wonkablog

MythTV 0.20 was released today. Yay. There’s a whole lotta fixes, but the one I like the most is the fading menus.

Anyway, I posted this on the Gentoo forums, but it’s worth repeating:

*BACKUP* your mythconverg database before upgrading.

If you don’t, you won’t be able to go back to 0.19-foo. The reason is because with each point release, the schema for the database changes. When you run mythbackend for the first time, it will upgrade your database schema if it needs to. But running an older version won’t roll it back, meaning you will lose all your settings and entries in ‘Watch Recordings’, etc.

Backing it up should be pretty simple. Just get the mysql connection settings from ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt

Then do:

Code:

mysqldump -u mythtv -p mythtv mythconverg > mythconverg-`date +%F`.sql

and save that file in a safe place. Heck, I would recommend doing regular database dumps anyway.

Good luck and have fun.

Now, I’m not one to rail on how horrible Microsoft Windows is. In my opinion, it’s just generally very difficult to be productive on it for a number of reasons — most annoying to me is how it assumes you have the brain capacity of a space rock, and designs the interface and settings from there. Using GNU + Linux has been very liberating because it does *exactly* what I want it to do from the ground up, and won’t pop up a dialog box 3 times just to make sure.

Anyway. I saw this comment on slashdot today talking about Windows XP, and honestly …. this guy sums up exactly how I feel.

XP is a perfectly fine operating system. I haven’t had any of my boxes crash…

Statements like this really do suggest the negative effect that Microsoft has had on computing. Users now are “perfectly” satisfied if their OS doesn’t routinely crash. What should be a basic assumption has become a lauded feat.

My linux and mac installs don’t crash either. Nor do they have a spyware virus problem (or even need for software to prevent such). But that’s just what they do to not suck. From usable CLI to functional least-rights users to better software (no Quicksilver, Textmate or iLife for PC) and on ad infinitum, they also do a tons of things that MS just can’t offer.

If you’re happy with the “accomplishment” of not crashing, good for you. I’ve experienced more and I’ve come to expect more.

Okay, well I’ve decided to try something completely new and different — I’m going to do a lot of research, read up on all the relevant subjects, and then use my mad consumer skillz and make some planned purchases. How freaking boring.

I’ve pretty much already come to the conclusion that nothing short of a slightly beefy computer is going to cut it as a usable mythfrontend. I’m highly skeptical (hence the research part), but I think that a 1ghz mini-itx system might be able to pull it off. Apparently, there are motherboards that have onboard MPEG2 hardware decoding, taking a huge load off of the CPU on playback. I’m pretty skeptical about how easy it is to get those working too, but I’m willing to consider it.

One thing I know that would be a shoo-in replacement is using a Hauppauge PVR 350 which does both hardware MPEG2 encoding and decoding. I know right now you can use it’s S-Video out connection to watch the TV, though I kind of remember reading something about that disappearing soon or X not using it anymore or something. Gah, I really need to read up.

Aaaaaaaaaaaagh. My latest adventure into trying to find my perfect hardware multimedia system has failed once again. What a pain in the booty. I won’t even go into what I tried this time because I’ve already embarrased myself enough.

Someone out there has got to know something that will work. Here’s what I’m looking for:

• A decent PVR or a frontend to MythTV
• Extremely quiet
• No monthly subscription fees
• Decent video output quality

That’s it. That’s my short list. I don’t care what form it comes in, whether it’s a desktop with a completely silent fan, a hacked Tivo, a beefed up Mini-ITX or a toaster in a cardboard box. As long as it’s quiet, puts out a good picture, and I don’t have to shell out $$$ each month, I’ll be extremely happy. I don’t even care if it means I have to record all my shows in MPEG2. That’s great. That’s fine. There’s gotta be something. Everything I’ve tried or every idea I’ve come up with has really sucked.

From what I can tell, *nothing* is going to replace having a nice beefy computer box, which I would do in a heartbeat except they put off a lot of noise. I’m sensitive to sound though, and I have a really low tolerance for noise sometimes so it really does have to be near silent, and the last thing I need is another wind tunnel.

If someone has any ideas, please slap it down. I’m losing my mind.

So what do you do when you have multiple TV tuners?  You setup mutiple myth backends, too!

