Just thought I'd note my experiences with sticking R5A10 on over the weekend and getting it running with DVB support in the UK, in case it's of any use to anyone.

Overall, I'd say it was a great success. There's things I've not quite got configured properly yet, due largely to not being able to find up to date documentation for .17..

My hardware is an Asus Pundit (not Pundit-R) with 2.5Ghz P4 and Nebula DigiTV DVB-T card. Using built in ethernet (Broadcom4400), video (SIS chip) and sound. Have an ATI RF remote control that came with a 9700 AIW Pro.

I had problems booting the ISO, but that seemed to be an issue of the CD drive - swapped it and it worked fine.

I opted for the 2.6 kernel (boot options: knoppix linux26) and used the manual setup because I wanted to preserve the contents of /myth but not do an upgrade - the previous installation suffered from a crash while updating and a number of files were hosed so didn't want to backup/restore the myth database.

Installed in a matter of minutes, rebooted and all the hardware seemed to be detected, including ethernet and ATI remote control. X even worked properly with the SIS chipset and the TV without needing to spend hours fiddling with config files and downloading the latest drivers - I had backed up the X config from before the install, but still wasn't expecting it to work without a fight from past experience...

Two issues here though that might want to be looked at:
1. When running X, it opens an xterm to do the post-install config. Due to the setup of /etc/securetty, root isn't allowed to login on ttyp0 (or anything other than the virtual consoles/serial port) so it failed to su to root. Edited /etc/securetty and it worked.
2. On about the third reboot, the networking wasn't working - it seemed that it was loading the IP-over-firewire module and had on that occasion assigned that as eth0 and the ethernet interface got eth1.. Edited /etc/modules.conf to alias eth0 to bcm4400 and it hasn't repeated it.

Next, made sure all of the modules relevant to the DVB card were loaded by adding to /etc/modules (including the frontend NXT6000 one that took me a while to remember).
Myth detected the card fine and with a bit of effort found the channel setup guide that showed how to correctly get Myth to scan for DVB channels. The scan worked perfectly and picked up all of the channels that I'd expect.

Picture quality is great. No issues so far with sound or picture, but I've not spent much time testing that as yet and haven't recorded anything...

What I've not yet got working:
on-air EPG. It's supposed to get the EPG over the air - in fact, if you use myth to scan for channels, you're not supposed to use mythfilldatabase to populate the EPG because the channel IDs gathered automatically don't match the XMLTV IDs so it'll either not work or mess up the schedules.
As yet, it's not picked up anything and I've not seen anything in the backend logs to indicate failure. Does anyone know whether support for over-the-air EPGs is compiled into the binary installed with R5A10, or will I need to compile it up myself? (There is a flag that needs to be defined, same as for DVB support in general. The DVB flag is clearly set..)

the ATI remote properly. It physically works, but some of the keys don't appear to be doing what - as far as I can tell - they should be. The kernel source seems to have been patched to make the keys more myth-friendly, but reality doesn't match - I don't know whether the module was compiled before the source was patched? As an example, the pause key should be mapped as 'p'. Pressing 'p' on the keyboard pauses live TV, but the pause button on the remote does nothing. Similarly there seems to be no way to get out of some submenus such as the video player. Channel up/down seem to try and jump forwards/back through the recorded buffer.

Also, the key repeat seems a bit odd. Pressing the channel up key briefly seems to make myth unusable for about 20-30 seconds as it tries to deal with a number of queued keypresses telling it to jump forwards through video, causing it to stutter and slow down and flash the borders of the screen blue (it was widescreen on a 4:3 display). That seems to be an issue with myth rather than the remote because it does the same thing on the keyboard.

Edit: One other issue springs to mind. On doing the clean install, mythvideo was by default looking somewhere other than /myth/video for video files, but I can't remember where it was looking now. Somewhere in /var anyway. Other paths all seemed fine.

I think that's about it for my observations of a clean install - hopefully it'll be of use to someone, either for looking into the issues for the next release, or to see that it's worked on my setup... I'm impressed with .17 too - although much of that might have already been present in .16 - I last used myth properly with .15 before getting a DVB card and never managing to spend the time getting it fully working under knoppmyth R4V5.

If anyone has any more information on the EPG or the remote, let me know.

Steve.

Steve,

Although I can't give you any actual help. I just wanted to say that your posting has spurred me on. I have been thinking of building a KnoppMyth box for a while. But it has to be a DVB solution and DVB seems a bit bleeding edge at the moment. I've past unix experience but never touched Linux. Seems like a good project to cut my teeth on. The DVB card was one of the things I was pondering over.
Thanks,

mark

Gone reasonably well for me. I am always amazed at all the little tweaks you need to do, even though KM does a fabulous job of installation if you are a typical tier 1 user.

I am using a twinhan DVB-T card for UK tv, a FF siemens DVB-S card and a pvr-250. I had everything nice and stable under a tweaked and recompiled R4v5 install.

Having done an upgrade, bit opf a shame to find none of the cards worked

As always I struggled with the whole bit of loading the drivers in the right order. Knoppmyth picked up some of the modules, including dvb-ttpci, for the DVB-S card which then fails because it can't load the firmware.

