.
The channel editor is used to globally alter channel information, including items like hue, contrast, finetuning and others. Users in North America shouldn't run the channel editor until after completing initial setup and running mythfilldatabase at least once to populate the database.
Run the mythfilldatabase program as directed. The master
backend will obtain guide data for all the video sources you defined during
setup.
NOTE: If you are using DataDirect and watching the output messages on the console or the log file it is normal to see a "401 Unauthorized" error followed by a "200 OK" when the connection to Zap2It is being established.
From : Sun Jun 13 05:00:00 2004 To : Mon Jun 14 05:00:00 2004 (UTC)
--02:58:01--
http://datadirect.webservices.zap2it.com/tvlistings/xtvdService
=> -'
Resolving datadirect.webservices.zap2it.com... 206.18.98.160
Connecting to datadirect.webservices.zap2it.com[206.18.98.160]:80...
connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 401 Unauthorized
Connecting to datadirect.webservices.zap2it.com[206.18.98.160]:80...
connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/xml]
[ <=> ] 114,125 63.57K/s
02:58:03 (63.53 KB/s) - -' saved [114125]
Your subscription expires on 08/20/2004 12:00:00 AM
Grab complete. Actual data from Sun Jun 13 05:00:00 2004 to Mon Jun 14
00:00:00 2004 (UTC)
Once mythfilldatabase has finished, start the master server before
continuing.
$ mythbackend
mythbackend will print information about connections and what it's doing to
the console. If you'd like to see the options that are available for
mythbackend, type mythbackend -h for help.
As of MythTV v0.18, the available options are:
$ mythbackend -h
Valid options are:
-l or --logfile filename Writes STDERR and STDOUT messages to filename
-p or --pidfile filename Write PID of mythbackend to filename
-d or --daemon Runs mythbackend as a daemon
-v or --verbose debug-level Prints more information
Accepts any combination (separated by comma)
of all,none,quiet,record,playback,channel,
osd,file,schedule,network,commflag,audio,
libav,jobqueue
--printexpire List of auto-expire programs
--printsched Upcoming scheduled programs
--testsched Test run scheduler (ignore existing schedule)
--resched Force the scheduler to update
--nosched Do not perform any scheduling
--version Version information
Running mythbackend as a daemon and using the logfile option will allow you
to have mythbackend automatically start up during the boot process. For
example, you may add this to your rc.local file, or you can follow
the steps outlined in the section called
Automatically starting mythbackend at system boot time.
Ensure that you've granted access to the master MySQL database for remote backends as discussed in the section titled Modifying access to the MySQL database for multiple systems and that you have the correct IP address for the database server in the "Database Configuration" screen of the setup application on this slave backend.
Make sure that the IP addresses on the General setup screen are accurate. If the slave backend can't communicate with the master backend due to IP address misconfiguration then MythTV will not function properly.
Configuration of a non-master backend follows the same general procedure as that of the master backend, with the exception that you skip over the "Video Sources" step. All possible video sources need to be defined on the master backend system; only the master backend will query a listings provider to obtain guide data for all the non-master backends.
mythfilldatabase on a non-master backend.
mythfilldatabase --manual is another option; the manual option will allow you to fine tune channel frequencies and specify which channels will be added to the database. If you are not using the tv_grab_na grabber, you must use the --manual option.
mythfilldatabase --file is an option if there isn't an XMLTV grabber for your country, but you do have an XML formatted listings file created by some other program.
mythfilldatabase --xawchannels is an option if you have used xawtv to fine-tune your channels and would like to import the fine tuning offsets into MythTV.
mythfilldatabase --refresh-today will only pull guide data for today (in case of late-breaking changes to the schedule).
In order to keep your database filled, mythfilldatabase should be run once a day. To use MythTV's built-in capability, you'll need to run the mythfrontend Setup option. From the MythFrontend, enter the Setup>General screen and advance to "Mythfilldatabase", the fourth screen. Select the checkbox, then complete the options as you see fit. The mythbackend program will now run mythfilldatabase at the times you specify.
While the DataDirect TV listings service has several advantages, it does not support grabbing logo icons for the stations you receive. However, there are utilities provided with MythTV which you may use to grab your initial set of icons and to keep them updated if your lineups change.
First, you need to generate or obtain an XML file with the information for your stations.
If you have XMLTV software installed, there is a perl script in MythTV's
contrib/ directory which will generate this file for you. Run the
command:
$ perl mkiconmap.pl
You will be asked for your zipcode and the service that you use. If there
are no errors, the iconmap.xml file that you need for the next step
will be created.
If you do not have XMLTV software installed and do not want to install it
for the sake of this minor task, there is a generic
contrib/master_iconmap.xml which you can copy and use but this may
not be as complete as using the specific information for your service.
Once you have an iconmap.xml file, add the icon information to your
database and grab any new icons with the command:
$ mythfilldatabase --import-icon-map iconmap.xml --update-icon-map
Once you have completed configuration of your backend systems, the next step is to configure the frontend client.
When you start mythfrontend for the first time, it will attempt to connect to a configuration database on the local machine. If there is none, a "Database Configuration" screen will appear, and you will need to fill in some details. The "Host name" field needs the backend or database server's IP address or DNS name, and the User or password fields may need to be set to match your database user accounts. After editing those fields, press enter twice to write these configurations on your local machine, and attempt to connect to the database. If you make any mistakes, the screens will pop up again.
Now that mythfrontend has started up, you should have a number of buttons/choices. Before doing anything, go to TV, then to Setup and configure the frontend client.
The General screen has configuration items that don't really fit anywhere else. The first few configuration items asks you to indicate the number of seconds to record before or after a program, which is useful if the broadcast network or your system clock are out of sync and will help prevent you missing the beginning or end of a program.
To change the value, use the left and right arrow keys to increment and decrement the number of seconds. When you're satisfied with the result, use the down arrow to put the input focus on the Next button or press RETURN to continue to the next page.
The next page has a number of options to do with how channels are displayed on your system. The help text will give you more information. Move the focus to Next and press the space bar to continue.
The final General page sets up some final configuration items. See the help text for more information.
This set of screens is mostly concerned with how MythTV will look on your system. From here, you can choose different themes and set the resolution of your system.
Fairly self explanatory. Note that the alternate program guide does not use the same font settings as defined in Appearance, so if the EPG is unreadable this is where you make the adjustments to fonts, number of elements displayed, etc.
The one configuration item which may cause problems on your system is the "Deinterlace playback" setting. MythTV uses a linear blend algorithm for deinterlacing, which will improve how the image looks on your screen. Deinterlacing requires that your processor support SSE. (Streaming SIMD Extensions, aka "MMX2"). Early Intel Celeron (those that don't use the Coppermine 0.18um core and are usually <600MHz), Pentium Pro and Pentium II CPUs do not have SSE, so make sure that you haven't enabled deinterlacing if your processor doesn't support it. If you enable it, and your processor doesn't support SSE, you will get "Illegal Instruction" errors.
To determine if you've got SSE on an Intel processor, you can:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
[snip]
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca
cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
Notice the sse at the end of the line - this tells you that this processor will be able to deinterlace correctly.
On an AMD processor, look for "3dnow" in the cpuinfo line; "3dnow" is AMD's implementation of SSE instructions, so if your processor has 3dnow you shouldn't have any issues with deinterlacing.
MythTV provides a facility to include video filters while recording and during playback. These filters can be used to improve or modify the video image, including hiding the effects of an interlaced image or reducing the effects of noise in a poor video signal. The following is a brief introduction to introduce you to the filters that are available in MythTV version 0.18.
One or more filters can be included in a "filter chain". The filters to be used are identified in a "filter string". A filter string is a group of filter names and parameters separated by commas. To include parameters, the filter name is followed by "=" and the parameter information. There should be no spaces in the filter string. Here is an example filter string:
With parameters: kerneldeint=10:1,denoise3d=12
Without: kerneldeint,denoise3d
Recording filters are set for each individual channel. These may be used when encoding in software (MPEG-4, RTjpeg) but do not apply when using a capture card with hardware encoding such as those supported by the ivtv driver, DVB, HDTV or MJPEG cards. You can run MythTV's "setup" program and select the "Channel Editor". On the first page for each channel, you can enter a filter string in the box titled "Video filters". If you are running "mythweb" on your web server, you can click on "Settings" then "Channels" and enter filter strings in the "videofilters" column.
Playback filters are per-host and apply to any recording you watch from the frontend where filters have been applied. Playback filtering can only work with software decoding so the viaslice, xvmc, and ivtv outputs ignore filters entirely. From "mythfrontend" go to Setup->TV Settings->Playback. Enter your filter string in the box titled "Custom Filters".
"Deinterlace Playback" checkbox.
This implements special behavior needed for the "bobdeint" filter but can also be used to choose any of the deinterlace filters. If you prefer, you may leave this unchecked and include any of the deinterlace filters, other than "bobdeint", in your custom filter chain.
o The "invert" filter
Invert ignores any parameters and inverts the pixel values of the video frames. In other words, a negative image. This would rarely be useful but may be a good example to verify that your filter strings take effect.
o The "linearblend" filter
It is a simple deinterlacing filter that ignores parameters and works by blending adjacent lines. It replaces combing in interlaced video with a less distracting "ghost" image.
o The "bobdeint" filter
This filter splits the interlaced image into two separate fields that can be line doubled then displayed at twice the frame rate. If the display is at the same refresh rate as the recording (59.92Hz NTSC or 50Hz PAL) this will cause each refresh to show objects in motion in a new position with no jagged edges. However, if the display is not synchronous, it will cause flickering or the appearance of the picture moving up and down by one line.
o The "kerneldeint" filter
Kerneldeint is a more complex deinterlacing filter which applies a filter kernel using input from several lines. It generally removes combing without a "ghost" image, sometimes leaving a faint outline of the image from the other field. It is considered to be less distracting to watch than linearblend or no filter at all. It accepts one or two integer parameters separated by a colon.
The first parameter is the filter threshold and defaults to 12. Adjacent lines differing by more than the threshold value are filtered. The second option defaults to 0. If set to a non-zero value, it will cause the filter to skip chroma, and filter only the luminance. It may be useful on some capture cards which do not capture the chroma fields of interlaced video correctly.
o The "onefield" filter
This is a simple one-field deinterlacing filter that uses only one field of the interlaced video. By default it keeps the top field, though passing the parameter "bottom" will cause it to keep the bottom field instead.
This filter is primarily useful for those who display 1080i HDTV signals with a video mode that has 540 pixels vertically. The advantage over other deinterlacing filters is that scenes with motion never show combing or ghosting.
o The "adjust" filter
This filter adjusts the digital values for luma and chroma to ensure that they will fall within the ranges specified in the ITU-R601 standard. By default, this corrects a known problem for the luma range used by bt8x8 chips which causes video to look washed out. If parameters are passed, there need to be exactly six. However, passing a single parameter of "-1" will disable the filter.
1: luma minimum input value (int) 2: luma maximum input value (int) 3: luma gamma correction (float) 4: chroma minimum input value (int) 5: chroma maximum input value (int) 6: chroma gamma correction (float)
The default bt8x8 correction values are equivalent to "16:253:1.0:2:253:1.0". Output ranges are fixed at ITU-R601 values (16-235 luma, 16-240 chroma).
NOTE: If it is not already specified in the filter chain, this filter will be automatically applied when recording with the "bttv" driver.
o The "quickdnr" filter
A fast temporal denoiser. This can take 1, 2 or 4 parameters, each being a value from "0" for the least filtering to "255" for the greatest filtering. With one parameter, the filter will compute the values it should use for all of its variables. Two parameters will set the filter strength for luma and chroma independently. If you are interested in how the algorithm works, you may examine the source code to see how four parameter are used.
o The "denoise3d" filter
A slower denoiser that applies a spatial and temporal low-pass filter. The spatial filter can remove some noise that quickdnr can't, but a more powerful CPU is needed. This filter accepts 3 float parameters:
Reasonable defaults will be selected for omitted parameters. The chroma temporal filter strength is calculated from the other filter strengths.
o The "crop" filter
Covers edges of video with black bars. This helps improve video quality when the edges of the frame are distorted. By default, this removes 16 pixels from each edge. This can optionally take four parameters representing top:left:bottom:right. The number times 16 is the number of pixels to remove so, for example, the default is "=1:1:1:1".
o The "forceyv12" and "forceyuv422p" filters
These force the filter manager to use the given format. You can use one of these at the head of a filter chain to change the capture format. The most likely use would be forceyuv422p to use YUV422P capture on cards with known chroma interlacing problems with YV12.
There are some filters included in the MythTV source code that should not be used:
o The "forcergb24" and "forceargb32" filters
The two RGB formats should not be used because there is no conversion filter for them yet.
o The "convert" filter
It exists but don't use it. The filter manager uses this filter automatically when it is unable to match the input/output formats of two adjacent filters.
o The "postprocess" filter
While this exists in MythTV source code, it is currently not recommended for use.
There are trade-offs to consider when deciding if it would be wise to use a filter. Any processing will modify the original image so you should assess if the filter has made a noticeable improvement to the picture in order to justify the impact of the processing. Adding any filter will inherently increase CPU usage. The impact can vary dramatically depending on your CPU type and speed, the resolution of the recording, which filters you are using and other factors. You can only determine what is right for you through experimentation. However, as a starting point, here are some filter strings that you may find useful:
For typical broadcast stations: "kerneldeint,quickdnr"
For stations with poor signal quality: "linearblend,denoise3d=12"
For synchronous TV-out: check Deinterlace with "Bob (2x framerate)"
Depending on your capture card, MythTV offers different video encoders. The following types of hardware encoding cards are supported:
For DVB and HDTV cards, no further configuration is required after setting up the card using the 'setup' program. For all other cards, configuration is done through MythFrontend. Selecting 'Recording Profiles' from the 'TV Settings' screen will list the profiles currently available for the cards in your system. Depending on what types of cards you have installed you may see:
(Create new profile group)
Software Encoders
Hardware MPEG Encoders
Hardware MJPEG Encoders
Transcoders
The 'Transcoders' group is a little different from the others. Selecting this group will result in a menu with the following options: 'RTjpeg/MPEG-4' and 'MPEG-2'. These types indicate what transcoder options will be used for a given input type (i.e. the 'MPEG-2' settings would be used to transcode MPEG-2 files into MPEG-4. The source of the MPEG-2 stream (DVB, HDTV, or PVR-x50) does not matter. Configuration of the options is the same as below (although any resolution settings will be ignored).
Selecting any of the other options will show a new screen with a list of four profiles:
The Default profile will be used for any recording which does not otherwise have a specific profile assigned. The 'Live TV' profile will be used when watching TV. The remaining two profiles are available for customizing to allow for more precise control over what quality is used for a given program.
Selecting a profile will allow you to adjust the relevant options for that card. The most significant setting is the recording resolution, but you can also choose encoding format, audio format, and tweak other encoder specific properties.
See the What capture resolution should I use? How does video work? section for more information.
MythTV is able to control the LED on the Xbox to indicate backend recording status.
To control the LED, you will need the blink program from the
xbox-linux project, which is installed as /bin/led on GentooX. On
Xebian (the new Ed's Debian) you must install it yourself. On other
distributions it may or may not be installed as a program called
blink and should be located in your path. (Type which
blink to see if the program is available.) If you do not have
blink, you may obtain it from the Xbox-Linux project site at
http://xbox-linux.sf.net/. The
program you need is part of the eds_i2c_staff module in CVS. Note
the spelling.
