Mythdora 4.0

This is the best distro for myth we have tested so far.

It uses the latest myth version 0.20 on Fedora Core 6.

It auto detected the Hauppauge WinTW Nova-T DVB and everything was installed already such as myth packages for, video, pictures, music, game, internet streaming, phone, etc.

It didn't properly work with the graphics card, sometimes it's all discoloured when running mythfrontend. I still cannot work it out.

We could watch tv, record tv, what the video collection, listen to music, view images, burn dvd's straight out of the box.

EPG
We've tried to configure the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) and we have it half working. We are using shepard as it's a perl script which auto updates itself and gets all the EPG information for free. We have SBS News, Seven and all the HDTV channels working.

We are very close to getting this working and it really helps with recording anything you want so you can watch it later.

Video, Music, Gallery
When we linked to the shared drives we had to use this type of command:
//10.1.1.2/pictures /mnt/pictures cifs defaults,guest 0 0

For the video we have changed to xine (default) to mplayer instead because it's so much better.

Games
Used ZSNES, this worked quite well but fullscreen is a bit hard to get working correctly.

Joysticks were detected on /dev/js0, tested this with:
$ snes9x -joydevl /dev/input/js0

Remote control
I got a new remote control receiver called a ma-620, and nearly got it working the other night at the mlug meeting.

PCLinuxOS 2007 continue... (with problems)

Today we started to extend some of the features for our mythtv box, but there were many problems along the way. At the end of the day we had only made a few minor adjustments.

I'm also currently capped on my internet plan :(, so downloading things has been painful.

Autostart
First was to make mythbackend startup at boot time. mythtv automatically does this when you install, but it tries to run this as the mythtv user, well we don't use that user so we had to fix this up.
We had to make sure the 'mythtv' user had a shell.
As we have been starting our mythbackend with mythuser we had to delete /mnt/store/nfslockfile.lock

Now we typed the following to test it will work
# su mythtv
$ service mythbackend start

Also whilst we were in the area we made PCLinuxOS auto load in as mythuser

Emulators
We tried a few emaultors, and had the following problems.

ZSnes
downloaded the source for this off their website as it's not included in synaptic
untared it and configured it.

This had an error with libSDL, after doing a lot of googling people suggested we tried libSDL-devel. So we installed that. This didn't work either :(.

I knew a different SNES emulator and we decided to test this

Snes9x
Downloaded this from their site, untared and ran configure.
This bombed out with
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C++ compiler cannot create executable.

I installed g++, then tried again. This time it got a little further but still didn't finish compiling. It ended with a list of errors from the 'make' starting with:
Error: previous declaration of 'SDSP1 DSP1' with 'C++' linkage.


MythBrowser
Next we tried to get an easy to use browser to work within mythtv. There is a package called mythbrowser, this looked good, but turned out to be pretty pointless.

It worked, but you couldn't use a heap of keys such as 'm' or '2', 'space' counted as an enter. This was done by default. These are known as keymappings and are supposed to help the user, it only creates problems! To fix this you must install mythweb, but that will not install under PCLOS 2007.

We tried using firefox instead with the kiosk add-on you can make firefox start in fullscreen mode, and through the setup of mythbrowser you can tell it to use firefox, only problem is if you have multiple firefox windows open and closing them you need to use alt-f4, not really nice.

MythControl
This is for remote control bindings with myth.

The problem wasn't with mythcontrol it was with LIRC and how to configure it with our unknown undocumented onboard IR device. After a lot of work here, not getting anywhere fast we decided to leave this until I get my USB to IR device soon.

Mytharchive
This is used to burn DVD's basically. This works! but not straight away. As our cd device is /dev/hdc and the mythtv settings for this don't work we had to make a symlink.

# ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd

Now it will work, all we tested was burning a large AVI file in data mode to a DVD-RW, and we were happy.

Maybe next week we will test the rest of the burning. You can burn normal files, and AVI files to Video DVD's so people with normal DVD players can watch these as well.

TV Problems
After all this the TV part started to play up with timeouts, this was bad. I hate going backwards for a days work/hacking.

This was the dmesg error we were receiving.
cx88[0]/2: cx8802_timeout


EPG

Next we tried to get an EPG working, this seems near impossible. I remember we got half of one working under mythedition, so maybe we could look at that Hard drive and work it out.

It's all to do with this tv_grab_au file and how/where it phases xml data from about the TV stations. Seems like there are a few people making custom scripts for melbourne TV stations. Some use existing listings others use paid services such as icetv.

It's hard to setup and we haven't had any luck yet. This would be a nice feature as we would be able to see what's coming up on the TV and schedule recordings easier.

Conclusion

At the end of the day we have got the burner going and it's quicker to start up now.

All the other stuff we hit dead ends. We haven't had time to download MythDora4.0 as i'm capped, my mate is going to try this week so hopefully we will give it a go next Sunday.

As for the remote control, this will take some work to get this working I feel, but is high on our priority of things.

Priority of tasks left with current PCLinuxOS 2007
- Remote control
- EPG
- Emulated games
- Game pad
- make mythbrowser easier to use
- mythstream (internet TV and Radio)

PCLinuxOS 2007

Last week we tried installing myth from scratch on PCLinuxOS 2007.

It mostly went smoothly.

I added my 'cx88_dvb' driver to '/etc/modprobe.preload' like normal.
loaded driver manually so we didn't have to reboot
# modprobe cx88_dvb

Added a mythtv user through PCLinuxOS User Management and made sure this user was part of the wheel group.

Installled 'mysql'

Started mysql
# service mysqld start

Installed myth packages, 'mythtv', 'mythtv-frontend', 'mythtv-backend', 'mythtv-setup'

As we forgot to install mysql before mythtv on our machine we had to load the mythtv database manually and grant permission to the 'mythtv' user with the following commands:
# mysql -u root < /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.20/database/mc.sql mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'mythtv'@'localhost' identified by 'mythtv'

Run mythtv setup
$ mythtv-setup

We had a problem with 'tv_grab_au' script not working, this is common and has happened in all distros so far.
We had to download this file from www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~wilu/xmltv/tv_grab_au_reg
rename it to 'tv_grab_au' and run:
# chmod +x tv_grab_au
Then move this file to any directory within path such as '/usr/local/bin'
If you had this problem you will now need to rerun mythtv-setup

Fill the DB
$ mythfilldatabase

Now we could start mythtv and watch TV, we logged in as a user called 'mythuser'
$ mythbackend
$ mythfrontend

Thoughts
At the end once this was up and going adding features such as video, images, music, games was pretty simple. The TV driver is the best we have seen so far, we can change channels in 3 seconds which is acceptable. This maybe even less if you have a good hard drive, which we don't.

Weather didn't work, but we haven't spent time fixing it yet.
News was easy so now I can read RSS feeds, but adding new ones doesn't seem to work yet.


What's next
Next we will test MythDora 4.0 and see how good it really is!

I would also like to get mythstream working as it allows you to watch internet TV and Radio.

We have brought some USB gamepads which look like Playstation controllers. We want to get these working with all the emulators especially the playstation emulator with GT2