I tried adding the same /etc/modules file as I had in R4V5, but strangely that didnt work, maybee an order thing. I eventually got it all to work by:

Making sure I copied over the bttv0 file, to get all the options for the Twinhan card. placed all the twinhan modules in the right order, then left all of the siemens card to the end of the list so the hotplug manager could do its stuff. Also the firmware for the card(dvb-ttpci-01.fw) had to be added to /lib/firmware . This is where hotplug agent (?) in 2.6.x needs it to be.

I also had a copy of the firmware in /usr/lib/firmware.. but that is a legacy from 2.4 days. Not sure if that was part of the virgin R5A10 install, if so it needs to be changed.

Added the modules in this order worked for me: The commented entries were added at install time, but didnt work for me.



The last gotcha is that even though this is an upgrade, if you have DVB channels configured in your database, you are better off deleting them all and starting again with the autotune. (this is a Mythtv thing, nothing to do with KM)

so far my upgade has gone well, i have my visionplus cards working and i can watch tv. will keep everyone updated if i have any major problems

How did you stop the autodetection? Can you please let me know. I get the twinhan visionplus auto detected as a bttv generick then the computer locks.

I remember reading this problem is earlier versions of mythtv as well. For me i never had this problem so i did not need to deal with it.

From memory what u need to do is comment out bttv in mondules then put your dvb card in and set it up that way. For some reasons it locks up on certain pcs.

What chipset are you using? Some VIA boards have this problem. Take a look in your mobo manual and check which pci slots are shared and make sure u are not using that one for the card. Also if you are not using the serial and paralell ports diable then in the BIOS to free up IRQ's

I would suggest making a new post for this so this one doesn't get off track.

guantamanera,

are you using R5A10 ? This locking was a problem with the old version of bttv, when it did not recognise the twinhan cards. The new version does recognise it, and doesnt losk (or so I have found on my system).
if you have multiple cards, that use bttv, this used to give a problem, you need to set them all at once with somthing like:

/etc/mythtv/modules/bttv0 put



with the parameters for each card in a comma seperated list, in the order of the cards. In my case I had a twinhan first, followed by an old analogue wintv card, both pal tuners.

good luck.

Thanks guys,

I got R5A10. I tried putting the code you gave me, but still it locks. It just says bttb0 using ***UNKNOWN/GENERIC*** [card=0 autodetect]
and nothing happens after that, and I have only that card in my computer nothing else.

My computer has an intel chipset.

Thank you everyone I got it working.
I uncomented 1 line in /etc/modules.conf
and /etc/modutils/KnoppMyth

The line I uncommented was


That worked and i kept this on /etc/modules


Now when knoppmyth load I can hear the tuner in my dvb card click, and then I did the settup of mythtv scan the satellite and everything worked out. Butt cannot view live tv. I just see a black screen with no video for 2 minutes .then it goes back to the front menu, but that is a subject for another thread.

Well thank you everybody.

Following up my own issues:

To get the over-the-air DVB EPG working, I did need to recompile Myth (just the main mythtv part, not mythvideo etc). Then restarted myth and as if by magic programmes started appearing in the schedule.

I just unpacked the mythtv source archive that's in /usr/src/mythtv; patched it with the patch file in the same place so that it starts out with all of the knoppmyth options/file locations etc, then edited settings.pro and uncommented the relevant option, recompiled using the normal procedure and was away...

I've still not got round to looking at the ATI remote key mapping yet but will probably try recompiling the module first.

Finally, adding the eth0 alias in /etc/modules.conf didn't fix the problem with eth1394 being assigned to eth0. It seems to be random which ethernet interface gets loaded first. Most of the time it's the ethernet card but twice now with no changes the firewire interface has got in first. Can't see where it's being loaded unless the act of initializing the firewire loads it? It's certainly not being directly loaded from /etc/modules or from any of the init scripts that I can see. Might try moving the module elsewhere and see what complains, or just recompiling the kernel without it.

Steve.

Steve,

I have an Asus Pundit-R (currently running SuSE) and, after testing KnoppMyth successfully on another computer I was thinking about installing it on my Pundit. I have a Celeron processor so the processor fan is either off or very quiet. The hard disk makes a load of noise though - have you managed to get your hard disk to be quiet?

Thanks,
Tom

sjwk: Check out http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3757&highlight=firewire+eth0 for some discussion about your firewire problem.

tombaaaaa: PC noise is a big subject. There are some HD quieting devices around (see http://www.silentpcreview.com), but IMHO the first step is to make sure you have a quiet HD. The above web site has some recommendations. I made the mistake of getting a WD. I am now using a Samsung as my main drive and spinning the WD down at boot. My box now sounds like a jet taking off and landing during boot. However, the comparitive silence after the boot is impressive.

Allen

_________________
ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

Another Oxfordian I see..

The hard disk isn't noticeably noisy, but then again I have a P4 2.5Ghz in there so the fan noise probably drowns it out...
It's much quieter than any of my other machines at home or work, so I kind of don't especially notice it.

I've got a Western Digital WD1200JB in mine, which I think runs at 7200rpm. Perhaps a 5400 might run quieter? I've also heard of software you can use with Maxtor drives to tweak the firmware settings in the drive and make them run quieter.

Steve.

fyi,



...worked really well on my R4A5 system to get rid of head-movement related noises. Note that -M is an experimental feature. I think the default value is either 0 or 254, you might want to try an...



to verify your current value first.

Don't recall if I did it once or added it to a startup script.

-brendan