Once you have installed blink you will need to set permissions.
blink needs write permission to the i2c device to function
properly. There are three methods to accomplish this. First, you could run
mythfrontend as root, which is the simplest method, but could
potentially be a security risk. Next, you may make the blink
binary setuid root, which allows non-privileged users to run a program with
root capability. This is done by typing the command:
$ su
# chmod u+s /path/to/blink
/dev/i2c/0 device read/write
for all users, but this is the least preferred method.
Now it's time to setup MythTV for Xbox hardware. Enter Setup -> General. On the second page check the 'Enable Xbox Hardware' option. Upon reentering the settings, you should have a new option named 'Xbox'. Within this option you may select the distribution, LED colors for recording and the update interval. If you select GentooX as the distribution led will be used as the blink binary name, otherwise, blink is used. Colors should be self explanatory. The update interval determines how often the frontend should poll the backend to determine if the status has changed.
The keys.txt file describes what the various keyboard commands are.
If you have loaded mythweb, you may change the default keys to your liking.
| Arrow keys | used to move the highlight point around |
| ALT-F4 | exit out of the application |
| Space/Enter | take action on the item under the highlight point |
| P | play in both "Watch a Recording" and "Delete a Recording" |
| D | delete in both "Watch a Recording" and "Delete a Recording" |
| U | to view details for the currently selected show on the Watch or Delete screens, EPG, "Program Finder", "Fix Scheduling Conflicts" or search results screens |
| O | to list the upcoming episodes for the currently selected show on the EPG, "Program Finder", "Program Recording Priorities", "Fix Scheduling Conflicts" or search results screens |
| I | edit recording options from the EPG, "Program Finder", "Program Recording Priorities", or "Fix Scheduling Conflicts" screens. From the Playback and Delete screens, 'I' presents options for recorded shows such as Auto Expire or Stop Recording. Pressing 'I' while on the Recording Options screen will take you to the Advanced Recording Options screen. |
| Up or down | keys change the channel |
| num pad | Type a number to enter a channel number or jump amount (HHMM format) |
| P | pause / play. You may also add an explicit keybinding for 'Play' through MythWeb, returning you to normal speed if you are in slow motion, rewind fast forward or pause mode. |
| C | change inputs on TV Tuner card |
| ESC | quits |
| I | puts the On-screen Display up again. During playback, 'I' toggles between position and show description info. If a jump amount is entered, jump to that position. |
| M | brings up the electronic program guide (Grid) -- see the EPG section |
| Page Up | jump back the configured number of minutes (default is 10) |
| Page Down | jump ahead the configured number of minutes (default is 10) |
| End or Z | skip to next commercial break marker |
| Home or Q | skip back to previous commercial break marker |
| T | toggle close caption support |
| F | rotate between the various Picture Adjustments (Colour, Hue, etc.) While Picture Adjustment is on-screen, use Left and Right arrows to adjust. These settings adjust the look of the video playback, and are independent of the G-key settings used at record-time. |
| [ or F10 | decrease volume |
| ] or F11 | increase volume |
| | or F9 | toggle mute |
| / | jump to the next "favorite" channel |
| ? | mark/unmark the current channel as a "favorite" |
| U | increase the play speed |
| J | decrease the play speed |
| A | Adjust time stretch (speed up or slow down normal play of audio and video |
| W | cycle through 4:3 aspect ratio, 16:9, 4:3 Zoom (like Pan and Scan), 16:9 Zoom, and 16:9 Stretch (eliminates black sidebars in TV signal) |
| F8 | toggle the sleep timer 30m->1hr->1hr30m->2hr->Off |
| CTRL-B | Jump to the beginning of the recording / ringbuffer |
| + | Switch between audio streams |
| Left | (if a jump amount is entered) to jump back that amount |
| Right | (if a jump amount is entered) to jump ahead that amount |
| Without the stickykeys option selected | |
| Left | rewind the configured number of seconds (default is 5) |
| Right | fast forward the configured number of seconds (default is 30) |
| < | starts rewind mode as if stickykeys are selected |
| > | starts fast forward mode as if stickykeys are selected |
| With Stickykeys option selected | |
| Right | starts fast forward mode |
| Left | starts rewind mode |
| In fast forward or rewind mode: | |
| Left/Right | increases the ff/rew speed |
| 0 | plays at normal speed, but leaves the time indicator on screen |
| 1 or 2 | plays back more slowly than normal ff/rew speed (1 is slowest) |
| 3 | plays back at normal ff/rew speed |
| 4-9 | plays back faster than normal ff/rew speed (9 is fastest) |
| Space | exits fast forward or rewind mode |
| While video is paused: | |
| Left | rewind 1 frame |
| < | rewind 1 second |
| Right | advance 1 frame |
| > | advance 1 second |
| G | rotate between the various Picture Adjustments (Colour, Hue, etc.) for recording. These values affect the look of the resulting .nuv file, and are independent of the playback picture settings. While Picture Adjustment is on-screen, use Left and Right arrows to adjust. |
| H | Channel history. Each repeat steps back through the previous channels. |
| O | Turns on 'Browse' mode, allowing user to browse channels and program info while watching current show FullScreen. |
| Y | switch between multiple capture cards. NOTE:you will lose your LiveTV buffer on your current card. Useful for different-sourced cards (such as Dish Network on one, HDTV over-the-air on another card.) |
| Left | browse program prior to current listed program |
| Right | browse program following current listed program |
| Up | browse program on channel above current listed channel/program |
| Down | browse program on channel below current listed channel/program |
| / | browse program on next favorite channel |
| 0-9 | enter a channel number to browse |
| Space/Enter | change channel to channel of current listed program |
| R/r | Toggle recording of current program (cycles through types) |
| ESC/O | Exit Browse mode |
| Left | Move video to Left |
| Right | Move video to Right |
| Up | Move video Up |
| Down | Move video Down |
| PageUp | Zoom In |
| PageDown | Zoom Out |
| Space/Enter | Exit Zoom mode leaving picture at current size and position |
| ESC | Exit Zoom mode and return to original size |
| V | toggle Picture-in-picture on or off |
| B | toggles the window focus (lets you change channels on the PiP window) |
| N | swaps the two channels by changing channels on both cards |
| Space/Enter | set a bookmark at that point. Next time you start the recording, you will automatically jump forward to this point and clear the bookmark. |
| X | queues the current recording for transcoding |
| O | brings up menu to allow toggling settings such as Commercial Auto-Skip, Auto-Expire, etc. |
| D | exits the current recording and displays the Delete menu |
| E or M | enters/exits edit mode. |
| In edit mode | |
| Left/Right | move forward and backward |
| Up/Down | alter the amount of time you jump forward and backward. Increments are: nearest cutpoint, nearest video keyframe, 1 frame, 0.5 seconds, 1 second, 20 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes. |
| PageUp/PageDown | move forward and backward to the nearest cut point |
| < or > | move forward or backward by 10 times the normal jump amount |
| Space/Enter | allows you to set or delete a cut point |
| Z | loads the commercial skip list (if one exists) into the cutlist |
| C or Q | clear all cut points in the cutlist |
| I | Inverts the cutlist |
| Arrows | are used to move the highlighted program point around |
| A, D, S, W | perform the same as left, right, down and up |
| PageUp/PageDown | move the channel list up or down a page |
| Home/End | move the highlight left or right by one day |
| Ctrl+Left or < | move the highlight left by one page |
| Ctrl+Right or > | move the highlight right by one page |
| 9, 3, 7, 1 | (like a numeric keypad) perform the same as PageUp, PageDown, Home and End |
| I | bring up more information about a show, and allow you to schedule a recording. If you select "Record this showing" while watching Live TV you can "Instant Record" a program. |
| Space/Enter | allow you resolve conflicts or change overrides. If the program is not already scheduled to record, it will instead act like pressing 'I'. |
| M | when on a channel will change to that channel |
| ESC or C | exits without changing the channel |
| R | change the current item from Recording/Not-Recording. Successive keypresses cycle through the scheduled recording type list. |
| X | change the channel to the currently selected channel without leaving the EPG (Most useful in the alternate EPG) |
| ? | mark/unmark the current channel as a "favorite" |
| / or 4 | toggle the guide listing between all channels and filtered "favorites" |
| Right | increases priority value |
| Left | decreases priority value |
| 1 | sorts by title |
| 2 | sorts by priority |
| Home/End | toggle sort priority |
| I | edit recording options |
| ESC | commits changes and exits |
| 1 | show all recordings |
| 2 | show only important recordings |
| Home/End | toggle show showing all/important |
| I | edit recording options |
| Space/Enter | resolve conflict or override |
| Home | change to the previous view if applicable |
| End | change to the next view if applicable |
| M | select another view if applicable. In the title and description search popup, press M again to edit or delete the selected view. |
| D | on a custom profile group displays a popup to delete the group |
In the Watch Recordings screen, Recording Groups allow you to separate
programs into user-defined categories, such as "Kids", "Alice", "Bob", etc.
This can be used to reduce clutter, or to segregate content if you use the
PIN function.
| M | change the view or to set a group password |
| I | move a program from one Recording Group to another |
| 1 or F1 | Meaning of the icons |
| / | Tags a recording. Tagged recordings can be played either in order or shuffled and deleted as a group. You can also change the recording group for several recordings at once by tagging them and using the popup INFO menu to change the recording group. |
| ? | Clear the tagged list. |
If you are using MythTV with just a remote control then it is suggested that you map the remote control keys as described below. Your remote control may not have the same set of keys as those named below, the names are only a suggestion that roughly correspond to the function.
If you are adding new key bindings to the program then consideration of this suggested list will help users with remote controls.
This list assumes a minimal remote control that only has 20 keys, nearly all
features can be used with this configuration. If you have more keys then you
can access all of the features. With only 16 keys most features are usable.
| REMOTE CONTROL | LIRC KEYSTROKE | FUNCTION |
| 0 - 9 | 0 - 9 | channel selection, EPG navigation, ff/rew speed setting (with stickykeys) |
| Left Arrow | Left | scroll left, rewind |
| Right Arrow | Right | scroll right, fast forward |
| Up Arrow | Up | scroll up, channel change up |
| Down Arrow | Down | scroll down, channel change down |
| Select / OK / Play | Space | Select item, play (with stickykeys) set bookmark |
| Cancel | Escape | Cancel, quit playback |
| Menu | m | EPG (from watching TV) edit (from playback). |
| Pause | p | Pause |
| Other key 1 | i | Information |
| Other key 2 | c | Change tuner card input |
MythTV is "themeable", meaning that the visual appearance of the program can be modified by the user without re-compiling or altering the program functionality. The MythTV website has a Themes section; pick a theme you'd like to use and download it to your system.
Once it's on your machine, you must move the file and untar it:
$ su
# cp funhouse.tar.gz /usr/local/share/mythtv/themes
# cd /usr/local/share/mythtv/themes
# tar -xzf funhouse.tar.gz
# exit
The theme will now be available in the mythfrontend Appearance section.
bz2 file, use
tar -xjf rather than tar -xzf.
A script used to exist for adding DirecTV pay-per-view information into the database. As of 2005-04-01 this script no longer appears to work, and this section will be removed from the HOWTO with the release of 0.19.
A script for adding DirecTV information into the database has been written by tarek Lubani mailto:tarek@tarek.2y.net and is available at http://tarek.2y.net/myth/ppv.pl. This is currently an external user-supplied program, so if you have issues with the script, please contact the author.
A script for adding Pay Per View information into the MythTV database for DishTV subscribers is available at http://www.mythppv.com/.
MythTV supports changing the channel on an external tuner. If you have
an external tuner, such as a DirecTV or digital cable set top box, you
should add /usr/local/bin/changechannel to your Input Connections in the
mythbackend configuration GUI.
The changechannel program is not supplied with MythTV, so this is going to be dependent on what sort of external tuner you have. Example scripts for Sony and RCA receivers can be obtained from http://tarek.2y.net/myth/. This is currently an external user-supplied program, so if you have issues with the script, please contact the author.
Feel free to browse some of what sort of hardware is available at http://shop.store.yahoo.com/snapstreammedia/cablepacks.html, or if you wish to assemble your own, rather than purchase, the following may be helpful: http://www.snapstream.com/products/irblaster/sonydss.htm for cable pinouts for RCA DSS receivers.
What does the MythTV Shutdown/Wakeup function do? The scheduler on the Master backend (MBE) keeps track of the idle status of the entire MythTV system, including the Slave backends (SBE). If it considers the system to be idle, and thus ready to shutdown, it sets the wakeuptime to the time of the next recording and then proceeds to shut down all Slave backends and then itself. Once it is time to begin recording, the Master backend and the Slave Backends are automatically woken up. This system allows MythTV to record like a normal VCR, thereby conserving power when not in active use.
In order to use the Shutdown/Wakeup function there must be some method of waking up the Master backend. There are any number of solutions, but we will discuss in detail two possibilities:
The scheduler keeps track of the idle status of the MythTV system. To determine whether or not the MythTV system is idle, the following conditions must be met for a period of time defined in the "Idle timeout (secs)" parameter.
If we get to this idle state the Master backend will set the wakeuptime using the "Set wakeuptime command", which is the same for WOL and BIOS wakeup. The Master backend will then shut down the Slave backends and itself using the "Server halt command".
One caveat is that the scheduler tries to guess if the Master backend was started by a wakeup call or by the user. If it thinks it was woken up by a user, it blocks shutdown until a client connects to the Master backend, after which it will behave as described above. To disable this feature, unset "Block shutdown before client connected" in the mythfrontend Setup->Setup->General screen.
Once it is time to startup the system, the Master backend is woken up first and will wakeup the Slave backends using the "Wake command for slaves". At this time, there is no support for starting only the required Slave backend, so all Slave backends will startup.
There are a number of options that are used to control the Shutdown / Wakeup feature.
Shutdown/Wakeup Options:
The "WakeOnLan settings": These settings have nothing to do with using BIOS or WOL wakeup, they are the same for both.
To use WOL to wake your Master backend you will need a WOL capable Master backend, a machine that runs 24/7 which can execute an at-job and nc (netcat) on the Master backend. I use some little bash scripts to make my DSL router wakeup my mythbox if required.
Replace $SERVER and $PORT with your own settings! On my Master backend I have a script that gets called as 'setwakeuptime command' which looks like the following:
#! /bin/sh
echo $@ | nc $SERVER $PORT
If you use inetd:
In /etc/inetd.conf add:
mythwake stream tcp nowait mythtv /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/bin/mythwake
/etc/xinet.d/ directory:
service mythwake
{
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = mythtv
protocol = tcp
id = mythwake
server = /usr/local/bin/mythwake
}
/etc/services:
mythwake $PORT/tcp
Finally, /usr/local/bin/mythwake looks like:
#! /bin/bash
#this should be a command to wake your server
WAKECMD="#!/bin/sh\n /usr/local/bin/wakeMBE"
#first we need to delete all wake jobs in queue
for JOB in atq | cut -f 1 ; do
atrm $JOB;
done
#now we read the date from 'nc'
read date;
#now set the atjob
echo -e "$WAKECMD" | at $date ;
Since I don't use this, I cannot say much about this. If your motherboard supports any wakeup tool you have to call that tool as "Set wakeuptime command" with the "Wakeup time format" suitable for that tool.
