Tuesday, June 22, 2004

A minor complaint about commercial flagging. 

One great advantage of MythTV over commercially-available PVRs is that MythTV empowers the user to skip commercials "auto-magically." In normal practice, programs are "flagged" for commercial transitions (such as black screens leading into and out of commercials) immediately after recording. Such skipping can automatically reduce a 30 minute-sitcom to 20 minutes of viewing or less.

However, when I upgraded to MythTV 0.15.1, the mythbackend program tried to assign commercials to most of my previous recordings. At the same time. All at once. Load factors soared into the low 20's on my single processor machine. For now, the fix is to turn off commercial flagging - later fixes may include protecting the bulk of my previous shows from being reflagged by changing permissions. Or finally cleaning up my drive of shows I don't want to watch, either would work.

# posted by Bryan : 2:00 PM

Monday, June 21, 2004

MythTV 0.15.1 and Mandrake 10.0 Official : Mini HOW-TO 

It has been one day since I finally got MythTV 0.15.1, IVTV, and Mandrake 10.0 playing together well. My main problem was that I tried applying every "bleeding edge" advance to my box when many were unnecessary. In the end, this is my configuration:

-Mandrake 10.0 Official with kernel-2.4.25.5mdk
-IVTV driver 0.1.9, the suggested driver for users.
-MythTV 0.15.1, including
MythVideo
No downloading of Hollywood movies for me, simply there to watch videos from the Internet Archive and from my digital camera.
MythDVD
I enabled VCD support not (illegal) trancoding/ripping. It's moot anyway until I graduate, no DVD player yet.
MythWeather
I can never, never get the map to load on the first try; I always visit twice.
MythBrowser
This blog loads up pretty well, though the graphics at the right are shifted to the bottom of the page. Have you seen Aiy's Backyard, my wife's pages?
MythWeb
No compiling required - don't forget to set permissions liberally (chmod 777 works for my private network) to /var/www/html/mythweb.
MythNews
Nice for skimming headlines.
I made corrections to the posts below noting what was bad advice and what was good advice, dating entries for clarity. Headings should be followed in numerical order and not chronological.

MythTV - what a great program!

# posted by Bryan : 6:52 PM

Sunday, June 20, 2004

MythTV 0.15.1 and Mandrake 10.0 Official : Step 0 - Roll back to Kernel 2.4 

In the course of installing Mandrake 10.0 Official and MythTV 0.15.1 at the same time, I have kept running into problems getting IVTV to work for me. I was downright ignorant to have erased my working Mandrake 9.2 setup with MythTV 0.13 - I just wanted the goodies associated with being "up to speed" with Mandrake 10.0 Official.

After wrestling off-blog for some solutions, I have now decided that Mandrake 10.0 Official will probably work just fine - if I roll back to a 2.4 kernel. I saw that urpmi gives me the option for kernel-2.4.25.5-1-1mdk.i586. I installed that as well as its kernel source, and then installed the Kernel 2.4 version of the nVIDIA driver. So as of now, I have vision again in KDE 3.2.

# posted by Bryan : 4:31 PM

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

MythTV 0.15.1 and Mandrake 10.0 Official : Step 4 - Getting Ready to Compile mythtv 

We again are following the HOW-TO at mythtv.org. From Chapter 4 I fixed the shared library requirements and the device permissions. In Chapter 5 I updated my files from CVS, learned more about an educational project called LAME, and ended up redirected to Chapter 21.19 to fix up the old, saved database to the brand new DataDirect Service. Cool! Now I can compile mythtv. The process is straightforward from the instructions.

EDIT 21 Jun 2004: Follow the MythTV instructions - they do a great job of updating what we need to do as Mandrake users. If it doesn't say what to do (say, for MythNews I believe) then look for the .pro file to qmake then make and make install. Once you compile MythTV itself, everything goes swimmingly. MythTV takes less time than a Kernel to compile but it still takes time.

# posted by Bryan : 5:24 AM

MythTV 0.15.1 and Mandrake 10.0 Official : Step 3 - Seeing and controlling the Hauppauge card 

We start off with all our prerequisites for MythTV downloaded. We will be following the instructions found at Chapter 22 of the mythtv.org HOWTO. As the instructions are not under a open license, we will recap briefly our progress as we go along. EDIT 21 Jun 2004: Follow that page exactly, though I chose to go with a more recent update for the PVR-250 firmware. Keep track when you are a user and when you are root ($ vs. #). I also deleted information below regarding Chris Kennedy's IVTV Patches because the basic ivtv drivers worked for me. and until I graduate, I'm not trying the remote control again.

