MythTV

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The following is the procedure I used to set up MythTV on Debian Sarge.

It seems the former Debian MythTV developer has defected to the Ubuntu camp. He has packages available for Debian unstable and several flavours of Ubuntu, but nothing for Sarge. So, I decided to do this the hard way.

My Hardware:

 Asus A7VI-VM motherboard with Duron 850 CPU and 256MB RAM.
 (WAS nVidia Geforce2MX100 AGP video card.  (onboard video disabled))
 UPDATE: I'm now using an FX5200 card (Asus) that will do overscan.  You need at least a GF4 to do overscan.  See notes below, though.
 Intel 100Mbit nic.
 (WAS WinTV?-PVR150 video capture card)
 UPDATE: Replaced it with a PVR500 so I can record two shows at once.  Having problems with tuner quality on tuner 2, though.
 Creative labs sound blaster live card (with digital out... onboard audio disabled)
 2 x WD 4.3GB hard drives.
 1 x DVD-ROM
 1 x WD160GB 8MB Cache HD. 
 irman infrared remote reciever

1. Installed a fairly minimal Sarge using expert26 mode. (linux26 may have worked...) I set up a RAID1 to boot from.

2. Updated my kernel to the latest 2.6.13.4 from source.

3. Used mkinitrd to enable booting from the RAID. (?)

3.5 set up the sound with alsaconf

4. Installed nvidia's drivers from their .run package.

UPDATE: The latest drivers don't work with the latest kernels as I write this... 2.6.16 and 1.0-8178. You will need to patch the 1.0-8178 driver with the patch found [here]

Also, you may need to follow the TV-Out instructions in the README. I found that TVOverscan didn't work, so I used nvidia-settings to adjust it, then added "nvidia-settings --load-config-only" to the startup scripts. Also, XV makes a silly blue border on the screen... It's apparently an off-by-one bug somewhere. You can remove it by running xvattr -a XV_COLORKEY -v 0 in the startup too.

The following two steps were performed automaticly by the nvidia installer.

(5. Changed driver in XFree86-4.conf from 'nv' to 'nvidia') (6. Removed dri and GLcore as per nVidia readme)

7. built ivtv 0.4.0 drivers from source

8. added lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

 deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sarge main 
 deb-src ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sarge main

9. installed mplayer from that source.

10. tested wintv card with

 cat /dev/video > test.mpg  (ctrl-c after a few seconds)
 mplayer test.mpg (i got static and noise!!!)

11. started installing dependancies using apt-get (DebianMythTVDependancies)

12. Added /usr/share/qt3/bin to PATH and set QTDIR=/usr/share/qt3 and export PATH QTDIR in /etc/profile

13. got my account at http://labs.zap2it.com

 click on the "New User? Sign Up" link.
 In the "Certificate Code" field, enter ZIYN-DQZO-SBUT

14. unpacked mythtv-0.18.1 configured and compiled:

 ./configure --enable-xvmc
 qmake mythtv.pro
 make
 make install

15. Set up mysql. In Sarge, if you want network access to the database you need to comment out the bind-address line in /etc/mysql/my.cnf You might also consider adding a root password to mysql: "mysqladmin password newpassword"

16. create the database: cd database; mysql -p < mc.sql (the -p is only required if you set a password in the previous step.)

17. Set up initial volumes:

 amixer set Master,0 100%,100% unmute
 amixer set PCM,0 100%,100% unmute
 amixer set Line,0 75%,75% mute captur
 amixer set Capture,0 100%,100% captur
 alsactl store

18. set up some permissions (I'm running as 'scott'):

 chown :scott /dev/video* /dev/vbi* /dev/mixer* /dev/lirc

19. in /etc/lirc/hardware.conf set DRIVER="irman" DEVICE="/dev/ttyS0" and comment out the MODULES line.

20. set up lircd with irrecord --driver=irman --device=/dev/ttyS0 myremotefile.conf

21. copied that file over /etc/lircd.conf restarted lircd and tested with irw we will configure myth to use lirc after we run it the first time. (the config file goes in ~/.mythtv/ which isn't created yet.)

22. make a folder to store video:

 mkdir /mnt/local
 chmod a+rwx /mnt/local

23. add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf run ldconfig

24. in X, as the user you want to run mythtv as, run mythtv-setup

25. Follow the setup in the myth docs... it's pretty basic from here.

26. Almost forgot... the myth docs completely gloss over setting up lirc for mythtv. You need to set up mappings from button presses to keypresses in ~/.mythtv/lircrc The format is the same as ~/.lircrc. There is an example in mythtv-0.18.1/configfiles/hauppauge-lircrc-nativelirc

Upgrade to .19-fixes:

 svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv
 svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythplugins
 svn co http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/myththemes
 cd mythtv
 ./configure --enable-xvmc
 make

(Don't do it yet... I should have stayed with .18.1)

Upgrade to .20 + linux 2.6.18 + ivtv 0.8.0 (2.6.18 apparently fixes a problem I've been having, ivtv080 is the only version that will work in 2.6.18, and because only v4l2 is now supported, myth .20 is required.)

Downloaded MythTV 0.20, unpacked,

 ./configure --enable-xvmc
 make
 make install

same with plugins and themes.

mysqldump mythconverg -u mythtv -p >myth.19backup.sql (in case we have to roll back.)

Shutdown and restarted Myth before upgrading kernel... seemed to work as well as .19 did.

Downloaded linux-2.6.18.tar.bz2 built kernel using old .config, but also enabled everything in Device Drivers->Multimedia->Video Capture->Encoders and Decoders as per ivtv 0.8.0 readme.

rebooted with new kernel Now we have to update ivtv and NVIDIA drivers

Well, it turns out 0.8.0 is _worse_ than what I already had, so I'm reverting to 2.6.17.8, but keeping Myth .20.