If your MySQL server and your Master backend are not on the same machine, you can have the Master backend wake your MySQL server using WOL. You will find the settings for this in the second page of the setup program, or at the end of mysql.txt. The meanings are the same as discussed in "The WakeOnLan settings" above.
If, for example, one of the Slave backends is also your desktop computer,
you could simply use a little script as 'server halt command' which first
calls /sbin/shutdown -t TIMEOUT where TIMEOUT is a value sufficient
for you to react. You could then popup a window using *dialog, asking for
permission to shutdown. If you cancel the shutdown, simply call
/sbin/shutdown -c.
If you get "nvram-wakeup: /dev/rtc: Device or resource busy" your
set-wakeuptime-script should stop the program that uses /dev/rtc before
setting the wakeuptime.
The MythTV master backend is responsible for managing the schedule for all TV tuner cards on the master and any slave. It's job is to search the TV listing for the shows you have requested and assign recordings to the TV tuner cards. If none of the shows that you've chosen overlap, it simply records all of the shows. However, if there are shows where the beginning and end times overlap, the scheduler follows rules that you've specified or makes logical decisions about what would be best if you haven't express your preference. Further, the "Upcoming Recordings" page allows you make specific decisions about what you really do and don't want to record.
When you choose a show that you would like to record from the Options Page, there are eight different types of rules to help the scheduler find which showings you would like to record.
Singles will record without regard to duplicate matching.
The standard recurring methods of All, Channel, Weekly and Daily use the descriptive information in the TV listings to try to record only one showing of each unique episode. However, This goal is sometimes complicated by the fact that the stations may not include a description for a specific episode but use a generic description for the series instead. When there is a generic description, the default behavior is to assume that it may be an episode that you have not seen and to record it for you. One of the duplicate matching options is "Record new episodes only". If this is selected, listing that have an original air date of more than 14 days earlier are considered repeats and are not eligible to record. Generally, generic episodes will be marked as repeats also.
Because of generic episodes and other situations, MythTV offers an alternative approach where shows may be recorded by choosing from multiple showings even when the descriptive information is not reliable. All of the "Find" record types look for matching titles in the listings. If there is a showing with specific episode information and that episode has recorded before, that showing is marked as previously or currently recorded. The scheduler will then choose to record the earliest non-conflicting showing from any of other remaining showings regardless of the descriptive information. Generally, Find One is most useful for movies or specials and the Find Daily and Find Weekly rules are best for news or current events shows that are repeated. However, these may be useful in other situations where the standard recording rules may not work correctly.
As you add more shows that you would like to record, the scheduler will eventually encounter conflicts. If there are two shows at the same time and you have two or more TV tuner cards, both shows will record. However, if there are more shows than cards, the scheduler will have to decide what it thinks it should not record based on the information you have given. If you see an unexpected situation you are not "stuck" with the scheduler's choice. You can still tell the scheduler exactly which shows you do want to record and/or don't want to record in any situation.
By default, all shows you select are have equal value to the scheduler. There are a set of rules to to make good choices when two or more shows are in conflict. However, priority values let the scheduler know what you want so that it can set the schedule based on your preferences.
Initially all priority values are set to zero. You may choose to leave everything at "0" and let the scheduler follow rules to guess what you might prefer when there are conflicts. However, if you have one or two favorite shows, you may want to increase the priority value so the scheduler will know that you would prefer recording these over other shows. You might use certain values to rate shows so that all favorites are 2. good shows are 1 and extra 'filler' shows are all -1 for example. You could sort each title on the "Set Priorities" to have a unique value so the scheduler can always know which show you'd prefer verses any other show. The choice and style are entirely up to you. However, the more information you give to the scheduler, the more likely it will make the choices you would like in the first place.
The scheduler choices are based on the total priority for a showing by adding up four different priority factors. By default, all of these factors are "0" but you may use any combination to express your likes and needs.
Per record rule -- this is the "priority" field in the "Scheduling Options" section of the options page and this values is included for any showings that match the recording rule. You may choose to only use these values and not use the other factors for the sake of simplicity and clarity.
Per record type -- Setup->TV Settings->Recording Priorities->General allows you to add to the priority based on the type. It may make sense to increase the value for "Single" so that by default they have an extra advantage over other shows. You may want to decrease the value for Find rules so that they will be less likely to interfere with regular shows and will be more likely to record in a non-conflicting time instead.
Per channel -- Setup->TV Settings->Recording Priorities->Channel Priorities can be useful if you believe that you prefer any of the shows on certain channels. This would give all shows on a channel an advantage by default.
Input preference -- in the MythTV "setup" program, the "Input Connections" section allows you to add additional priority in the "Input preference". This is simply another priority factor but has an interesting effect. If a card input has a higher value than the other cards, the scheduler will see that you would rather record showings of episodes on this card rather than a showing on another card. If you have multiple cards of different quality, you may want to set input preference to encourage the scheduler to record shows on your best card(s) whenever possible. This can also be useful if you have multiple video sources which include the same stations. For example, with digital and analog cable you could increase the digital cable input preference by 1 to tell the scheduler that you want to record from the digital station whenever possible but the station on the analog input could still be used when the digital input is busy.
For any single showing of any show you've chosen to record, these factors are added together to find the "total priority". This is the priority that the scheduler uses to decide which shows are given the first choice when filling in the schedule.
Here are the actual decisions made by the scheduler as it fills in the schedule.
Setup->TV Settings->Recording Priorities->General has a checkbox for "Reschedule Higher Priorities" which tells the scheduler to try to be a little smarter in certain situations. If this is checked, the scheduler will look for situations where a show cannot record because all inputs for the channel are used for higher priority shows. It will check to see if any of the other shows could be recorded at another time so that the conflicting show can be recorded in it's place.
Generally, this is a good strategy but there are tradeoffs. If a higher priority show is postponed, you will not get to watch it until it is recorded in the later timeslot. There is also a risk that the TV listings may change and the later showing may go away. In this rare case the higher priority show may never record. On the other hand, if you do not use this option you will miss recording some lower priority shows unnecessarily unless you make similar these changes manually.
By using Reschedule Higher Priorities, the scheduler will do a better job of recording as many of your shows as possible when left unattended. It will also be easy to see that shows have been marked to record at a later time. You can then decide for yourself when you would prefer to record the first showing.
The Manage Recordings->Upcoming Recordings page is your control center for the MythTV scheduler. Unlike other DVR systems, this one page gives you all of the information and tools you need to see all of your alternatives and make whatever adjustments you desire.
The upper half of the screen has a scrollable box listing items that match your record rules sorted by time. The lower half shows the details for the highlighted item. There are two 'views' available. Press "1" to include all of the items that match record rules even if they do not need to be recorded. Press "2" to focus on just the things that will record and items that may need your attention. The message in the upper right-hand corner will remind you when there are conflicts that would prevent one or more shows from being recorded.
The items in the list are colored white for things that will record, gray for those that do not need to record and yellow when there is a time conflict. Items at the top of the list may also be highlighted indicating that the recording is in progress.
Along with the channels, start times and titles, the right-hand column has a status code. Numbers indicate which card number has been assigned to record the show. Letters are used to indicate the reason that something will not be recorded. Just below the box is a short status message for the highlighted item that indicates the type of record rule that was matched and a one or two word explanation of the status code. If you press SELECT, you will see more information about the status.
There are a few status codes that may require your attention. "C" indicates that there are more overlapping shows to record than there are TV tuners to record them. "L" indicates that the scheduler found that it may be better to record a later showing of this episode. These states happen as a result of your choices and should normally reflect your preferences. However, you may notice situations where you would like to modify the scheduler's initial choices.
The first thing you can do is to highlight an item and press INFO once or twice to see the Recording Options page. From this page you can change the record rule type, the duplicate matching rules, or raise or lower the priority to resolve whatever problem you noticed.
Additionally, you can treat any individual showing as an exception that you do want to record or don't want to record. To use these "override" features, highlight the item and press SELECT. You will see a message explaining the current status and at least an "OK" button to exit without making changes.
For items scheduled to record, there will be a button for "Don't record" which will prevent recording this showing but will still allow the same episode to record in the future. If there is episode description information, you may also see a button for "Never record". This prevents recording this showing and tells MythTV to remember that this is an episode that you've seen or don't need to see if it is ever in the TV listings again.
For items that are not scheduled to record, the message will describe the reason and in the case of "C" or "L" it will include a list of the shows that are scheduled to record instead. For any item that could potentially be recorded there will be buttons for "Edit Options" and "Add Override". "Edit Options" will allow you to change the options for the existing record rule such as raising the priority so that the show will record. These changes would apply to this and all future showings that match this record rule. "Add Override" will allow you to set options that apply to the specific showing without affecting the existing record rule.
If you return to an override page after an override has already been set, you will also see a "Clear override" to undo your changes. This option makes it very easy to try out some "what if" attempts when deciding on your best strategy in a difficult situation.
The MythWeb allows you to use a web page to control various aspects of your MythTV system. MythWeb is a separate application, but it's dependent on MythTV being installed and operational.
Download mythweb from http://www.mythtv.org/ and save it to a location where you can find it. The next step depends on whether your distribution has a web server and if you have PHP support.
Mandrake 9.0 has apache and PHP pre-packaged, so installation is quite simple. Once you have installed the two programs, either with the graphical installer (see instructions in Graphic Install Tools) or through the command line (section Command Line), and you've ensured that the apache server will start at boot using the Mandrake Control Center.
# urpmi apache2 apache2-mod_php php-mysql
# chkconfig --level 345 httpd on
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart
$ tar -xjf mythweb-0.18.tar.bz2
$ cd mythweb-0.18
$ su
# mkdir /var/www/html/mythweb
# cp -r . /var/www/html/mythweb
# exit
$
Edit the /var/www/html/mythweb/config/conf.php file if required.
By default, MythWeb uses an Apache .htaccess file to restrict
access to the website and to configure some variables.
To create the password file for Apache (if your system doesn't already have one), you could do something like this:
# cd /var/www
# htpasswd -c htpasswd mythtv
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user mythtv
See the man page for htpasswd for more examples.
To access the web page, open a web browser and use http://[name or ip address]/mythweb/
404 Page not Found error.
MythWeb allows you to configure which keys are bound to which actions within MythTV. If you'd like to reset this back to the default, execute the following command:
$ echo "delete from keybindings ;" | mysql -u mythtv -pmythtv mythconverg
If you find yourself wedged into a theme that isn't working, open your
web browser and go to site:
http://mythweb_name_or_ip_address/mythweb/settings.php?RESET_THEME=yes
MythGallery is a photo and slideshow application. MythGallery is a separate application, but it's dependent on MythTV being installed and operational.
Download MythGallery from http://www.mythtv.org/ and save it to a location where you can find it. There are a number of transitions available, some requiring OpenGL support. You will also need to install a TIFF library. Under Mandrake, you would perform the following command:
# urpmi libtiff3-devel
$ tar -xjf mythgallery-0.18.tar.bz2
$ cd mythgallery-0.18
$ ./configure --enable-opengl
$ qmake mythgallery.pro
$ make
# su
# make install
# exit
$
The controls for MythGallery can be found in the README that comes with the application.
When you first start MythGallery, you will see a thumbnail view of any folders and pictures in the Gallery Directory you specified in setup. If this is the first time you have accessed this directory, the thumbnails will be generated on the fly. If the Gallery Dir is writable, these thumbnails will be cached thus speeding up future access. On the left is a greyed-out menu of options.
Use the arrow keys to select a folder or picture to open/view with the Select key, or use the Menu key to toggle access the menu on the left. The menu options are as follows:
The import path in the setup dialog is a colon separated list of directories and/or executable files. When the import key is pressed, a new directory (the destination directory) under the current directory will be created and the import path will be searched. If the item in the import path is a directory (the source directory), the contents of that directory will be copied to the destination directory. If you would like the source directory to be that of a removable device, it might be a good idea to use autofs. See the automount howto at www.linuxdoc.org for info on how to get it working.
If the item in the import path is an executable file, MythGallery will attempt to execute it with the destination directory as its sole argument. Be careful when using executable scripts that the script runs unattended (doesn't need user intervention) and returns properly, otherwise it could create the appearance of MythGallery hanging (e.g. running smbclient and prompting for password). Also be sure that scripts have executable permissions set.
Here is an example script that a user may want to run on import:
#!/bin/csh
if ($#argv == 0) then
echo "Usage: $0 dest_dir"
exit
endif
cd $argv[1]
# get stuff over the network
wget http://www.somesite.dom/dir/file1.jpg
wget http://www.somesite.dom/dir/file2.jpg
wget http://www.somesite.dom/dir/file3.jpg
# stuff that requires manual module loading and/or fs mounting
modprobe camera_module
mount /dev/camera /mnt/camera
cp /mnt/camera/* $argv[1]
umount /mnt/camera
rmmod camera_module
# perform some processing
foreach pname (`ls *.jpg`)
jpegtran -flip vertical $pname > $pname.new
mv $pname.new $pname
end
MythMusic has a number of prerequisites that must be satisfied before it is operational. Depending on your distribution, some of these prerequisites can be satisfied through the various package managers. If your distribution doesn't offer pre-compiled versions of the software below, then follow the generic instructions for manually compiling and installing the software.
The prerequisites for MythMusic are:
These instructions are for distributions which don't have pre-compiled versions of the software necessary to run MythTV.
Download MAD from http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/ Save it to a directory you can find later.
$ tar -xzf mad-0.14.2b.tar.gz
$ cd mad-0.14.2b
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
$
Download libid3tag from http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/ Save it to a directory you can find later.
$ tar -xzf libid3tag-0.15.0b.tar.gz
$ cd libid3tag-0.15.0b
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
$
Download FLAC from http://flac.sourceforge.net and install:
$ tar -xzf flac-1.1.0.tar.gz
$ cd flac-1.1.0
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
$
Download libcdaudio from libcdaudio.sourceforge.net and install:
$ tar -xzf libcdaudio-0.99.9.tar.gz
$ cd libcdaudio-0.99.9
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
$
Download cdparanoia from http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/down.html.
$ tar -xzf cdparanoia-III-alpha9.8.src.tgz
$ cd cdparanoia-III-alpha9.8
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
# make install
# cd /usr/lib
# ln -sf libcdda_interface.so.0.9.8 libcdda_interface.so
# ln -sf libcdda_paranoia.so.0.9.8 libcdda_paranoia.so
# exit
$
Mandrake 9.0 has a number of the prerequisites available on the installation CD. Some of the software you're going to need will have to be obtained from the "contrib" or "cooker" development repositories. Applications downloaded from "cooker" come from the development branch, so there may be issues with some software. It isn't recommended that you mix cooker and release-level software.
urpmi is the simplest tool for installation of packages from the command line. The difficult part is the configuration, but this has been made easier at the following website: http://addmedia.linuxfornewbies.org/ The website will allow you to choose a mirror site and then present the command-line configuration text for that mirror. You will most likely need to add a "Contrib" mirror to your setup. Once you have done that, you can proceed. If urpmi prompts you about other modules that need to be installed to satisfy dependencies, say "Yes".
