Linux PVR (HTPC) - Bits and pieces

Posted on July 13th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: htpc, linux.

So yesterday I got samba to work and I got the RaLink2500 wifi card up. It’s a (CNet CWP-854 Wireless-G PCI Adapter).

The samba stuff was real easy. The tricky part was to get the rights administration right on the Windows XP side. I followed this tutorial on the knoppmyth wiki.

Drivers for the rt2500 wifi chipset was also easy to install following the wiki on serialmonkey.org, the only thing I needed to do which was not in the tutorial was getting a source entry for my /etc/apt/sources.list

The other day I also battled with XMLTV to get it to work. That was so much back and forward, so when it was finally working, I wasn’t sure what I’d done to make it work. But I used a mix of “perl -MCPAN -eshell” and manuall install of the packages I downloaded with CPAN. The tutorial I picked the steps from is here. Then a few rounds with the channel setup, and mythfilldatabase to get the correct XMLTV id tags to the channels, and XMLTV data into the program guide.

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Linux PVR(HTPC) - Forum activity

Posted on July 12th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: htpc, linux.

I made some posts to the “My Settopbox Forum” today with the hope that people will help me, and maybe learn something from my endeavours.

Lets hope somebody has answers for me! :)

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Linux PVR (HTPC) - The flop…

Posted on July 10th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: htpc, linux.

Okay, do remember that I was using poker terms ;)

So it wasn’t a flop to use the Terratec card, but pretty close to it. It turned out that it wasn’t one of the few rare cards that supports ripping the sound over the PCI interface, so I had to use the audio patch cable after all.

Having spent all of my weekend on this problem, I was willing to make compromises. I haven’t slept much this weekend to put it that way…

In other words, I’m back where I started out; I could have stayed with the Pinnacle card.

The sound quality, to put it mildly is crap, when compared to using it with Windows XP which has drivers that support the internal sound source. Using Linux drivers and MythTV, the sound is “tinny”, oversampled and noisy.

Another thing thats not the way I would like it is that MythTV adjusts the PCM volume, and not the Master Volume. So adjusting the volume affects the quality of the sound, and not only the volume. Had it been “wired” differently in the software I could have adjusted only the Master Volume without adding oversampling and more noise to the signal.

Well, let it be. I will live with it for now, and use the TV volume and get me myself one of those multicontrollers one bright day.

I will also replace the TV card I have in the box now with a better one that has an MPEG2 decoder in the hardware and sound capabilities to my liking… (alas, yet another tv card…)

On the upside, I can report that ZSnes is a dream to run on the box, and integrates wery well into MythTV; it’s fantastic!

This all leaves me with the following “TODO-list” on the box:

  • Setup Samba and integration with my Windows XP Pro box for shares with tv shows (UPDATE: Done!)
  • Setup UAE (Amiga), MAME, Scumm, Sega Genesis, Playstation(?), NES and Nintendo64
  • Figure out how to make the USB Joypads to work in MythTV (lircd setup I wonder?) (UPDATE: I found several “HOWTOs” on this subject, but had no success)
  • Tune the setup of my ATI Wonder Remote, the keys are sluggish and doesn’t make sense (UPDATE: Partial…)
  • Make my RaLink2500 wifi card work. Right now theres a long cable from the bedroom to the livingroom… (UPDATE: Done!)
  • Get XMLTV with tv_grab_no to work (UPDATE: Done!)

In the short term I have the following plans on the hardware front:

  • Multiremote which can control both the HTPC and the TV
  • Two nice wireless joypads for more comfort and tidyer setup
  • NAS - network storage for all my movies and music
  • New TV Tuner card. Should be dual tuner with MPEG2 and PCI Sound. Or two identical cards (PiP etc)

Long term:

  • A Big Fat Nice TV to go with it
  • A sound system (Af, I know - it’s a long time to come still ;))
  • Upgrates to the hardware (CPU, RAM, Motherboard, GFxCard)

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Linux PVR (HTPC) - Going for broke

Posted on July 9th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: htpc, linux.

I’m all in…

As I’ve previously posted, the attempt at making a Mandriva HTPC failed when I couldn’t get MythTV to compile.

My resident Linux expert Tord gave it two looks and advised that I go straight for the KnoppMyth Distro. So I did just that.

Now, some 21 hours later I’m trying for the last time (excluding a two hour nap)…

The first thing that stopped me from claiming success was that I couldn’t get sound to work with my Pinnacle PCTV Stereo card. When googling this issue it seems to be a well known problem; with a solution. I however, was not able to close this issue on my system with the fix reported.

