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PostPosted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 2:42 pm 
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Location: Silicon Valley, CA
:(

If you got that as "sarcasm" I apologize. I did not intend it to be sarcastic. I really DO look forward to each installment of your struggle. I hope to follow in your footsteps one day when the Hauppage boxes become more available.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 2:50 pm 
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Liv2Cod wrote:
:(

If you got that as "sarcasm" I apologize. I did not intend it to be sarcastic. I really DO look forward to each installment of your struggle. I hope to follow in your footsteps one day when the Hauppage boxes become more available.

:oops: Ok... the dangers of the written language I guess. Sorry for misinterpreting your post. I'll keep the updates coming then.

Latest update is good news! I have configured myth to add the HD-PVR and I can record a show. It seems to be good (thumbnail in mythweb is good), but I will not know for sure until I get home tonight and can watch something on the box in realtime. I'll report again tomorrow.


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PostPosted: Fri Jul 25, 2008 8:12 am 
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Last night's testing was a mixed bag.

Live TV and recordings are working and the playback video decode is fine, but the audio is missing. I'm sure that good audio is present in the HD-PVR stream and audio is fine on HDHomeRun channels. I suspect that I need to add AAC support to the mythtv build. I didn't see a config option for it (like there is in the plugins config), so I need to do some further research there.

Some quick tips for anyone who is trying this out or thinking of trying this out:

#1 You must have a channel changing script defined for the HD-PVR (even if it's just /bin/true). Otherwise it will not work at all and you will have no idea why.

#2 You must have a dual core modern CPU or you have no hope of decoding. I have a Dragon2 system with a Core2Duo CPU and it takes 65% of the CPUs for playback (more than one whole core of constant utilization).

#3 Both MythTV and VLC in the stock R5.5 will not playback HD-PVR captures. There are changes to the decode logic in svn that are necessary for playback. For driver capture testing, use a Windows machine with the Hauppauge drivers and playback software installed.

#4 MythTV svn trunk is definitely a non-stable development platform. Expect warts, small things broken and such. It's not anywhere near the quality of a KnoppMyth release... don't expect it to be.

Quick easy question... how do you save the alsamixer levels, so that when I reboot they are the same? This used to just work in the last KnoppMyth release (I think). Thanks!
NOTE: Looks like I need to do a "alsactl store". Yikes... maybe not.


Last edited by nharris on Fri Jul 25, 2008 9:16 am, edited 2 times in total.


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PostPosted: Fri Jul 25, 2008 9:03 am 
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Ok... this post is just to document the configure lines I'm using. I'll update it with the latest as I go along.

mythtv:
./configure --enable-dvb --enable-xvmc --enable-opengl-vsync --enable-xvmc-pro --enable-proc-opt --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --prefix=/usr

mythplugins:
./configure --enable-dvb --enable-xvmc --enable-opengl-vsync --enable-xvmc-pro --enable-proc-opt --enable-transcode --enable-vcd --enable-aac --prefix=/usr

myththemes:
./configure --prefix=/usr


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PostPosted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 2:55 pm 
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Success!

The configure lines in my post above do the trick. I'm recording and playing back with (mostly) no problems... live tv works fine too. For some reason I'm having issues playing back 1080i HD-PVR video. My guess is that the decode plus deinterlace is just too much processing, but it could be an unresolved bug too. I can't say for sure, since the frontend will crash quickly when attempting playback. Luckily, I can set my DirecTV box to output only 720p for all HD and that seem to work fine. I'll do some more testing later to see if I can get 1080i to work. Once I run for a while and make sure things keep working, I'll post a HOWTO along with my precompiled packages.

I really hope that they back port the HD-PVR changes into 0.21. Here are a quick list of annoyances and unknowns:

1. No firmware loading implemented in the current HD-PVR driver. This means you have to run the device on a Windows machine first. In my experience, you can't turn it off either or it does not seem to get recognized. So, my formula so far has been get it running under windows and then unplug the USB cable and move it to the Myth box. This would not be fixed by a back port to 0.21, but hopefully it will get added to the driver in the near future.

2. Themes from 0.21 do not work (correctly) on 0.22 SVN. You must change to a stock theme and OSD before updating. I miss blootube. I'll be trying out the MoPo theme as it seems to be updated for 0.22.

3. I looks like you need to install mythweb by hand (by copying files). Not sure why this does not get included when building/installing the mythplugins package. Plus the current state of mythweb is not as stable as 0.21 (it's small things like weather and such that don't seem to work).