# urpmi libmad0 libmad0-devel libflac4 libflac4-devel libcdaudio1 cdparanoia
# urpmi libcdda0 libcdda0-devel libvorbis0 libvorbis0-devel
# urpmi libcdaudio1-devel libid3tag0 libid3tag0-devel
Additional visualizations have been added to MythMusic. If you wish to use these, there are some prerequisites you must install prior to compiling.
fftw may be obtained from
http://www.fftw.org/. In Mandrake 9.1 it may be installed by
typing:
# urpmi libfftw2 libfftw2-devel
OpenGL should be installed on practically all distributions.
However, you will need the devel module. In Mandrake 9.1 it may be
installed by typing:
# urpmi libMesaGLU1-devel
SDL may be obtained from
http://www.libsdl.org. In Mandrake 9.1 it may be installed by
typing:
# urpmi libSDL1.2 libSDL1.2-devel
Red Hat provides packages for several of the prerequisites, making installation very simple. Of the prerequisites, Red Hat provides packages for Vorbis, cdparanoia, SDL, and OpenGL (which you probably already have installed). To install these all at once, simply type (all on the same line):
$ up2date --solvedeps libvorbis libvorbis-devel vorbis-tools cdparanoia-devel cdparanoia-libs cdparanoia SDL-devel SDL
If you get the following message: "None of the packages you requested were found, or they are already updated" it probably means you already have all of those packages installed.
You must install the remaining packages, (MAD, FLAC, libcdaudio and optionally fftw) manually following the installation directions above. When installing fftw do not use the rpm package offered on the website because it will cause an error, so use the source package instead.
Once all the prerequisites have been installed, you can proceed with
getting MythMusic going. Make sure that you run ./configure first.
If you wish to use the new visualizations, make sure you install the
prerequisites. Run ./configure --help for help.
NOTE for Red Hat users: Before compiling, make the following modification to settings.pro, otherwise the compile will fail: Find the following text: INCLUDEPATH *= /usr/local/include immediately below that add INCLUDEPATH *= /usr/include/cdda save and close settings.pro and proceed with compiling MythMusic.
$ qmake mythmusic.pro
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
$ ./configure
Configuration of MythMusic occurs in two places. The main mythfrontend Setup is for global MythMusic configuration. Go to the Setup/MythMusic/General Setup screen and adjust it for your particular setup.
The second configuration screen is within the MythMusic program and will allow you rescan your music library, etc.
Here's some explanation about the Ignore_ID3 and The NonID3FileNameFormat:
If Ignore_ID3 is set to TRUE, MythMusic will try to determine the Genre, Artist, Album, Track Number, and Title from the filename of the mp3 file. The NonID3FileNameFormat variable should be set to the directory/file format where the mp3 files are stored. For instance, I store mine in the above shown Genre/Artist/Album/Track format. MythMusic will then use this information to fill in the proper fields when it populates the musicmetadata table rather than searching for an ID3 tag in the mp3 file.
The files can be laid out in any format, such as:
Genre/Artist/Album/Title Artist/Genre/Album/Title Artist/Album/Title (with Genre left as Unknown)
The track number is optional but can be specified with the title by using the TRACK_TITLE keyword instead of TITLE. If TRACK_TITLE is used, then the filename can have a space, hyphen, or underscore separating the track number from the track title. Keywords are case insensitive, so if you specify GENRE it's the same as Genre in the format field.
The Ignore_ID3 option does not disable the code that determines the track length, just the portion that tries to read ID3 info.
MythMusic is fairly simple to use. It is recommended that you insert the CD before selecting "Import CD". You should also ensure that your system doesn't try to automount the CD and begin playing it automatically.
Another item to consider: there are some CDs that contain computer data that runs as a "CD Extra" when inserted into some Windows PCs and Macintoshes. As of 2003-06-10, MythMusic doesn't support track skipping or individual track selection, so if you have a CD with "CD Extra" data you will not be able to encode it; MythMusic will hang attempting to encode the non-audio data.
Here's some information on playlist management:
Q: How do I create a new playlist? A: Using the MythMusic "Select Music" menu option, setup the playlist as you normally would by adding songs or other playlists as needed. When you are ready to save the new playlist, highlight "Active Play Queue" at the bottom of the selection tree and hit the "i" key. This will pop up a menu allowing you to name and save the new playlist. You can also hit Enter to bring up the popup on the Active Play Queue. This does not work on the playlists above, as Enter is obviously bound to checking/unchecking the boxes. Any number (ie. keypad on remote) will also bring up the menu in both cases.
Q: How do I enter the playlist name in the text field without a keyboard? A: Use the keypad number keys (bound to your remote) to select letters quasi-cell phone style. Keys 2-9 work pretty much like any cell phone text entry. 1 cycles through a few special characters, delete, and space. 0 is like a CAPS LOCK. Hard to describe, fairly easy to use. You will soon be able to specify the cycle timing in a Setup screen. You can type fairly quickly through a combination of jumping around the number keys AND hitting a non-number key (right arrow is particularly good for this) to force the current character.
Q: How do I edit a playlist? A: Highlight the playlist in the selection tree and hit the "i" key then select "Move to Active Play Queue" in the popup. You can now modify the "Active Play Queue" like normal, adding songs and playlists by selecting them from the song tree. When you are done, highlight the "Active Play Queue" in the selection tree and hit the "i" key then select "Save Back to Playlist Tree". And whatever you were editing as your Active Queue before you moved an existing playlist "on top" of Active reappears. Think of Active has having a push on, pop off capability, but with a depth of only 1.
Q: How do I delete an item from a playlist? A: Highlight the item in the selection tree and hit the "d" key.
Q: How do I rearrange the songs in my playlist? A: Highlight a song and hit the "space" bar, the song will now have pair of red arrows in front of it. Use the up and down arrow keys to move it around in the playlist. When you have it where you want it, hit the "space" bar again.
Q: How do I delete a playlist? A: Highlight the playlist in the selection tree and hit the "i" key then select "Delete this Playlist" from the popup.
You may run into errors when running MythMusic.
The full text of the message will say:
databasebox.o: Couldn't find your CD. It may not be in the freedb database. More likely, however, is that you need to delete /.cddb and /.cdserverrc and restart mythmusic. Have a nice day.
If you get this message, you should go to the home directory of whatever user MythMusic is running as and type:
rm .cdserverrc
rm -rf .cddb/
These files aren't automatically deleted because of a conscious design decision by the author that programs that automatically delete things are bad.
The files are used to locally cache CD lookups. If you are re-inserting CDs, your machine will not actually have to go out to the Internet to determine what is on them. However, the URL used to access the freedb database has recently changed, so the stale information in the files from previous runs of MythMusic would cause the error above. Once the files have been deleted the stale information will be gone and your local database will be rebuilt as you use CDs.
The MythWeather module will obtain the weather information for the location that you specify. You must be running MythTV v0.10 or later in order to use MythWeather.
Change into the MythWeather directory, then make and make install:
$ cd mythweather
$ qmake mythweather.pro
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
MythWeather uses MSNBC.com as its source for weather data and weather.com for its radar image.
These are the keyboard commands for MythWeather:
Left Key Goes back one page, and extends the time spent
on the page you are on.
Right Key Goes forward one page, see above.
Space Pause, wait on the current page until space is hit
again.
Numeric Keys You can check other weather by keying in other ZIP codes.
Enter Key Switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit. Can also
be used a way to force a data update.
"m" Key Resets the location to the database default, then updates the data.
"i" Enter / Save settings
ESC Exit the settings screen without saving / Exit the program
MythWeather also has an "Aggressiveness" setting. This affects how long MythWeather waits for data from the msnbc.com website before timing out. If you are on a slow connection, or have a slow DNS, or MythWeather just doesn't seem to be working and you've already tried everything else, then try increasing the aggressiveness level parameter. This parameter is inverse; a higher number actually means that MythWeather will be less aggressive, and will therefore wait longer before timing out.
MythWeather will print debugging information on the terminal. If you wish
to see additional debugging information while MythWeather is running, run
mythweather from the command line with as mythweather --debug
You may also force mythweather to re-run the configuration by starting it on
the command line as mythweather --configure. These two options are
mutually exclusive.
The MythVideo application will allow you to use an external program to watch media files that are not directly supported by MythTV.
Change into the MythVideo directory, then make and make install:
$ cd mythvideo
$ qmake mythvideo.pro
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
See MythVideo's README file for additional information.
MythDVD is an application which rips DVDs and makes them available for use with MythVideo. You may also transcode the DVD content from MPEG-2 to other formats which should greatly reduce the amount of space the DVD material takes up on your hard drive.
MythDVD has a number of prerequisites to enable transcoding functionality. If you only wish to play DVDs rather than convert them to something like MPEG-4 or xvid you may skip the prerequisite installation step.
Mandrake users may install the prerequisites this way:
# urpmi libdvdread3 libdvdread3-devel a52dec liba52dec-devel
# urpmi mplayer ogle xine
# urpmi xvid xvid-devel fame libfame0.9-devel transcode libdvdcss
Next comes the configuration and compilation. If you don't want to
transcode, then the first command in the next example can simply be
./configure
$ ./configure --enable-transcode
$ qmake mythdvd.pro
$ make
$ su
# make install
Transcoding ("ripping") a DVD requires you to run the Myth Transcoding Daemon (mtd). To ensure that mtd is configured correctly, you should first test it at the command line.
$ mtd -n
mtd is listening on port 2342
$ mtd -d
Running mtd as a daemon will allow you to automatically start it during the
boot process. For example, you may add mtd -d to your
rc.local file, or you can adjust the script/steps outlined in the
section called
Automatically starting mythbackend at system boot time to start mtd instead of mythbackend.
Some compile errors are worse than others. If you get an error that doesn't abort the compilation, and says something like:
cc1plus: warning: changing search order for system directory
"/usr/local/include"
cc1plus: warning: as it has already been specified as a non-system
directory
If you get an error like /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lXext, the
compiler is telling you that you don't have XFree86-devel installed, or that
your distribution hasn't set it up correctly. This needs to be fixed before
MythTV will compile.
This is due to the broken Qt that is being distributed by Suse. To work
around this, edit libs/libavcodec/Makefile and remove any
"-fPIC" you find there and then recompile.
This error happens when there's a missing link in the
/usr/lib/qt3/mkspecs directory. There are two ways to fix this
error:
1. Create the link manually:
$ su
# cd /usr/lib/qt3/mkspecs
# ln -sf linux-g++ default
or
2. Run qmake mythtv.pro in the mythtv directory. Rerunning qmake will create a new Makefile for you, however this still doesn't fix the root cause of the issue, which is that your distribution didn't create the symlink for you when the qt3 package was installed. The first choice is the better solution.
You didn't set your QTDIR. Re-read the section on
Setting up paths.
This is most likely to be caused by an overheating processor rather than an actual programming fault within gcc.
Without details, the developers will not be able to determine if you have discovered a genuine code-bug, or if the problem is with your system. In order to determine what's going on, you must recompile MythTV with debugging support and run MythTV within gdb, the GNU debugger.
Re-run the configure script and add --compile-type=debug
to any previous configuration options you may have used. Check the
config.log file if you have forgotten.
Now, you need to clear out the old versions of the software to ensure that you're running with the debugging code, then compile and install.
$ make distclean
$ ./configure --compile-type=debug
$ make
$ su
# make install
# exit
At this point, you now have debug-enabled software ready. Let's assume that
the problem you're having is in the setup program.
$ cd setup
$ gdb ./mythtv-setup
GNU gdb 5.3-1mdk (Mandrake Linux)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain
conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i586-mandrake-linux-gnu"...
(gdb) handle SIGPIPE nostop
Signal Stop Print Pass to program Description
SIGPIPE No Yes Yes Broken pipe
gdb has a number of options, read the man page for more
information.
Once at the (gdb) prompt, type run to start program
execution. When the program segfaults or appears to lock-up (press CTRL-C),
type
(gdb) thread apply all bt full
All of the output from gdb should be posted to the mythtv-dev mailing list, along with the steps you followed to get the program to crash.
If you're trying to troubleshoot and you can't get back to the gdb window for some reason, it may be easier to use two systems or to start mythfrontend from the text console.
If you're going to troubleshoot from a remote system, connect to the machine
that you're going to test using ssh or telnet. Next, type
$ export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0. This will allow the graphics to be
displayed on the X console (usually ALT-F6 or ALT-F7) and still give you
output and control of mythfrontend, either from the ssh
session, or by switching back to the text console by pressing CTRL-ALT-F1.
You can now continue troubleshooting using gdb as detailed in the
instructions.
This error used to occur when users compiled MythTV with incorrect CPU options. This should no longer occur with the new configure script.
When run as a non-privileged user, MythTV can not crash your system. If your system is crashing when you run MythTV, then you have some issue with the drivers for your capture card or other hardware, or the CPU fan has fallen off/broken and your system is overheating when asked to perform a CPU intensive task like encoding video.
If you are running as root, which is strongly discouraged, it is possible that your system may crash due to the real-time thread using all available CPU. You will not be able to interrupt the process, so for all intents and purposes your computer will have crashed.
You didn't add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf. See the
section on modifying
/etc/ld.so.conf.
Your MySQL installation may have networking turned off.
Check that /etc/mysql/my.cnf does not contain
skip-networking. If it does, remove it. Also verify that
bind-address is set to your IP address instead of
127.0.0.1. If you change either of these items, restart
MySQL.
If you have reason to believe that your MySQL database is corrupt, execute the following commands to attempt to repair it.
NOTE: Ensure that there are no programs accessing the database while you attempt to repair it. Make sure that all backend and frontend programs have exited.
mysqlcheck -r -umythtv -p<password> mythconverg
This is a different problem than the one discussed in the previous section. Currently, the ivtv driver or firmware appear to have some issues if the vertical capture resolution is not the full screen height. If you are having a jitter problem then ensure that you are capturing either 480 lines (for NTSC) or 576 lines (for PAL). The default capture profiles may need to be edited for your setup. Go to Settings->TV Settings->Recording Profiles and adjust the Default and Live TV options to 480 or 576 from their defaults.
This is due to DPMS, the Display Power Management System, which is used to save power by turning off your monitor when the system decides that it's not being used or due to a screensaver that has defaulted to a blank screen. MythTV now has DPMS support built-in, and should intelligently handle the screen. Continue reading if you wish to override DPMS and force it off.
Since it's likely that watching TV will not generate keyboard or mouse events for a time, you need to turn off DPMS and the screensaver. There are a few ways to do this. You may also need to check your BIOS for power saving modes and disable screen blanking there as well.
Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 or /etc/X11/xorg.conf
file, and look for:
Section "ServerFlags"
#DontZap # disable <Crtl><Alt><BS> (server abort)
#DontZoom # disable <Crtl><Alt><KP_+>/<KP_-> (resolution switching)
AllowMouseOpenFail # allows the server to start up even if the mouse doesn't work
Option "blank time" "0"
Option "standby time" "0"
Option "suspend time" "0"
Option "off time" "0"
Option "NoPM" "1"
EndSection
Also, look for:
Section "Device"
Identifier "device1"
VendorName "nVidia Corporation"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce 256 (generic)"
Driver "nv"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
In this case, you would need to either delete the Option "DPMS"
line, or change it to # Option "DPMS" to comment it out. The next
time you start XFree this change will take effect.
