MythTV notes

I just installed Mythbuntu 12.04.1 and set up MythTV on an old computer. Here are some notes from the process.

plopKexec can boot Linux from USB when the BIOS can't

The computer has a floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive that can't read CD-RW discs, and USB 2.0 ports. USB seemed like the best way to install Linux.

I put the files on my Archos Recorder V2 using UNetbootin. The Windows version failed to detect the Archos Recorder V2. The Linux version hung for a while but otherwise worked properly. I successfully tested the result on a computer that supported booting from USB, but the computer I wanted to use didn't support it, so something else was needed. I first tried Plop Boot Manager, but it only sometimes detected the drive and every boot attempt hung. I was able to start the installation without problems using a plopKexec floppy.

Don't upgrade MythTV from the PPA

Mythbuntu has repositories with updated versions of MythTV. These can be enabled using Mythbuntu Control Center. I tried these when I encountered problems, and they did not make things any better. If you upgrade MythTV, it might upgrade the database schema. It's possible to downgrade MythTV via ppa-purge, but the old version will refuse to work with the upgraded database. You can restore the database from a backup.

Analog channel scanning does not work

I was trying to use the Hauppauge PVR-250 analog video capture board with hardware MPEG encoding. The channel scan always quickly finished and picked up no channels. However, ivtv-tune from ivtv-utils could tune to channels, and the video was available at /dev/video0. I guess analog channel scanning is broken in MythTV.

Channels can be input via the channel editor in backend setup. The important thing to set is the "Frequency or Channel" on the last page. I populated the channels using some SQL that I constructed using sed from my cable company's channel listing.

Switch to the Slim profile to avoid hesitations on slow hardware

When I first watched TV, there were regular hesitations. It was at first disappointing how a 1 GHz Pentium III couldn't properly play SD MPEG2, and I wondered if MythTV became more demanding recently. However, everything worked perfectly after I switched to the Slim video playback profile.

ATI Remote Wonder works, but some keys need remapping

For the ATI Remote Wonder, I just had to put batteries in the remote and plug in the receiver. It worked, both as a keyboard device and as a mouse. However, some keys weren't mapped the right way for MythTV. Some even had key codes above 255, which meant they can't normally be remapped in X. I remapped them using a patched xf86-input-evdev driver.

The git pull fails because the changes can't merge cleanly with current code. It would probably be best to simply check out the branches instead, for example "git checkout code-remap-2.6.0". It's also possible to check out earlier versions and then pull the code remap.

It's not necessary to change udev rules anymore. InputClass matching can be used to apply the remapping to the desired device. You can create a new file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ for all of this stuff.

It's also possible to use the ATI Remote Wonder via LIRC. I could have avoided the evdev patching that way, but I liked how the mouse part works with the kernel driver.

LIRC works

Cogeco only makes a few channels available via analog signals. I wanted access to more, so I hooked up a Huawei DC730. I already had a LIRC configuration file for the remote from before. LIRC failed to learn it, but I was able to find a compatible configuration online. It's actually for Comcast Branded Motorola DTA100 and Pace DC50X, so it seems XMP-1 is standardized. I already knew LIRC can recognize the remote, and for sending, I just had to build the simple transmitter circuit and configure LIRC on that machine. There's no need for a stronger transmitter as long as the LED is close to the DC730's IR window and properly aligned.

First, I disabled the normal serial driver via "setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none".  I placed this along with other customizations in /etc/rc.local. Then I copied the configuration file for the remote into /etc/lirc/ and added an include to /etc/lirc/lircd.conf, like the comments there say. Finally, I edited parts of /etc/lirc/hardware.conf to load the lirc_serial module and start lircd. After running /etc/init.d/lirc to perform those actions, it was possible to test the setup via irsend.

For automatically changing channels via MythTV, I created a shell script to send the channel digits followed by the enter key. The MythTV back end is set to use this via input source configuration. There's also a field for pre-setting the channel on the tuner, but I'm not sure if that works. Instead, I added "ivtv-tune -t us-cable -c 3" to /etc/rc.local.

Eventually I found that repeated keys were sometimes registering as just one keypress. For example, attempts to change to channel 22 would sometimes change to channel 2. I fixed this by increasing gap in the remote configuration file to 101698.

MythTV goes overboard with logging

After a short while, I couldn't watch video while recording anymore.  The problem was that mysqld was using too much CPU time. Restoring an old database fixed this, but I didn't want to lose the settings made since then, so I investigated further. The problem was all the verbose logging being stored into the database. I stopped both the front and back ends from storing logs into the database, and reduced the verbosity of the front end. This has to be done via command line arguments. For the backend, edit /etc/init/mythtv-backend.conf. The front end arguments are either set from MYTHFRONTEND_OPTS in /usr/bin/mythfrontend shell script or from Mythwelcome setup. Other components such as Mythwelcome also log the same way.

Use the RTC

It makes no sense to keep a computer on 24/7 just for occasional use. Even the more than 10 year old motherboard I'm using can power on from an RTC alarm. It seems I don't even need to disable hwclock updates. It makes sense to use Mythwelcome. If I set Mythwelcome to automatically start the front end when the computer is manually turned on, then I have to press alt-tab to show Mythwelcome after quitting the front end. For now, I'm forced to disable that option.

Don't buy ATI/AMD video cards

The most annoying part was dealing with ATI graphics cards. The free software drivers don't work well, and the proprietary drivers don't work. I may write about this in another blog post.