Another thing, test your IVTV installation before progressing. First, just type in
# cat /dev/video0
If the screen fills up with random characters and doesn't report input/output error, you're halfway home. For a break with your Channel 4, (CSPAN-2, here) then type
# mplayer /dev/video0

# posted by Bryan : 3:19 AM

MythTV 0.15.1 and Mandrake 10.0 Official : Step 2 - Weaning off the install CD's 

One of the things I enjoy most about Mandrake is urpmi. I am now going to change the source of my installation from the CD's I downloaded off the Internet to actively updated servers accross the US (because I am in the US). In fact over the last week I have downloaded several things from several servers. I can tell you from the mid-Atlantic partion of the US, I got the fastest speeds from
ftp.rutgers.edu (~ 400kb/s)
helios.dii.utk.edu (= 200 kb/s cap)
raven.cslab.vt.edu
mirror.cs.wisc.edu

So, I went with:
urpmi.removemedia -a
urpmi.addmedia --update updates ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/Mandrakelinux/official/updates/10.0/RPMS with ../base/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia main ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/Mandrakelinux/official/10.0/i586/Mandrake/RPMS with ../base/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia contrib ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/Mandrakelinux/official/10.0/contrib/i586 with ../../i586/Mandrake/base/hdlist2.cz

I aquired files I would need for running MythTV and just for my own edification.

# exit
$ su
# urpmi mozilla-firebird mysql gcc gcc-c++ freetype2-devel cdialog alsa-utils XFree86-devel perl libqt3-devel libqt3-mysql apache2 apache2-mod_php php-mysql libtiff3-devel libdvdread3 libdvdread3-devel a52dec liba52dec-devel mplayer
EDIT 21 Jun 2004: adding urpmi ntp wget e3. One advantage to Mandrake 10.0 is that MythTV 0.15.1 requires wget-1.9 to run the DataDirect service from Zap2It.com.

# posted by Bryan : 2:34 AM

MythTV 0.15.1 and Mandrake 10.0 Official : Step 1 - getting vision 

(Before proceeding, I note that the mythbox is hooked up to my local LAN and also the Internet. I am typing this blog and sending command to the box via a 2d computer, a laptop.) (EDIT 21 Jun 2004: Don't forget to look for "Step 0" above!)

I was able to use the television to watch the installation, but I have the TV off now because I have yet to load up the nVIDIA driver for my X session. Referring back to a previous post, I log into my mythbox using SecureCRT and shut down the display manager.

$ su
# /etc/init.d/dm stop
Stopping display manager:
#

EDIT 21 Jun 2004: Many efforts were made by me to get to this point using the more advanced 2.6.x-tmb-mdk kernels that were suggested by this person who like me would eventually see IVTV + kernel-2.6.3mdk not change channels. He got got a 2.6.4 kernel to work where I couldn't. I still don't know how or why.

As it turns out, I don't have the nVIDIA driver on hand right now - I think I deleted it after running it the last time. I select version 4496 because newer versions give me blue bars on the left and top of my MythTV videos.

I need to wget the driver. Turns out I forgot to install it. Installing now.

# urpmi wget
# exit
$ wget http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-4496/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run
$ su
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run

EDIT 21 Jun 2004: If you did Step 0, you have a 2.4 kernel and the rest of this post doesn't apply.

Then the bad things happen.

ERROR: The kernel header file '/lib/modules/2.6.3-7mdk/build/include/linux/modversions.h' does
not exist. The most likely reason for this is that the kernel header files in
'/lib/modules/2.6.3-7mdk/build/include' have not been configured.

So I go a Googleing, and of course the problem is resolved via the nVIDIA forums. You just have to download a modified package from www.sh.nu...

$ wget http://www.sh.nu/download/nvidia/linux-2.6/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg0.run
$ su
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg0.run
And that was it. I then copied a copy of my old XFConfig-4 into /etc/X11.

Turn on the television again, login as the standard user, and see the nVIDIA logo on the screen. Then, the blue field with the X. Yep, blue field. And an X. OK, blue field. X got it. Where's KDE 3.2?

top yielded that I am not hung-up anywhere processor wise.

Well, reboot -h. the modifier keeps the disk drives happy. On reboot, KDE 3.2 shines bright and free. We have completed Step 1 - Getting Vision.

# posted by Bryan : 1:43 AM

MythTV 0.15.1 and Mandrake 10.0 Official : Introduction 

It is well over a week since I last posted. During this time I have installed Mandrake 10.0 twice on my computer, installed Mandrake 9.2 on my computer, and am again about to install 10.0 on my computer. If anyone is looking for advice on how to run MythTV 0.15.1 on Mandrake 10.0, consider that this fifth effort is well, a fifth effort. EDIT 21 Jun 2004: Sixth time was the charm.

In my fourth attempt, I got MythTV 0.15.1 partially working in Mandrake 9.2. With this in mind, I kept the /home/mythtv partition of my hard drive unchanged when performing this latest install. In this way, I do not have to habitually download all the MythTV files once again. Been there, done that. EDIT 21 Jun 2004: Sixth time I deleted the /home partition again. Didn't set me back at all, because I backed up well.

At the current time, my computer may be desribed as the following, right after installing 10.0 Official once again.

Hard Drive: 1 drive, 3 partitions
reformatted - hda1 (5.1GB) /
preserved - hda6 (5.8GB) /home
nearly full - hda7 (136GB) /var/video

Video outputs:
yes - nVIDIA GeForce 4 5200 PCI w/TV-out
no - Intel 810 on-board

Sound Card:
ALSA - SoundBlaster PCI (snd-en1371)

Memory:
384 MB

# posted by Bryan : 1:32 AM