Finally, check:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "monitor1"
VendorName "Plug'n Play"
HorizSync 30-85
VertRefresh 50-160
# Sony Vaio C1(X,XS,VE,VN)?
# 1024x480 @ 85.6 Hz, 48 kHz hsync
ModeLine "1024x480" 65.00 1024 1032 1176 1344 480 488 494 563 -hsync -vsync
# TV fullscreen mode or DVD fullscreen output.
# 768x576 @ 79 Hz, 50 kHz hsync
ModeLine "768x576" 50.00 768 832 846 1000 576 590 595 630
# 768x576 @ 100 Hz, 61.6 kHz hsync
ModeLine "768x576" 63.07 768 800 960 1024 576 578 590 616
EndSection
Ensure that there isn't an Option "DPMS" in the Monitor
configuration.
You can also turn off DPMS from the Command Line, but this will not survive a reboot.
$ xset -dpms
Using xset +dpms will turn it back on.
Another technique to try, which will turn off the screensaver:
$ xset s off
$ xset -dpms s off
Finally, depending on your distribution, you may be able to turn it off from within the control panel.
If mythfilldatabase suddenly appears to be failing, there are at least two things to check.
First, if you are in North America, ensure that your DataDirect subscription is still valid, otherwise, check to see what version of XMLTV you're running and that it's the latest version.
First, you should check that your kernel has been enabled for DMA:
[mythtv@pvr mythtv]$ dmesg |grep DMA
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd800-0xd807, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xd808-0xd80f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=9729/255/63, UDMA(33)
hdb: 80043264 sectors (40982 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=4982/255/63, UDMA(33)
From the listing above, you can see that hda, hdb and hdc are set for DMA, and hdd is set for pio. If your kernel is not reporting DMA being enabled, you may need to recompile your kernel. Check your motherboard's chipset (look in the "ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support" section in "make menuconfig") for more information.
Next, check that the hard drive has DMA enabled. Use the hdparm program to check and enable DMA.
# hdparm -d /dev/hd?
-d1 parameter, it will turn DMA on.
You may also setup your PC to do this at boot time, either by adding the
command to your /etc/rc.local file, or by adding files to
/etc/sysconfig.
On Mandrake and other distributions, if you install hdparm from an RPM you
will most likely get a /etc/sysconfig/harddisks file installed.
This file will be parsed by the /etc/rc.sysinit script. If you use
the default harddisks file, your changes will affect all IDE devices
(including CD ROMs). If you wish to use different parameters for various
devices, rename and/or copy the file to harddiskhda,
harddiskhdb, etc. Edit the file to your liking and on the next
reboot your setting will be preserved.
This may occur when MythTV doesn't have an accurate seektable. Run mythcommflag --rebuild
/dev/dsp. See
this in the PVR-250
section for more information.
Audio appears to be one of the bigger issues that users run into on the mailing list. If the audio isn't configured correctly, then MythTV will often appear to hang, when in fact it is trying to manipulate the audio subsystem and failing. You may or may not receive error messages indicating that the source of the error is the audio subsystem.
You can not use xawtv to determine if your audio is working correctly, since xawtv is simply using the analog sound patched through line-in to line-out. It doesn't need to digitize the sound unless you are using the recording function.
A better test to verify that sound will work for MythTV (and recording with
xawtv for that matter) is to startup xawtv, mute the
line-in then run aplay /dev/dsp. You should hear the recorded audio
slightly delayed behind the real-time video. You should see messages about
"underrun". These can be ignored but they do confirm that the driver is
loaded and there is an active device. Once this test succeeds, MythTV
should work correctly because it writes to and read from /dev/dsp in
the same way that aplay does.
To record audio along with video the audio signal must be digitized by a DSP so that the audio data can be stored in a file. On playback, the audio data is written to /dev/dsp and converted back to an analog signal. This analog signal should then be sent to your speakers. Here is what is needed in alsamixer. If you are using an ALSA version after 1.0.6, use alsamixer -V all:
CAPTUR source - the analog source to be sent to the DSP. This should be set to the input source from the tuner card to the sound card. In most cases this is Line but this could also be Aux, CD, Mic, etc., depending on how you connect the input cable. This source should be muted to prevent patching through the analog sound. The volume of this source will not affect the record level.
Capture mixer - this sets the level for the analog to digital recording. While a volume of 100% is recommended for testing, distortion may occur. Lowering this level to 75% to 85% may result in better audio quality. "Capture" should be marked as the CAPTUR destination.
PCM mixer - this sets the level for the digital to analog playback. While a volume of 100% is recommended for testing, distortion may occur. Lowering this level to 75% to 85% may result in better audio quality.
Master mixer - sets the level for the analog signal sent to line-out or the speakers.
You may also want to ensure that /dev/dsp , or whatever device file
is being used, hasn't already been grabbed by another process, like
esd or artsd. If the device file isn't available, then
MythTV won't work. You may wish to run configure and enable
support for these.
If you wish to see what application is grabbing a resource, you can use the
fuser command:
# fuser -v /dev/dsp
To disable aRts in KDE, go to KDE->Control Center->Sound->Sound System and
uncheck the "Start aRts soundserver on KDE startup" box. Run # killall
artsd from the command line to stop the artsd program.
If you're using multiple sound cards and multiple tuners, use alsamixer
-c 1 to work with the second sound card. The first card is #0, the
second card is #1, etc.
mythbackend does a check to see if your sound device is capable of full duplex operation. If it's not, it's most likely that you're going to run into issues when you try to record and play sound at the same time. If your backend is a separate machine than your frontend, then there's no problem, since you're only going to be doing one thing at a time with the card. Likewise, if you're running the frontend and backend on the same machine, but you're using btaudio or a Hauppauge PVR-250 as your recording source, and using the playback function of your sound card, then you also shouldn't have an issue, since the sound card isn't being asked to perform two functions at once.
If you can't get your sound card to go full duplex and need it to, then check your distribution for updated sound drivers. If your sound card is not capable of full-duplex operation, either because the drivers don't support it, or it has been designed that way, then you're pretty much out of luck and will either need to purchase a new sound card, or will need to get btaudio operational.
This can be due to a number of factors. The simplest case is the "ghost" keypresses. For me, it was due to compact fluorescent lights in the same room as the IR receiver, which the receiver was picking up as keypresses. Once the lights were switched to incandescent bulbs, the ghost went away.
You may have an issue with lirc misinterpreting IR commands from a different remote. I also have an issue where the TiVo "Peanut" remote will eventually cause lircd to stop responding; even though lircd is configured for the Pinnacle Systems remote, the TiVo remote IR patterns are being seen by the IR receiver.
If your remote has been properly configured, and irw and irxevent are working correctly, then it's highly likely that your window manager is not giving focus correctly to the various Myth programs as they run. The following window managers are known to work correctly:
NOTE: You do not need to use irxevent if you are using MythTV's native LIRC support, so the window manager focus issue does not apply in that case.
See message http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2003-April/002527.html
There is no such thing as "Canada Cable"; Canada uses the same
frequencies as the United States. "Canada Cable" was a hack that some
people used when they would discover that their channels were off-by-one,
ie, when tuning to channel 42, they might get channel 41 or 43. This is
actually due to the tuner on the video capture device being mis-detected.
You must manually specify the tuner type in your /etc/modules.conf.
See the video4linux mailing list (
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/video4linux-list) for
more information.
Find your php.ini file. Make sure you've got a line in it like this:
extension=mysql.so
Restart apache for it to take effect.
This is the intended behavior. The MythTV interface is meant for use with a remote control or a keyboard.
Nothing, really. It's just lame (the mp3 encoder) complaining for some obscure reason. This seems to be fixed in more recent versions of the libmp3lame library.
Something's wrong with your program database. Did mythfilldatabase run with no major errors? Or, MythTV may not have permissions to the appropriate video4linux devices. See the section titled Device Permissions for an example.
The most likely issue is that you have incompatible versions of the lirc_i2c and lirc_dev modules and the various lircd programs. See the section called Hauppauge PVR-250 remote and MythTV's native LIRC support. for examples on finding and removing old versions of lirc.
MythTV prints error and status messages to the shell that was used to start the application. If nothing seems to be happening when you try to view a program, try switching back to the shell and look for error messages there, or, if you're running from a startup script, check the log file.
XvMC is a NVidia driver feature which is supposed to help with decoding video. Users have reported that rather than speeding up their video it appears to be doing the opposite. You may want to check that your color depth is set for 24bpp.
You need to disable any sort of auto-running media player in your environment, otherwise MythDVD or MythMusic will not be able to work properly.
In KDE, you may want to perform the following:
$ rm ~/.kde/Autostart/Autorun.desktop
MythTV comes with a utility called mythtranscode which can decode nuv files into raw format for use with other applications. This command-line utility was not designed to be used by the end-user, but instead to be called by other applications or scripts. Programs like mkmovie ( http://www.icelus.org/) and nuvexport ( http://forevermore.net/myth/) are better suited for the end user. However, since mythtranscode can be a useful tool, directions on using it follow.
mythtranscode creates raw streams, which means that they do not contain any container information such as resolution, frame-rate, or audio sampling rate. In order to process the output, you must supply this information to the processing utility. mythtranscode provides the relevant information on STDOUT.
There are two modes in which mythtranscode can create raw streams. The first has no synchronization and assumes that the processing utility will read audio and video at a constant rate. This method is useful when a single application will be processing the raw output, such as mencoder or ffmpeg. The second method assumes that two separate applications will be processing the audio and video streams independently, and there is no rate control between them which means that the two programs don't coordinate their efforts to maintain synchronization.
First, start mythtranscode. You will need to determine the channel and the start time manually.
$ mythtranscode --chanid 1036 --starttime 2003-10-20T15:30:00 --profile \
autodetect --fifodir . &
When mythtranscode begins executing, it will create two FIFOs ("audout" and "vidout") in the directory specified (in this case ".", meaning the current directory) and will print out information about the video stream.
The next step is to start the processing application. The following assumes that the stream is NTSC 640x480 with 32Kbps audio.
To use mencoder you would enter a command like:
mencoder -audiofile audout -audio-demuxer 20 -rawaudio rate=32000 \
-rawvideo on:w=640:h=480:fps=29.97 -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o out.avi \
vidout
ffmpeg -f u16le -ar 32000 -ac 2 -i audout -f rawvideo -s 640x480 -r 29.97 \
-i vidout -vcodec mpeg4 -b 2000 -acodec mp3 -ab 128 out.avi
Or to play directly using mplayer (again 1.0PRE1 or later is needed):
mplayer -audiofile audout -audio-demuxer 20 -rawaudio rate=32000 \
-rawvideo on:w=640:h=480:fps=29.97 vidout
If you wanted to write the raw data to separate audio and video files for later processing, the following would work (note the use of --fifosync for rate-control):
$ mythtranscode --chanid 1036 --starttime 2003-10-20T15:30:00 \
--profile autodetect --fifodir . --fifosync &
$ cat audout > audio.raw &
$ cat vidout > video.yuv
MythTV is not dependent on any particular window manager. If you wish to
run a lightweight window manager, the configfiles/ directory has an
example of a .twmrc and .fvwmrc file you may use.
While MythTV allows you to set various GUI and capture resolutions, not all combinations make sense.
First, analog video signals have a defined vertical resolution. In NTSC, the video standard specifies that there are 525 vertical scan lines. Once the "extra" lines are removed (they're used to synchronize the video signal, and encode closed captioning data), you have 480 horizontal lines stacked vertically.
In PAL, there are 625 "raw" lines of resolution, with a net of 576 horizontal lines stacked vertically.
Horizontally, the maximum value allowed for a Bt8X8 chip is 720. However, due to limitations in the chip and other limitations of broadcast television, there may not be a noticeable improvement in image quality beyond 400 or 500 pixels.
With this in mind, there are certain commonly accepted values for resolution. While other values may be accepted for the vertical resolution, they will cause scan lines to be repeated or dropped.
From "best" to "worst", in NTSC:
As you can see, the lower quality values are half of the better ones. 720x240 is possible, but isn't a good tradeoff relative to the number of vertical lines lost. In a PAL country, the you would use values like 720x576 or x288.
The higher resolutions will be more CPU intensive if you're using software
encoding (PVR-250/350 will have minimal host CPU impact even if you're using
720x480). If the CPU is overtaxed, frames will be dropped causing uneven
motion. You will likely see the best results at resolutions which average at
least 10% CPU idle time. You can use system tools such as top or
sar to check the CPU % idle while recording. If the CPU average
usage is consistently exceeding 90%, frames will need to be dropped during
peak times when more than 100% of the available CPU would be needed to
process all of the frames.
If you'd like to read more on this, go to the vcdhelp website at http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/userguides/94382.php.
MythTV is designed to be run as dedicated full screen TV application but can also be run as a desktop application on a computer monitor. Here are a few consideration for configuring sizes to best suit you needs.
For output to a Television, common resolutions are 640x480, 800x600, and some rare devices support 1024x768. Generally, higher resolutions are better. However, you may find that you prefer the picture quality at one of the lower resolutions. Everything in MythTV is scalable and should 'fit' regardless of the resolution you choose.
Edit your X configuration file, usually /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 for
XFree, or /etc/X11/xorg.conf for Xorg, so that the resolution you
want to use is listed first in the lists under "Screen". If this resolution
is higher than the resolutions supported by your output device, you will see
a 'panning' effect where moving the mouse to the edge will scroll around a
desktop area which is larger than the display size. If this happens, edit
your X configuration file to match the display size then restart X.
In 0.10 and later, from "mythfrontend" go to Setup->Appearance. The default for the height and width is "0" - this will cause MythTV to automatically size itself to full screen.
If the MythTV GUI width and height are not 0, mythfrontend uses these GUI dimensions and is anchored to the upper left corner of the X Desktop. If the GUI X and/or Y are not 0, the upper left corner is positioned at the specified coordinates. If the "Run the frontend in a window" box is checked, the window will have a frame and can then be dragged to any position on the desktop.
/usr/local/share/mythtv/ . Make sure to use fonts large enough
to be read on a TV screen from a distance.
The full screen TV size is based on the X display size. For Xinerama, you can specify a screen in Setup->General. The TV picture will be stretched to fit the entire GUI area regardless of the capture resolutions used. However, during playback, the "W" key can to used to correct differences between 16:9 and 4:3.
Because picture edges can be ragged and screen edges aren't straight, Television is designed to project an image larger than the physical screen. This is called "overscan". Underscan is fitting the entire image inside the screen. Underscan is useful for computer monitors so that toolbars and scrollbars at the edges can be seen.
For best results, match the X display area as close as possible to the edges of the physical screen. This can only be adjusted by your tv-out device or by the settings for the television set. Many sets have these adjustments in a 'service mode'. If you cannot make these adjustments, there will be black borders around the edges of the X desktop, MythTV GUI and TV playback.
MythTV has settings for "Overscan" in Setup->Playback. These can not, and do not, cause the image to display beyond the edge of the X display area. The purpose of these settings are to cut off rough edges and to expand the image so that objects will appear to be the same size as a normal overscanned TV picture.
See the mysqldump manpage for more information.