4. So far, I'm removing the mythtv, mythplugins, mythtv-themes and mythstream before installing my packages. I'm not sure if you really need to remove mythstream, but I don't use it anyways. You also need to manually delete the entire mythtv themes subdirectory (so you completely remove all the extra themes). I have also had to delete the smolt directory to get things working.

5. You have to make and make install the hdpvr driver by hand, installing it over the stock R5.5 stuff. Making a deb package for it does not seem to work. I've tried making a v4l-dvb package and such and I can't seem to find the magic to make this work.

6. The HD-PVR has a fan and it is loud! When it start streaming, it sounds like one of those little graphic card type fans is going full blast inside the box. With all my attention to making my myth box quiet, it's annoying that the HD-PVR is my largest source of noise (by far). I'll have to crack it open and try to modify it to get rid of the noise.

That's about it for now...


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PostPosted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 3:00 pm 
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Anyone using this patch to browse across multiple tuners? I hope this gets incorporated into 0.22.

http://www.ronfrazier.net/ronfrazier.ne ... owseTuners


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 6:27 am 
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In case you are curious, commercial flagging and skipping works fine with HD-PVR recordings. This makes MythTV the first out there to do this. SageTV and all using CommSkip or ShowAnalyzer don't have support yet.


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PostPosted: Tue Jul 29, 2008 5:08 pm 
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Joined: Thu Dec 01, 2005 4:14 pm
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Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Wow...nice work! Sounds like support for this device just needs a little buffing and polishing. That's fantastic news.

Thanks for being brave and sharing your saga. The fact that you were able to go from "I took it out of the box" to "Success!" in a matter of weeks is a testament to the MythTV developers for their hard work and to you for your diligence in giving it a whirl. Well done! Looking forward to additional details.


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 7:40 am 
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Hi akulcsar, glad you are interested and I hope you will try it out too (assuming you are looking to buy a HD-PVR). If so, please provide some feedback.

My current status:
The backend seems to be glitching on recording a few shows. They are "recorded" but get 0 byte file sizes. I have no idea why right now and will need to investigate my log files for some clues. The shows that are recorded (only 480p and 720p right now) playback fine with good commercial skipping.

I'm working on a writeup of my procedure so everyone can give it a spin with minimal pain and suffering. The more people start using and providing feedback on the HD-PVR to the MythTV and driver guys the better. You can find my writup (a work in progress) on my KnoppMyth page at:

http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/KnoppMyth.html

Once again, feedback and constructive criticism are welcome and appreciated.


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 8:18 am 
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I just noticed that SVN trunk has a myththemes and a themes directory. The themes directory has blootube and Project Grayhem. I'm going to see if I can get this installed too.

UPDATE: The extra themes in SVN work fine.


Last edited by nharris on Thu Jul 31, 2008 7:14 am, edited 1 time in total.


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 3:28 pm 
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Location: Ann Arbor, MI
I'm thinking about purchasing one, but not for a little bit yet. I'm in the process of deciding what to do with my current cable provider.

Curious: do you have a separate frontend, or are your backend and frontend combined? What hardware do you have in your playback device?


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PostPosted: Thu Jul 31, 2008 7:18 am 
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akulcsar wrote:
Curious: do you have a separate frontend, or are your backend and frontend combined? What hardware do you have in your playback device?

I have three similar Dragon2 machines. One is a combined backend/frontend and the other two are frontends. Unfortunately, you need some modern CPU power to decode the HD-PVR streams and MythTV does not have any kind of cheap HD extender available (yet).


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 3:15 pm 
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akulcsar wrote:
I'm thinking about purchasing one, but not for a little bit yet. I'm in the process of deciding what to do with my current cable provider.

Curious: do you have a separate frontend, or are your backend and frontend combined? What hardware do you have in your playback device?

Looks like Newegg.com has the HD-PVR in stock for $220 right now. I would highly suggest the fastest CPU you can afford and quad core would be a big plus. While you don't really need the quad core, it would be nice to have a couple of commercial flag processes running at the same time. It takes a lot longer to flag commercials (ie-decoding the H.264) with HD-PVR recordings. I'm thinking of upgrading my backend.


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PostPosted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 1:40 pm 
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New HD-PVR firmware is reported to be out very soon (already in limited testing). It will have AC3 support and might fix some of the other decoding issues.


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PostPosted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 6:07 pm 
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Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Lookin' good man. This thing will keep coming down in price I predict, and your hard work will make it easier for the rest of us slugs to get it going...
:P

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