I actually had no idea you could even do this until yesterday, but apparently you can have slave backends for mythtv, not just frontends.  It is really cool how it works, too.  In my scenario I have two amd64 Gentoo boxes both running the 0.19-fixes svn release.  On my main master myth backend, I have the Plextor tuner and all my recordings.  Then on my slave backend I’ve got the PVR-500 with dual tuners on it.

Setting up a master-slave backend relationship is actually much, much easier than I thought.  Just run mythtv-setup, first of all, and setup the IP addresses of the machine.  Myth will know if your box is the “master” backend server if (and only if) both IP addresses are the same in the General configuration — one is for the ip of the box, and one is for the ip address of the master server it should connect to.  By default they are both set to 127.0.0.1 for localhost.  Just change those to 192.168.1.x and now others can connect to it.

Then, on the slave just set the master ip address and the subnet address for the slave too.  The only other big thing to do is make sure you setup MySQL on the master server to accept connections from the subnet.  Up until this point though, your “slave” box is just a frontend, since you haven’t really done anything with the backend.  In fact, I’m assuming the only difference between running it as a frontend or backend (or both) is if you actually start running mythbackend on that box.

I went through the rest of mythtv-setup on the backend and added the tuner cards.  The DataDirect listing showed up in my list already from the master server (wow, that’s cool) so I knew they were already talking to each other.  Then it was time to try out the little booger.  Sure enough, I could record three shows at once, and set the scheduling from either of the two frontends.  Plus, I could watch things in the library from either one, not to mention stream video from the live tv recording streams on the tuners from the other boxes.  Very cool stuff.

I started playing around with myth a bit more after that, and it started dawning on me quite a bit more how cool this application really is.  Even when you take it down to the bare basics — it is an awesome PVR.  I still remember pretty well how crappy my Comcast DVR was, mostly lack of features and huge bugs, and mythtv just totally pushes the standard.  It’s great stuff.

I was curious how well the PCHDTV cards were coming along, so I bought one of the 5500 models the other day. I got bored with it after I couldn’t get it working after 20 minutes without reading any documentation, so I dumped it on my friend Jason to play with. Naturally, he got it working perfectly that day. He’s one of those weirdos that only runs the stable version of mythtv though, so I don’t trust his judgement.

Anyway, today I was bored and I bought a Happauge WinTV 500 MCE card to see how well the ivtv drivers were coming along. I gotta say, I like this little booger.

It’s got two onboard TV tuners using the same cable connection, and they record straight to MPEG2 video and MPEG3 audio using onboard hardware encoding. So far I’ve had a few problems with it, mostly where it sometimes doesn’t like the audio on the second tuner. I’ll start up myth, and when recording on one tuner, and watching TV on the second, it will squelch badly. If I change channels it resets it though. Not really a big deal.

The problem seems to persist if you put a second (non-WinTV) tuner card in there, though — it always squelches on the second tuner. Apparently it doesn’t play well with others.

In fact, it gets a little worse than that. The ivtv modules don’t play at all with the kernel modules for my Plextor ConvertX. Of course, it’s a problem that very few people are going to run into, since most people are content to have just one hardware cable connection encoder in their system. I just enjoy seeing which combinations will break.

It does bring up an interesting question though — why aren’t these drivers in the kernel? Both sets of drivers (ivtv, wischip) are released under the GPL-2 and both use the v4l2 API. If I knew a lot more about kernel development, I might be able to answer that question. The cool thing though is the pchdtv drivers *are* in the kernel for 2.6.18. Maybe those won’t complain when it has neighbors. Who knows. I’d have to get my card back, first.

That brings me up to four TV tuners I have now. I gotta say, I love all of em.

• Lifeview Flyvideo 3000 - has an onboard Philips tuner, puts out a great picture
• Plextor ConvertX - USB2 and hardware encoding to MPEG4
• pcHDTV 5500 - HDTV looks nice
• WinTV PVR 500 MCE - two onboard tuners + MPEG2 encoders

I think I’m probably gonna stick with the ConvertX as my main tuner for now. I’m curious to watch the development of both that one and ivtv, to see if they both get into the kernel. It seems like there’s been a lot of work done on the v4l and dvb drivers lately, so I’m pretty optimistic.