$ mysqldump -u mythtv -pmythtv mythconverg -c > mythtv_backup.sql
To restore: (assuming that you've dropped the database)
$ mysql -u root
mysql>create database mythconverg;
mysql>exit
$ mysql -u mythtv -pmythtv mythconverg < mythtv_backup.sql
You may need to alter the MySQL permissions if this database is being shared with multiple systems. See the Modifying access to the MySQL database for multiple systems section for more information.
$ mysql -u root
mysql> drop database mythconverg;
mysql> quit
This assumes that you will be moving your data to newer / bigger hardware and don't want to lose your programs.
The first step is to create a database backup as demonstrated in an earlier section.
Next, you will extract only the data that is relevant to the programs:
$ grep "INSERT INTO record " mythtv_backup.sql > restore.sql
$ grep "INSERT INTO recorded " mythtv_backup.sql >> restore.sql
$ grep "INSERT INTO oldrecorded " mythtv_backup.sql >> restore.sql
$ grep "INSERT INTO recordedmarkup " mythtv_backup.sql >> restore.sql
Note the space after the table name and the ">>" to append to the file for all but the first grep. "recordedmarkup" is huge and may be hundreds of thousands of lines if you had lots of hours of recordings.
After you have moved the data files to the new hardware, configure MythTV using the mythtv-setup program as you normally would with a standard MythTV installation.
At this point we will restore the information about your programs back into the database:
$ mysql -u mythtv -pmythtv mythconverg < restore.sql
After successful insertion of the data you may delete the
restore.sql file.
btaudio allows you to obtain the audio data from your tuner card directly over the PCI bus without using a sound card. This is useful if you would like to use multiple tuner cards in a system without adding a sound card for each one, or if your existing sound card is not capable of full-duplex operation.
In order to use btaudio, your tuner card will need certain hardware installed on it, and that hardware must be wired correctly. The chip that will allow you to use the btaudio module is the MSP34xx. However, having a MSP34xx is no guarantee that you will be able to use the btaudio module.
As of 2003-03-31, this is the current list of cards and their status: Works with btaudio:
The following cards do not work:
The following cards have been reported to work, but have issues:
Once btaudio loads, it should register additional /dev/dsp and
/dev/mixer devices. Typing $ dmesg will let you know
what's going on.
If mythfilldatabase grabbed a channel which you do not want to include in your TV listings, you can remove the entries from the grabber configuration and the MySQL database. This often happens with premium channels; for example, HBO or Showtime may be available on your cable TV system, but is scrambled because you're not a subscriber to that channel. Since you can never watch it, you want to get rid of it.
If you are using the DataDirect service, login to your account at http://labs.zap2it.com/ to modify your lineup. Uncheck the boxes for any unwanted channels, and they will no longer be included in your download.
If you are using a grabber from XMLTV, comment out the channel from the
~/.mythtv/<sourcename>.xmltv file by inserting the word "not
" (including the space) in front of the unwanted entry. This will prevent
xmltv from grabbing future listings.
Next, delete the unwanted item from the channel table so that it will not
appear in the EPG or when changing channels. To delete the data from the
database we need to perform some steps. First, assuming that HBO is channel
15, we need to find out the internal chanid used by MySQL:
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql> select chanid from channel where channum=15;
+--------+
| chanid |
+--------+
| 1015 |
+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> delete from channel where chanid = 1015;
Old program data will be removed over the course of a week. However, you may want to immediately delete any current program listings for the channel that has been removed:
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql> delete from program where chanid = 1015;
You may want to use a central server to store your files.
On the host machine, (in this case, the hostname is "masterbackend") you'll
want to edit your /etc/exports file and use something like:
/var/video (rw)
To export the /var/video directory with read / write privileges.
On the "slave" machine, you'll want to edit the /etc/fstab file and
add something like:
masterbackend:/var/video /var/video nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr,nfsvers=3
Then run # mount -a to re-read the file to mount the file system.
In this case, the source is a machine called "masterbackend" which is exporting the directory "/var/video", which we're mounting locally at "/var/video". The rsize and wsize options are used to increase the performance of NFS; "hard,intr" is there because that's the recommendation of the NFS-HOWTO, and the nfsvers is required for filesizes over 2GB.
Here's an example submitted to the mythtv-dev list by Pat Pflaum mailto:pat@netburp.com using fvwm:
$ cat > .xinitrc
fvwm &
mythfrontend
^D
$ cat > .fvwmrc
Style myth* NoTitle, NoHandles, Sticky, WindowListSkip, SloppyFocus, GrabFocus, BorderWidth 0
^D
$
The following also works with blackbox:
$ cat > .xinitrc
xset -dpms s off &
irxevent &
mythfrontend &
blackbox
Make sure that your .blackboxrc file has:
session.screen0.focusNewWindows: True
session.screen0.focusModel: SloppyFocus
Here's a method for automatically starting mythbackend submitted by Mike Thomson ( mailto:linux@m-thomson.net) and Stu Tomlinson ( mailto:stu@nosnilmot.com).
Copy the files from the MythTV contrib directory or from Mike's web
site (
http://m-thomson.net/mythtv/) as follows:
etc.rc.d.init.mythbackend should be made executable and copied to
/etc/rc.d/init.d/:
$ cd contrib
$ su
# chmod a+x etc.rc.d.init.d.mythbackend
# cp etc.rc.d.init.d.mythbackend /etc/rc.d/init.d/mythbackend
etc.sysconfig.mythbackend should be copied to
/etc/sysconfig/:
$ cd contrib
$ su
# cp etc.sysconfig.mythbackend /etc/sysconfig/mythbackend
Edit /etc/sysconfig/mythbackend if you want to change the defaults
(the userid that should start mythbackend, location of the logfile and (if
required) the name and location of the mythbackend binary).
Use chkconfig to make sure the script is called when entering runlevels 3, 4 or 5:
$ su
# chkconfig --level 345 mythbackend on
# exit
$
By default, the log file for mythbackend will be written to
/var/tmp/mythbackend.log. This has been tested and is known to work
on Mandrake and Red Hat, but many people prefer to place logs under
/var/log/.
To do this, create a group called mythtv (or anything you prefer)
and add your usual MythTV users to that group. If you changed the user that
starts mythbackend from the default of root you must perform this
step.
Create the directory /var/log/mythtv and set its
permissions as follows:
$ su
# mkdir /var/log/mythtv
# chown root:mythtv /var/log/mythtv
# chmod 0775 /var/log/mythtv
# exit
$ ls -ld /var/log/mythtv
drwxrwxr-x 2 root mythtv 4096 Apr 28 21:58 /var/log/mythtv/
$
Mandrake adds one more twist in the form of the msec utility,
which runs regularly and (at the default or any higher security level) sets
permissions on many files, including those under /var/log.
To tell msec about the MythTV log files and their directory, you need to
edit the /etc/security/msec/perm.local file to include the
following:
# /etc/security/msec/perm.local
# Local overrides to the msec program
#
# Full file path user.group permissions
/var/log/mythtv/ root.mythtv 775
/var/log/mythtv/* root.mythtv 664
A copy of the above has been included in the contrib/ directory. You may add it by typing:
$ cd contrib
$ su
# cat etc.security.msec.perm.local >> /etc/security/msec/perm.local
# exit
Finally run the msec tool to check and implement your
changes.
$ su
# msec
# exit
$
msec to add missing permissions to the files or directories you
created.
The portage file for MythTV has scripts that will allow you to run mythbackend at startup.
To run mythbackend as a daemon which starts at boot time:
# rc-update add mythbackend default
# /etc/init.d/mythbackend stop
To obtain a list of options:
# /etc/init.d/mythbackend
MythTV is flexible in the way that you define multiple backend tuner configurations. The only hard-and-fast rule is that the Master backend must have a capture device defined, but shouldn't imply that the capture device in the Master backend must be the first capture card defined in the database.
One example of an advanced configuration is the round-robin scheme. Rather than defining all of the cards on the master, you could first go into setup on the master to define globals such as the general configuration and the channel lineup but not the host-specific configuration item like the capture card. In this example, we will use a 4 tuner configuration, where two slaves have one card each and the master has two.
Using this scheme, the master backend will not use both capture cards until one of the following happens:
The scheduler in MythTV checks whether an encoder is available; if a slave backend isn't running, its encoder isn't available, so the scheduler will look for the next available encoder. This makes MythTV very flexible; slave tuners can come and go, and as long as there are enough tuners for what you'd like to record it doesn't matter which tuner in particular is going to be used.
Using this round-robin scheme along with a shared storage directory like NFS and enabling the Master Backend Override setting will allow you to view content even if the slave backend that recorded a program is not available.
The transcoder re-encodes files from one MythTV format to another. The main purpose of the transcoder is to allow users with hardware encoders (PVR-250) or systems that can only record in RTjpeg due to performance reasons (multiple capture cards, slow system, etc) to create MPEG-4 streams to save space.
The transcoder can be used in two ways:
The second method can be used on files that have already been transcoded (or files which were are already in the correct format), so only the frames immediately following a cut section will be re-encoded, resulting in a very minimal loss of quality.
To enable automatic transcoding, do the following: start the setup program under the host-specific settings: set the Transcoder Auto-run checkbox
For either manual or automatic transcoding: start mythbackend start mythfrontend select setup, and the Transcoding recording profile. now select either RTjpeg or MPEG-4 (selecting any of the hardware encoders will result in the transcoder not working). set the other parameters as you'd like. For best performance, you should match the audio to the 'Default' profile. If you plan to only use the manual transcoder, you can choose to set the video to be the same as the default profile too (as long as it is MPEG-4 or RTjpeg)
Everything should now be setup properly. If you elected to use the Auto-Run feature, the transcoder will automatically launch after each recording is complete. The transcoder thread runs at a low priority, so it should not impact any critical tasks or other recordings.
If you want to manually transcode a program, simply press 'X' while watching a recording (you should have already finished marking all commercials). If you change your mind, hitting 'X' again will stop the transcoding.
Once the transcode is complete, mythbackend will replace the old file with the new as soon as it is no longer in use.
If you need to change the name of the computers used with MythTV you'll need to perform a sequence of steps. There are a number of pieces of information that MythTV keeps track of which are tied to the hostname of the box, so changing the hostname involves altering the name in the operating system and in the MySQL database. In the examples below, the old name of the system was "frontend1" and we're going to change it to "kidsroom".
1. Stop all backends. If you run mythbackend from a terminal session, press control-c. If your backends are started with an init script, you would do something like the following:
$ su
# /etc/init.d/mythbackend stop
2. Change the hostname.
For Red Hat and derived distributions, edit the
/etc/sysconfig/network file. Look for
HOSTNAME=frontend1 and change this to
HOSTNAME=kidsroom or whatever you'll be using. For other
distributions, refer to the documentation, such as the
hostname(1)man page.
To alter the hostname in the current session, run:
# hostname kidsroom
3. Dump the database.
$ mysqldump -u mythtv -pmythtv mythconverg -c > mythtv_backup.sql
4. Rename the host in the database. First, ensure that the new hostname you'll be using isn't already in the database.
$ grep kidsroom mythtv_backup.sql
$ cat mythtv_backup.sql | sed s/\'frontend1\'/\'kidsroom\'/ >> mythtv_restore.sql
mythtv_backup.sql file in a text editor and perform a global search
and replace. When saving the file, make sure you use the new name,
mythtv_restore.sql or the rest of the steps below will fail.
5. Drop and recreate the database.
$ mysql -u root
mysql>drop database mythconverg;
mysql>create database mythconverg;
mysql>exit
6. Restore the database using your edited version.
$ mysql -u mythtv -pmythtv mythconverg < mythtv_restore.sql
If you are running slave backends or frontends, don't forget to re-enable access as detailed in Modifying access to the MySQL database for multiple systems.
7. Start the backends. If you use init scripts, do the following, otherwise start them from terminal consoles.
# /etc/init.d/mythbackend start
8. Quit and restart all frontends. Delete the mythtv_backup.sql
and mythtv_restore.sql files.
No.
While it is true that the TiVo runs the Linux kernel, and TiVo has released their changes to the kernel under the GPL, the TiVo is not a general-purpose computer, and there is no programming information available for the custom hardware contained within a TiVo. TiVo is under no obligation to release the source code to their application.
The ReplayTV runs VxWorks, a Real Time Operating System from Wind River Systems.
Yes, assuming that your wireless connection has sufficient bandwidth to maintain the datarate between the frontend and the backend. 802.11b should be sufficient if the encoded bitrate of the content is less than the datarate of your wireless connection, which in the case of 802.11b would be approximately 4 Mbps. (The advertised rate of 11Mbps gives an actual throughput of 4 Mbps.) 802.11a and 802.11g, if operating in their high-speed modes, or proprietary 802.11b "Turbo" schemes should be adequate. Multiple wireless frontends, poor signal strength or other factors can severely impact the viewing experience on the frontend.
There are two answers to this question. The easiest thing to do is to simply burn the MythTV files onto the DVD and treat the DVD as if it were a hard drive. This will allow you to save the programs, but it's likely that they will not be playable in a DVD player because the disc will simply contain files and not any DVD structure. If you'd like to create a DVD that will play in a standard DVD player and your files have been recorded as MPEG-2 from a device supported by the IVTV driver, the first step you'll need to perform is to remux the file to make it DVD compliant. Next, you'll use dvdauthor, mkisofs to create the ISO image, and finally dvdrecord to burn that to a blank DVD-R.
The requirements for this procedure are mjpegtools (provides mplex) and dvdauthor (provides mpeg2desc and dvdauthor).
This script will perform the necessary steps. You'll need to pass it the .nuv file and a name for the new DVD project. You should end up with a directory which you can mkisofs into a ISO file then burn it.
#!/bin/sh
mkfifo aud0
mkfifo vid0
mkfifo dvdmpg
mpeg2desc -a0 < $1 > aud0 &
mpeg2desc -v0 < $1 > vid0 &
mplex -f 8 -V -o dvdmpg aud0 vid0 &
dvdauthor -o $2 -f dvdmpg
dvdauthor -o $2 -T
rm aud0
rm vid0
rm dvdmpg
It's also possible to pipe the output of mkisofs directly to cdrecord without any intermediate files being written to your hard drive. For example:
#!/bin/sh
TSIZE=`mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -q -print-size .`
mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -V "$1" . | nice -10 cdrecord speed=1 dev=1,1,0 \
driveropts=burnfree -dao -v tsize="$TSIZE"s -
This is specific to MPEG-2 .nuv files created by Hauppauge PVR-X50 video capture cards.
The software packages you will want are:
1. Find the file you want.
2. Run avidemux2 and open the .nuv file which corresponds with the program you wish to burn to DVD.
3. Remove the segments you don't need. Click twice on "A" when you are at the beginning of the segment you want to save, find the end of the segment, and click "B".
4. Save the raw video stream and audio: File-> Save -> Save Raw Video
Stream. Save the file as 1.m2v. When that's done, go to
Audio -> Save Audio. Save the file as 1.mp2
5. Repeat steps 2 & 3 until you have saved all the segments you wish to keep.
6. Mplex the video and audio for each segment together in DVD-MPEG2 format. Do that by running
mplex -f 8 -o 1.mpg 1.m2v 1.mp2
7. Create a DVD file system by running
dvdauthor -o DVD 1.mpg 2.mpg ... n.mpg
dvdauthor -T -o DVD
8. Put a blank DVD in your drive and write the video by running
growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -dvd-video DVD
9. Be sure and check the DVD in a player and then delete all the files you created in this process.
Notes:
You can reduce the size of your files and fit more video on a DVD by using tcrequant, which is part of transcode.