I guess I could have used the audio cable and connected that to the Pinnacle audio-out, to the audio in on my motherboard. But this isn’t a “perfect” setup, and since this is a hobby project I can demand a perfect end result. So I rejected that solution, and when the saa7134 fix didn’t work for me either, I abandoned the Pinnacle card, and installed the Hauppauge card.

The next card I then tried was my Hauppauge HVR-1100 card (I know I said that it was the card I would use, but I changed my mind when I started out, thinking that Hauppauge would be a more widely supported brand…). This didn’t work at all as it seems that the cx88 driver is VERY immature at the moment, and in the knoppmyth distro it only supports 37 cards, and my card is not one of these.

So after hours of research and attempts at getting the new cx88 driver in, which might have support for my card; I’ve now given up. I’ll make one final attempt at a MythTV setup using my last TV card, the Terratec Cinergy 600.

If this doesn’t work, I don’t know if I’m up to trying out Ubuntu too. I might just head on right back to Win XP Home…

PS,

You have to excuse the bad spelling, syntax and grammar in this post. I’ll clean it up later:)

Right now I’ve only slept six hours in the last 51… And its taken one litre of coffee and it took me 20 minutes to figure out the sums of these hours. A sure tell tale sign that I’m way beyond the point where I can expect any level of productivity… But following this through to the end has become an obsession by now. I want to know where it all ends :)

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NAS - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

Posted on July 8th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: other.

To complement my dream of the perfect settop box for my tv, I’ve been looking for a good NAS. Thanks goes to Asbjørn for making excellent Gin Tonics and researching the extensive product selection out there.

I’ve previously held the Synology products close to heart, but their top model the Cube Station CS-406 is two times the price of a (to me) new found product.

My dream NAS now, which I will buy when finances allow is the Thecus YES Box N2100 (Toms network review). It’s got everything I need, and then some. But most important of all, a stylish look according to Asbjørn ;)

The two shops that sell these in Norway are shg.no and Netshop it seems. Both are unknowns to me in internetshopping, so any advice on them is greatly appreciated!

Now, if only there was a NAS with BitTorrent support…

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Linux PVR (HTPC) - Here we go again…

Posted on July 8th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: htpc, linux.

Okay, I’m going for this once more… As my girlfriend is on a 10day+ trip to Ireland, I can once again try to get the Hometheatre PC working again.

A little more than a year ago I bought components and stuff from PCUstyr.no to get myself a simple little AMD kit to play with. Back then I tried Mandrake, Debian, KnoppMyth and Suse, and landed first on Debian, and then on Suse for OS.

Both Debian and Suse worked well(Suse in particular), but I never got MythTV to work though, so I swapped to WinXP Home in the end with Team MediaPortal(v 0.2.0.0RC4), and then Nero Premium 7. But after all my effort, I never used the box as a tuner, because Team MediaPortal would just crash when tuning with my Hauppage HVR-1100 card… And the nvidia drivers never got me a good picture to the TV :( I don’t have the patience to fiddle around with all that crap…

But still, if the tuner had worked, the kit wouldn’t have had the functionality I want (MAME, snes, scumm, uae, etc) on top on the tuner and video playback. So now I’m trying again…

So on the recommendation of a friend I tried Mandriva Linux 2006 (Tord, argh….) The distro feels really unpolished compared to Suse 10, the KDE gui is a bit unresponsive and cluttered. For one one of the things that worked under Debian and Suse was that while the system had to think, it would disable the affected parts of the desktop. Not so under Mandriva. Also Mandriva wanted to reboot for the smallest settings change, much like Windows 98…

Also I found that my GeForce FX5200 card wouldn’t work out of the box with the tv, and the drivers were a real pain in the a** to install(no kernel sources available, had to boot into safemode to get a display). Then, after having done all the install prerequisites and attempted install of MythTV; I wasn’t anywhere. Myth compilation just failed :(

So now I’m back to start; knoppMyth? Well no not after two more alternatives are tested out, there is a new live myth distro out there now. I’ll be trying to install My MythDora, a FC4 based distro. My last chance I think, save of trying Ubuntu which is the reference distro for MythTV, which isn’t such a bad idea maybe. As I’ve only heard nice things about Ubuntu so far, but that was also the case with Mandriva…

Then, if all else fails. There is now a new version out of the Team MediaPortal software(Thank you Norton Ghost!). And maybe I can get familiar with its plugin API… Nah, I’ve got enough on my plate with Servibase :)

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