MythTV - Home Theater
This has been a passion of mine for several years. I found myself staring at another seemingly
endless round of commericals one evening and thinking to myself "what is it that I was watching?!".
That started me into looking at a digital video recorder, something that was computer based and
would allow me to skip all those commericals. Finally, I ended up with deciding to use
Hauppauge TV Receiver cards and install MythTV on a computer.
That was about three years ago. Since then, the HTPC (Home Theater PC) has gone through a number
of receiver cards and computers.
Currently, my backend setup is:
Hauppague PVR-500 dual TV / Radio receiver.
Gigabyte GA-EP43-S3L
six 320G SATA-II drives (1.1T Video volume).
Intel Q6600 CPU
8G DDR2 memory
Mandriva 2008.1 Linux distro.
The front end setup is:
BioStar K8M800-M7A
AMD Sempron 2800
1G DDR memory
Nvidia Geforce4 AGP video card
eHome Infrared Transceiver (external).
Yamaha RX-V361 Amplifier / FM Receiver.
Samsung 244T 24" LCD monitor.
Radio Shack 8-in-1 IR remote control.
Mandriva 2010.0 Linux distro.
The PVR-500 is installed in a server that has 1.2 Terrabytes of RAID-10, 8Gig of SDRAM, running
an Intel Quad Q6600 CPU. This monster box is the video server for the HTPC. The HTPC can be shut
off and the video server will take care of recording the selections. When I want to watch some
TV / Movies, I turn on the HTPC, let it connect to the video server and select something to watch.
When those endless round of commercials now appear, I simply hit SKIP on the remote control and
avoid them!
In addition to the TV shows I timeshift (record) for later viewing, I have taken many movies that
I've recorded, edited out the commercials, then transcoded them into DivX format. There are over
500 movies now on the video server. All the movies have come from off-the-air and there is no
content from DVDs (/me thumbs nose at MPAA & RIAA).
Here, I will describe how the current HTPC has been assembled.
TopAntec - Fusion Black Remote
Now, this is a nice case! Far better than the Antec Minuet case I purchased years ago to build
my first HTPC into. This case measures 17.5 inches wide by 16.5 inches deep and sits 6 inches high
on a shelf. The Yamaha amplifier sits very well on top of this case and they both almost look like
they are the same equipment grade / family. The case is finished in a brushed aluminum front panel
with a slightly texture black paint for the case. The result is a case that is attractive and
will resist fingerprints.
The case is built to house a standard ATX power supply with an area for two vertically mounted
hard drives and a place for a horizontally mounted DVD drive. The DVD drive location features
a spring-loaded panel that flips down when the drive tray is opened.
The case comes with a 24pin power supply adapter cable that plugs in between the ATX power cable
and the motherboard. This adapter has a smaller cable that is used to power the LCD front panel.
No special power supply is needed with this case as it does with the Antec Fusion 430 case. The
two, generous, 120mm side panel fans rotate quietly and should provide sufficent cooling for
a modestly powerful motherboard / video. If you intend on using something like SLI video
cards, then good luck, the case is not designed for a video gamer. This is a case for
a home theater unit, it does not appear to have been designed as a do-everything case.
TopGet IMON LCD working
The lcd is fairly easy to get get working under the Mandriva 2010.0 distro. Grab
the latest version (0.5.3)
from sourceforge
. Unpack the tarball, run configure, then make and make install (you should know
the drill by now :). Only version 0.5.3 (latest) includes the imon driver patches.
To test, run LCDd and you should see text on your LCD display. Then run lcdproc and
this will give you some other output. If you have problems, there are plenty of
messages and forums out there that deal with the imon lcd...
TopPutting the LIRC together with 2 drivers
To use both the front panel knob and a remote control, you have to combine the
output of two lircd processes. The front panel IR receiver is not capable of
"hearing" anything other than the remote that came with the Fusion case. Since
I have the external eHome IR receiver and the front panel knob can only be read
via lircd, you have to combine them. A bit tricky, but seems to work well once
you get it going. Keep in mind, this is all on Mandriva, you Ubuntu guys may have
to "jiggle" things to get it working for yourselves.
To start off, install the stock lirc of version 0.8.6 and the kernel modules:
urpmi lirc dkms-lirc
Edit /etc/sysconfig/lirc to add these variables:
HW0MOD="lirc_imon"
HW1MOD="lirc_mceusb"
OPTIONS0="--driver=default --device=/dev/lirc/0 --output=/var/run/lirc/lircd --pidfile=/var/run/lirc/lircd0.pid --connect=localhost:8765"
OPTIONS1="--driver=default --device=/dev/lirc/1 --output=/var/run/lirc/lircd1 --pidfile=/var/run/lirc/lircd1.pid --listen"
Once that is done, patch /etc/init.d/lirc:
patch -p0 <
lirc_imon_ehome.patch
The patched lircd script will now start two copies of lircd and join their
outputs into a single stream. Try irw and see what happens.
TopMythTV Software Notes
The MythTV software is built from rpm sources taken from the Mandriva contrib repositories.
I prefer to do it this way as an RPM, in general, will do an uninstall more completely
than a tarball. YMMV
The MythTV source is from the 0.21 release with two modifications. One is a special
SQL search for Movies that have not yet been placed into the Video Archives. I detest
recording the same movie over and over again, then find it is already in my Video Archive.
The second change (patch) is to have mythlcdserver use
Ron Frazier's iMON LCD Server
. Ron has done some very nice work with perl to produce a credible replacement for the
mythlcdserver for the SoundGraph iMON LCD product. He also has done work with lirc to implement
the IR remote included with this case (more on IR later).
My LCD server patches have MythTV run the mythimon.pl when MythTV starts, and to shut
it down when you exit MythTV. This is the
SRPM for that mythtv with my patches
.
To build the RPM packages from SRPM:
rpmbuild --rebuild mythtv-0.21-16567.2mdv2009.0.src.rpm
TopLIRC Software Notes
To get the LCD working on the Fusion, I had to take the latest code from the lirc CVS
(as of 2009-03-09) and use that. The current release of lirc (0.8.3-4) does not support
the Fusion LCD, but only does the VFD (Vacuum Floresent Display) that is used in the
earlier version of this case.
Also, I've found the remote control that was shipped with the Fusion to be somewhat useless.
I have a perfectly good Radio Shack 8-in-1 Universal Remote that is also programmed to my
Yamaha Amplifier. The SoundGraph IR receiver appears to be only capable of decoding the
RM200 remote shipped with the case. I decided not to use this IR receiver but to continue
using the USB model that came with my Hauppauge PVR-500.
The SRPM I put together replaces the current release (8.3.4) of imon_lcd with that from CVS.
The CVS lirc_mceusb2 driver would not work with the Hauppauge receiver, but, the release
version did...
This source rpm
will allow you to build the imon_lcd driver that does not register an lirc device. It will
register the driver half that creates the /dev/lcd[0,1] devices but no /dev/lirc.
TopFinal Thoughts
After going to all this trouble to customize the code and get things setup, I did not want
urpmi to remove my changes. I still would like to update the computer software as the
Mandriva 2009 distro evolves. So, I placed the following lines into /etc/urpmi/skip.list
to protect those packages from being upgraded.
/^kernel/
/nvidia/
/mythtv/
/MythTV/
/^lirc/
/^dkms-lirc/
/^lib64myth/