The steps above create a DVD that starts playing the video automatically. If you want to burn a DVD with menus and multiple video titles, see the next section.
This assumes that you have already formatted the videos in a DVD-compliant format that works with dvdauthor.
This is potentially the most difficult step in creating a DVD with a menu. You must capture or create a background image with the appropriate resolution and mplex it together with an audio file (typically silence, although though you may use sound) and then create overlay images that show
You would then use spumux to combine the background video with the overlay menus.
The background image must be saved as a JPG and the overlay images must be
PNG with a maximum of three colors. Four colors are allowed, but the
transparent background counts as one of the available colors. In these
examples, the background file is called menu.jpg, the menu text is called
menu1.png and the highlighted and selected buttons are the same and called
menu2.png.
To get a background image, use avidemux2 and find the frame you
wish to use as a background image. Save the frame as
menu.jpg by executing File -> Save -> Save JPG Image.
You may also create your own background image in the GIMP. Use the following settings:
For NTSC Video:
width: 720
height: 480
x-axis: 81dpi
y-axis: 72dpi
jpeg2yuv -n 50 -I p -f 29.97 -j menu.jpg | mpeg2enc -n n -f 8 -o menu.m2v
For PAL Video
width: 720
height: 576
x-axis: 75dpi
y-axis: 80dpi
jpeg2yuv -n 50 -I p -f 25 -j menu.jpg | mpeg2enc -n p -f 8 -o menu.m2v
You will need some sort of audio to mplex with the M2V file you just created, so either capture some audio using avidemux2 or another program, or to create empty audio to mplex, use this command
dd if=/dev/zero bs=4 count=2000 | toolame -b 128 -s 48 /dev/stdin menu.mp2
mplex -f 8 -o menu.mpg menu.m2v menu.mp2
Open the background menu.jpg file in the GIMP. Add a transparent layer
over the background and mark where you will want the different buttons to be
located. This layer will later be deleted, so it doesn't have to be clean.
When creating this layer, use all the colors you want to use in your
buttons. Remember, no more than three colors.
Delete the Background layer.
Change the image to an indexed color mode. Do this by right-clicking on
the image and selecting Image -> Mode -> Indexed. Enter "4" in the
number of colors.
Create two new layers.
In the top layer, you will enter the text for your buttons. Select the color you want for your text either in the color palette or by using the Color Picker Tool. To use the Color Picker, you must make sure you have that bottom layer selected. Enter the text for all the buttons on the top layer according to whatever layout you decided on.
Now you will create the actual buttons by drawing boxes around the text and filling that area with the Color Fill Tool. Be sure and select the color you want (contrasting to the text) and to create your boxes in the second from the top layer.
Delete that bottom layer which we stated earlier would be deleted.
Save the current image as menu2.png. Do that by right-clicking
and selecting File -> Save as, and make the name menu.png.
Click "Export" and make sure that "Save Background Color" and "Save
Resolution" are selected.
Select the bottom layer and change the Opacity to 0%. Now save the image
as menu1.png.
To create the DVD menu, an XML file is used. An example
menu.xml file is shown below. The autoorder line is used to decide
what takes precident for ordering. If your buttons are ordered primarily by
rows, then select "rows". If your ordering is by column, then choose
"columns".
###begin menu.xml###
<subpictures>
<stream>
<spu
force="yes"
start="00:00:00.00"
image="menu1.png"
select="menu2.png"
highlight="menu2.png"
autooutline="infer"
outlinewidth="6"
autoorder="rows"
>
</spu>
</stream>
</subpictures>
###end menu.xml###
Then create the final menu with
spumux menu.xml < menu.mpg > menu_final.mpg
You should see some lines in the output to the console that show
INFO: Autodetect ...
The number of these lines that you see should be the same number of buttons you created. If there are, then good job!
To create the DVD structure, an XML file is used. The below file is an
example dvd.xml file. This example file allows for the 4 buttons in the
menu created earlier and has three video segments making up each of the 4
video titles. Each of the separate video segments will be treated as
separate chapters of one consistent video title.
### begin dvd.xml ###
<dvdauthor dest="DVD">
<vmgm>
<menus>
<pgc>
<button>jump title 1;</button>
<button>jump title 2;</button>
<button>jump title 3;</button>
<button>jump title 4;</button>
<vob file="menu_final.mpg" pause="inf" />
</pgc>
</menus>
</vmgm>
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<post>call vmgm menu 1;</post>
<vob file="1a.mpg" />
<vob file="1b.mpg" />
<vob file="1c.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<post>call vmgm menu 1;</post>
<vob file="2a.mpg" />
<vob file="2b.mpg" />
<vob file="2c.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<post>call vmgm menu 1;</post>
<vob file="3a.mpg" />
<vob file="3b.mpg" />
<vob file="3c.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<post>call vmgm menu 1;</post>
<vob file="4a.mpg" />
<vob file="4b.mpg" />
<vob file="4c.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
### end dvd.xml ###
Create the DVD file structure with
dvdauthor -x dvd.xml
Test the created DVD file structure with
xine dvd:/full/path/to/DVD/VIDEO_TS/
Then burn the DVD file structure to a DVD with
growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -dvd-video DVD
DataDirect will use different information for your video sources and channels than was used by XMLTV. The following will clear your old information in a way that will allow your EPG and existing recording rules to continue to work as you'd expect.
The first step is to create a backup of your database using the instructions found in Saving or restoring the database
NOTE: Examine the contents of the backup file to be sure that the backup succeeded before modifying your database.
NOTE: The MythTV DataDirect grabber requires wget version 1.9.1 or later. Verify that this is installed before modifying your database.
Next, start mysql and perform the following commands:
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql>CREATE TABLE channel_copy SELECT * FROM channel;
mysql>exit
$
Run the MythTV setup program. When the setup program prompts "Would you like to clear all program/channel settings before starting configuration [no]" type "yes".
Complete the configuration as detailed in the section called Configuring the Zap2It.com DataDirect service and in Video Sources.
/dev/video0 to Cable-DD in the
Video Sources portion of setup.
Once you're done running setup, run mythfilldatabase to populate the database with new data.
To restore the channel icons, you will need to perform one of two steps. Both are dependant on the channel_copy table you created above.
If you're running MySQL v3, execute the following. Note that the select command is very long. You can press ENTER at the end of each line; the command won't be evaluated until you end the statement with a semicolon.
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql>create table channel_temp
select c.chanid, c.channum, c.sourceid, c.callsign, c.name, cb.icon,
c.finetune, c.videofilters, c.xmltvid, c.contrast, c.brightness,
c.colour, c.freqid, c.recpriority, c.hue, c.tvformat,
c.commfree, c.visible, c.outputfilters
from channel c
left join channel_copy cb on (c.callsign = cb.callsign);
mysql>truncate channel;
mysql>insert channel select * from channel_temp;
mysql>drop table channel_temp;
mysql>drop table channel_copy;
mysql>exit
$
If you are running MySQL v4, it's a little simpler. The next command is one long string:
$ mysql -u root mythconverg
mysql>UPDATE channel,channel_copy SET channel.icon = channel_copy.icon
WHERE channel.callsign = channel_copy.callsign;
mysql>drop table channel_copy;
mysql>exit
$
Press "1" or F1 to get a popup.
This is covered in the hardware section, and extensively covered on the Hauppauge website. Briefly recapping:
A PVR-250 (model 980) is primarily a MPEG-2 encoder. It has a tuner, composite and SVideo connection for video, and an 1/8" audio jack for stereo analog audio. It also has an IR receiver and comes with a remote control.
The PVR-250 MCE (Media Center Edition, aka model 975)) contains a FM radio tuner. The tuner is currently not support by MythTV. The PVR-250 MCE does not contain a IR receiver or a remote.
The PVR-250 Rev 1 contained an MPEG-2 decoder. However, this function was not connected to any output jacks, and there doesn't appear to be any way to pull decoded video from the card, so it's a fairly useless feature.
The PVR-350 (model 990) has the features of the PVR-250 as well as being able to decode MPEG-2. The encode and decode functions may be used simultaneously. The MPEG-2 decoder function gives superior video quality. However, the decoder function is only available once Linux has started, so you will not see any boot-time messages.
Also, the card does not support any 3D functions, making it a poor gamer card.
Non-MPEG-2 content will be displayed on the PVR-350 output using framebuffer features, placing a large load on the host CPU.
Note that for the PVR-350 there are some considerations regarding the way audio is handled.
If you need to use an external Set Top Box (STB), such as for satellite TV or for digital cable you will need some way for MythTV to tell the STB to switch to a new channel. There are several methods:
6200ch.c in the MythTV
contrib directory which may work for you.Commercial flagging can be CPU intensive. By default, the backend that created a recording is the one which will flag commercials. You may wish to use a different machine to run commercial flagging.
On the slower machine:
Start the backend setup program. Advance through the pages until you get to the Job Queue page. Turn off the setting that says "Allow Commercial Detection jobs", thereby preventing any commercial flagging jobs from running on this machine.
Next, make sure that "Run Jobs only on original recording host" is turned OFF so that new jobs are allowed to run anywhere.
Restart mythbackend since it only reads this setting when it starts up.
On the faster machine:
Start the backend setup program. Advance through the pages until you get to the Job Queue page. Ensure that "Allow Commercial Detection jobs" is turned ON for this machine.
Run mythjobqueue. mythjobqueue will examine the JobQueue and run any jobs it finds. mythjobqueue should be left running so that it will pick up any new commercial flagging jobs that are added to the queue, otherwise new jobs will be added to the queue and your programs won't be flagged until you run manually run mythjobqueue.
This section contains configurations which you may find useful.
Install the Mandrake kernel source. If you are using a different Mandrake kernel level (ie, not 2.4.21-0.16mdk as in the example below, then alter the urpmi command appropriately.)
$ uname -a
Linux pvr 2.4.21-0.16mdk #1 Fri Apr 11 06:51:54 CEST 2003 i686 unknown
unknown GNU/Linux
$ su
# urpmi kernel-source
$ tar -xzf ivtv-0.1.9.tar.gz
This should create an ivtv directory. Switch to it and perform the following commands:
$ cd ivtv/utils
$ wget http://hauppauge.lightpath.net/software/pvr250/pvr250_17_21288.exe
$ su
# ./ivtvfwextract.pl pvr250_17_21288.exe
# exit
$ cd ../driver
The ivtvfwextract program extracts the firmware required for the card. You may want to go to the Hauppauge website and download the latest Windows driver if the wget command fails.
ivtv also needs to know how your kernel was compiled. The default Makefile
is not configured for the way Mandrake "does things". At the top of the
Makefile in the driver directory is a line like this:
KERNELDIR= /lib/modules/$(KERNVER)/build
KERNELDIR= /usr/src/linux
# uncomment if you use i2c 2.8.0+
#CFLAGS += -DNEW_I2C
CFLAGS.
Next, compile the driver:
$ cd ~/ivtv/driver
$ make
Compile the test_ioctl program:
$ cd ../utils
$ make
$ su
# cp test_ioctl /usr/local/bin
# exit
#warning Using temporary hack for missing I2C driver-ID for saa7114
However, if you get an actual compile error where the compile doesn't finish
and the error looks like:
saa7115.c:1117: error: unknown field 'inc_use' specified in
initializer
then you didn't uncomment CFLAGS as specified
above.
Add the following to /etc/modules.conf:
add above..."
if you will not be using the IR remote that came with the card.
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
options ivtv debug=1
options tuner type=2
options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
add below ivtv msp3400 saa7115 tuner
add above ivtv lirc_dev lirc_i2c
~/ivtv/driver/tuner.h for a listing of tuners. In the above
example, tuner type=2 is a Phillips NTSC. Use an appropriate tuner
type for your system and video standard. The debug=1 parameter on
the ivtv line actually means less debugging output will be printed.msp3400.o that would be loaded instead of the version that is
created by ivtv. Note that in the command below we are using the backtick,
usually located on the same key as the tilde " " and not the single quote.
$ su
# cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`
# pwd
/lib/modules/2.4.21-0.16mdk
# find . -name "msp3400*" | xargs rm -f
Next, copy the files that were compiled in the driver directory into the appropriate modules directory:
$ su
# make install
# depmod -ae
Finally, load the ivtv driver:
# modprobe ivtv
# exit
Check that the card is being recognized on the PCI bus:
$ lspci -v
<snip>
00:0c.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC15 MPEG-2
Encoder (rev 01)
Subsystem: Hauppauge computer works Inc.: Unknown device 4801
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
Capabilities: <available only to root>
If you don't see your card on the PCI bus, make sure that it's been installed in a bus-master slot. For some motherboards, only the PCI slots closest to the AGP slot are bus-mastering.
Check that the ivtv driver has created a new video device:
$ ls -l /dev/v4l/vi*
crw------- 1 mythtv sys 81, 224 Dec 31 1969 vbi0
crw------- 1 mythtv sys 81, 0 Dec 31 1969 video0
crw------- 1 mythtv sys 81, 32 Dec 31 1969 video32
In this case, the ivtv device is video0.
You can now add this card available to MythTV. Go into your mythtv setup
directory on the machine hosting the hardware MPEG-2 card.
When you add a new capture card, ensure that you are using the
video0 device.
The remaining setup is just like a standard V4L card; define a video source if you have not already done so, and assign the video source to a video card input on the Input Connections screen.
Some people report issues with the ivtv module not being loaded when
required by MythTV. To get around this, you can modprobe the ivtv driver
before using it. The simplest technique is to add the modprobe
command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
# echo "/sbin/modprobe ivtv" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
/lib/modules directory and rename
the existing msp3400.o file, then copy the msp3400.o from the ivtv
driver directory and re-run depmod. If that still doesn't work,
then check the ivtv mailing list for more information. You may wish to
perform an updatedb as root and then do a locate msp3400
to find all the msp3400.o.gz files that may be on your system. For
example, Mandrake has a msp3400.o.gz in the 3rdparty
subdirectory which will take precedence over the custom version created by
ivtv. You can check if you have the correct msp3400 loaded by typing (as
root): modinfo msp3400 | grep "parm: *standard". If you don't get
a line that says: "parm: standard int", then you're not loading the
correct msp3400.
# modinfo msp3400
filename: /lib/modules/2.4.22-9mdk/kernel/drivers/media/video/msp3400.o
Check that the path is correct for your kernel version, and that the driver
being loaded is in /media/video and not some other directory.
To turn off DNR, add the following to your rc.local:
/path/to/ivtv/utils/test_ioctl --set-codec-params=dnr_mode=0,dnr_temporal=0
First, you need to ensure that you've installed the kernel source appropriate for the kernel that you're running. In this case, we're using kernel 2.4.22-9, so when installing the kernel-source ensure that you've got the correct version.
$ su
# uname -a
Linux frontend 2.4.22-9mdk #1 sam sep 13 06:54:11 CEST 2003 i686 unknown
unknown GNU/Linux
# rpm -qa|grep kernel-source
kernel-source-2.4.22-9mdk
If you've already installed LIRC from the Mandrake packages, it's going to be version 0.6.6, and that won't work. Uninstall it:
$ su
# urpme lirc lirc-remotes liblirc-devel
# rm -rf /dev/lirc*
# exit
Check to ensure that you don't have other versions of lirc modules and programs on your system:
$ su
# updatedb
# locate lirc_i2c|grep `uname -r`
/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-9mdk/3rdparty/lirc/lirc_i2c.c
/lib/modules/2.4.22-9mdk/kernel/3rdparty/lirc/lirc_i2c.o.gz
# locate lirc_dev|grep `uname -r`
/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-9mdk/3rdparty/lirc/lirc_dev.c
/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-9mdk/3rdparty/lirc/lirc_dev.h
/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-9mdk/include/linux/modules/lirc_dev.stamp
/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-9mdk/include/linux/modules/lirc_dev.ver
/lib/modules/2.4.22-9mdk/kernel/3rdparty/lirc/lirc_dev.o.gz
# locate irw|grep "/usr"
/usr/bin/irw
/usr/local/bin/irw
/usr/local/man/man1/irw.1
# locate lircd|grep "/usr"
/usr/src/linux-2.4.22-9mdk/3rdparty/lirc/lircd.conf.RM-050
/usr/share/man/man8/lircd.8.bz2
/usr/share/doc/lirc-0.6.6/html/lircd.html
/usr/sbin/lircd
/usr/local/sbin/lircd
/usr/local/man/man8/lircd.8
# locate irxevent|grep "/usr"
/usr/share/man/man1/irxevent.1.bz2
/usr/share/doc/lirc-0.6.6/html/irxevent.html
/usr/share/doc/lirc-0.6.6/irxevent.keys
/usr/bin/irxevent
/usr/local/bin/irxevent
/usr/local/man/man1/irxevent.1
$ su
# rm -rf /lib/modules/2.4.22-9mdk/kernel/3rdparty/lirc
# rm -rf /usr/sbin/lircd /usr/local/sbin/lircd
# rm -rf /usr/bin/irxevent /usr/local/bin/irxevent
# rm -rf /usr/bin/irw /usr/local/bin/irw
Download the lirc-0.7.0pre2 tarball:
$ wget http://lirc.sourceforge.net/software/snapshots/lirc-0.7.0pre2.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjf lirc-0.7.0pre2.tar.bz2
Mandrake now includes i2c version 2.8.0 which changes the semantics of some low-level calls. You will need to patch LIRC in order for it to work correctly. Download the patch and install:
$ cd lirc-0.7.0pre2
$ wget http://delvare.nerim.net/i2c/other/lirc-CVS-i2c-2.8.0.patch
$ patch -p1 < lirc-CVS-i2c-2.8.0.patch
Next, run the LIRC setup program:
$ ./setup.sh
Select "1" (Driver configuration), then scroll down to "5" (TV Card), press ENTER, then scroll down to "f" (Hauppauge TV card) and press ENTER again. Once back at the main menu, press "3" for Save and run configure.
If your build environment is ready, LIRC will create a Makefile for you. Switch to root and compile:
$ su
# make
# make install
lirc_i2c.c:296: unknown field 'owner' specified in initializer, you
will need to edit the file and comment out a line in the source code. See
message
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/40136
for detailed instructions.make install process, LIRC will create the
appropriate device for you in /dev. Check to make sure:
$ ls -l /dev/lirc*
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 61, 0 Sep 18 15:36 /dev/lirc
srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 Sep 18 15:38 /dev/lircd=
Your modules.conf file should have already been modified if you've
followed the instructions
above for installing the PVR-250.
modprobe the lirc_i2c driver, run the lircd program and
then check your /var/log/messages and /var/log/lircd
files.
$ su
# modprobe lirc_i2c
# lsmod
Module Size Used by Not tainted
lirc_i2c 5124 0
lirc_dev 10096 1 [lirc_i2c]
...
# lircd
# tail /var/log/messages
Sep 18 15:38:26 frontend kernel: lirc_i2c: chip found @ 0x18 (Hauppauge IR)
Sep 18 15:38:26 frontend kernel: lirc_dev: lirc_register_plugin:sample_rate:
10
...
# tail /var/log/lircd
Sep 18 15:24:52 frontend lircd 0.7.0pre2: lircd(hauppauge) ready
To check that your remote is working correctly, run the irw program and start pressing buttons. If nothing is happening, you must begin troubleshooting. Things to check:
If none of the above works, and irw still isn't showing keypresses, then you will need to ask your question on the LIRC list.
Assuming that irw is showing keypresses, you can continue:
Recompile and install:
$ make distclean
$ ./configure --enable-lirc
$ make
$ su
# make install
If you're not using native LIRC support, ensure that the button names that
come up with irw match the ones in the .lircrc file in
your home directory. Note that if you are not using native LIRC support,
the .lircrc file is in your home directory and has a "." as the first
character.
Since we're using native LIRC support within MythTV, copy the
configfiles/hauppauge-lircrc-nativelirc file into your
.mythtv/ directory and call it lircrc. It has a slightly
different format than what you would use if you were using
irxevent. Also note that it is in your .mythtv directory
and does not have a "." in the filename.
$ cp configfiles/hauppauge-lircrc-nativelirc ~/.mythtv/lircrc
Add the commands to load the LIRC device drivers and start lircd to
your rc.local:
$ su
# echo "modprobe lirc_i2c" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
# echo "/usr/local/sbin/lircd" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
# exit
You should now have native LIRC support within MythTV.
LVM greatly increases the flexibility you have in managing your storage than traditional physical partitions. This section will provide some brief notes on how to use LVM to create storage space for your video files and how to add additional disk space in the future. There's lots more that can be done with LVM, so check the LVM HOWTO http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/ document for details.
If you don't understand how to partition a drive, or how to change the partition type you should stop and look at documentation on how to perform these steps.
Make sure your kernel configuration includes LVM support or that it's available as a module. Today, most vendors include this by default. You'll also want to ensure that you have a copy of the LVM utilities; check your distribution, or get the latest versions from http://www.sistina.com/products_lvm.htm and build them manually.
Check that the vgscan program is being run at some point during
your boot sequence - most distributions do this by default. Look for a
message during boot up that looks like this: vgscan -- reading all
physical volumes (this may take a while...) If you don't see any
messages during boot, you may need to install a LVM init script or confirm
that you have all of the LVM packages installed from your distribution.
LVM uses a few concepts you should be familiar with before starting.
The following example assumes that you want to create a LVM partition from a chunk of space in /dev/hda5, using a reiserfs filesystem and mounted on /var/video. You later decide to extend this filesystem by adding a new disk: /dev/hdb.
You need to create at least one LVM partition for a physical volume. Use fdisk or your favorite partition editor to set the type to LVM (0x8e). If you're using an entire disk, create one big partition rather than using the device itself. e.g. use /dev/hdb1 not /dev/hdb.
In the following example, you have a 15GB disk. The first 6GB are set as
your boot partition. /dev/hda2 was added as an extended partition,
and within that partition you created the /dev/hda5 linux (ext2)
partition.
# fdisk /dev/hda
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1823.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 15.0 GB, 15000330240 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1823 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 764 6136798+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 765 1823 8506417+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 765 1823 8506417 83 Linux
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-6): 5
Hex code (type L to list codes): 8e
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 15.0 GB, 15000330240 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1823 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 764 6136798+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 765 1823 8506417+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 765 1823 8506417 8e Linux LVM
Command (m for help): w
#
Create the LVM physical volume from the partitions (repeat if you have multiple partitions to use):
# pvcreate /dev/hda5
# vgcreate VGforMyth -s 64m /dev/hda5
# lvcreate --name video --size 5G VGforMyth
# mkreiserfs /dev/VGforMyth/video
# mount /dev/VGforMyth/video /var/video
# lvcreate --name music --size 3G VGforMyth
# mkreiserfs /dev/VGforMyth/music
# mount /dev/VGforMyth/music /var/music
# vgdisplay -v
Now, lets suppose you want to add a 60GB hard disk to the system as hdb and allocate 50GB of it to video storage.
First, create a single partition /dev/hdb1 covering the whole disk and make it type 0x8e using your partition editor.
# fdisk /dev/hdb
.... create partition, set type, save and reboot if it says you have to
Create the new LVM physical volume:
# pvcreate /dev/hdb1
Add the new physical volume to the volume group:
# vgextend VGforMyth /dev/hdb1
/dev/ide/host/bus/target/lun/etc format.
Make the logical volume used for video bigger:
# lvextend --size +50G /dev/VGforMyth/video
Unmount, resize and remount the filesystem. Technically, you don't need to unmount and remount the ReiserFS.
# umount /var/video
# resize_reiserfs /dev/VGforMyth/video
# mount /dev/VGforMyth/video /var/video
LVM comes with a program called e2fsadm.
Unmount, resize and remount the filesystem. The filesystem must be unmounted during this procedure.
# umount /var/video
# e2fsadm --size +50G /dev/VGforMyth/video
# mount /dev/VGforMyth/video /var/video
The partitions that your distribution sets up for you may not be optimized for large files. Using LVM in conjunction with the following techniques can be quite useful.
Unlike a typical filesystem, a MythTV video partition is usually a very large filesystem filled with a fairly small number of large files. Filesystem I/O is usually not an issue, even in multi-tuner and/or multi-frontend setups.
There is however, one aspect of filesystem performance that can have a bearing on the performance of MythTV. In Linux, deleting a file will utilize I/O bandwidth until the deletion has been completed. If deleting the file takes long enough, the video capture buffer may overrun, thereby resulting in dropped frames. Some filesystems are faster at deleting files than others and, for multi-gigbyte MythTV video files, these differences can be significant.
Fortunately, there are published tests ( http://aurora.zemris.fer.hr/filesystems/big.html) that provide insight into filesystem performance under conditions relevant to MythTV usage. In addition, some limited testing (archived at http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/52672) with very large files (10 gigabytes) was reported in the MythTV Users mailing list.
Ext2 was the defacto standard Linux filesystem for many years. It is stable, provides good I/O performance and can quickly delete large files. The primary disadvantage of Ext2 is that it is not a journaling filesystem, so a file system consistency check (fsck, which is normally only performed after a system crash) can take many hours on a filesystem the size of a typical MythTV partition.
Ext3 is Ext2 with a journal, so your biggest gain is that in case of a crash and reboot you won't have to wait very long for your partition to be remounted.
There are options available when formatting an Ext3 partition, as in:
# mkfs.ext3 -T largefile4 /dev/hdb1
This example assumes that /dev/hdb1 has already been created using
fdisk. If you're using LVM, /dev/hdb1 may be something like
/dev/VGforMyth/video.
The "-T largefile4" option creates one inode per 4 megabytes, which can provide a few percent more storage space. However, tests indicate that using the "-T largefile4" option can drastically increase the amount of time required to delete a large file and thus it should only be used with encoder settings that produce small video files (YMMV).
You can check on your filesystem using the dumpe2fs program. See the man page for details.
The Reiser filesystem is another journaling filesystem commonly distributed with Linux. It is known to be an extremely efficient filesystem and it especially excels at managing partitions containing a large number of small files. However, tests indicate it is not the fastest at deleting very large files. For that reason, it may not be the best choice when using encoder bitrates that produce very large files.
JFS (Journaling File System) is a journaling filesystem originally developed by IBM for AIX which was later released as open source. While not as common as Ext3 or ReiserFS, it is distributed with RedHat 9 (RH9) and Fedora Core 1 (RHFC1) and Mandrake as well as other distros. According to tests, JFS is the file deletion speed king, deleting virtually any file in under one second, even files as large as 10 gigabytes.
XFS is a journaling file system originally developed by SGI for Irix, and later released as open source. While not a part of the default RedHat Linux 9 or Fedora Core installation (although it is a part of Mandrake and Fedora Core 2), it can be easily installed via ATrpms. XFS provides deletion speeds for large files only slightly slower than JFS. According to the test results shown at ( http://aurora.zemris.fer.hr/filesystems/big.html), XFS provide higher I/O rates than JFS, albeit at a higher CPU loading. This may cause issues if you do not have the spare CPU capacity to handle XFS, potentially leading to dropped frames.
The Air2PC card has the capability to capture over-the-air HDTV signals (8VSB). The Air2PC card is installed as a DVB device and is supported within MythTV.
First, you must compile a version of the Linux kernel to support the new tuner device.
Download the source to 2.6.11.
$ su
# cd /usr/src
# wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.11.tar.bz2
# tar -xjf linux-2.6.11.tar.bz2
# pushd .
.config file and
use it as your starting point. If not, then go straight to the make
menuconfig portion below.
On Debian with a 2.6.10 kernel:
# cp /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/.config .
# make oldconfig
# make menuconfig
For Gentoo:
# emerge genkernel udev hotplug coldplug
# genkernel --menuconfig --udev --save-config all
Go to the Device Drivers->Multimedia->Digital Video Broadcasting Devices
Enable DVB for Linux and select B2C2/Technisat Air/Sky/CableStar 2 PCI.
Exit menuconfig, then compile modules and the kernel. (Gentoo will do this automatically as a part of the genkernel step.
# make modules
# make
# make install modules_install
Make any modifications necessary to your boot configuration files (lilo or grub) as required to boot your new kernel.
Download and compile the dvb applications you'll need to configure the card. At the password prompt, press ENTER.
$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@linuxtv.org:/cvs/linuxtv login
$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@linuxtv.org:/cvs/linuxtv co dvb-apps dvb-kernel
$ cd dvb-apps
$ make
$ su
# cp utils/szap/azap /usr/local/bin
# mkdir /lib/firmware
# cp ~/dvb-kernel/firmware/dvb-fe-nxt2002.fw /lib/firmware
# echo skystar2 >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
# exit
# cp ~/dvb-kernel/firmware/dvb-fe-nxt2002.fw /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware
# exit
Shutdown your machine, install the card and restart. Ensure that you're using your newly compiled kernel.
Once you've rebooted, confirm that the card is detected. If you type dmesg, you should see something like this:
drivers/media/dvb/b2c2/skystar2.c: FlexCopIIB(rev.195) chip found
drivers/media/dvb/b2c2/skystar2.c: the chip has 38 hardware filters
DVB: registering new adapter (SkyStar2).
DVB: registering frontend 0 (Nextwave nxt2002 VSB/QAM frontend)...
If you are using 8VSB (Over-the-Air HDTV), run the azap program. Replace ZIPCODE with your zipcode. The perl script will connect to http://www.antennaweb.org to obtain your HDTV channels.
$ cd /usr/src/dvb-apps/util/szap/channels-conf/atsc
$ test ~/.azap || mkdir ~/.azap
$ perl ./make_atsc_chanconf.pl ZIPCODE >~/.azap/channels.conf
$ /usr/local/bin/azap wsvn
using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0' and '/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0'
tuning to 183000000 Hz
video pid 0x0000, audio pid 0x0000
status 00 | signal fff0 | snr ea60 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 |
status 1f | signal f840 | snr ce6e | ber 00000068 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal f600 | snr d2d8 | ber 00000018 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal f290 | snr cd54 | ber 00000008 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal f340 | snr c658 | ber 00000030 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
CTRL-C
$
Once you have confirmed that your card is able to lock onto a HDTV signal it is time to configure MythTV. Start the setup program, and in the Capture Cards section change the card type to "Digital Video Broadcast".
For HDTV you do not need to use the Advanced configuration.