My Tier-2 setup is as follows.
This is the first linux install I have completed. Installation was fairly straight-forward, making allowance for me having to learn some things and creating some problems for myself (eg permissions). I did approximately the following using R5A30.2. This took about 9 days in total (1 weekend, 5 nights after work, 1 weekend) mostly because I am not knowledgable about linux.
I have moved away from a self-built Windows Media Center setup because I kept getting index problems in recordings which means they won't play back completely - maybe about 1-2% of the time, which is frustrating.
Hardware:
- DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T Plus tuner card
- Gigabyte NVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card (recently purchased as a minimum needed for MCE).
- ASUS P4P800-X motherboard
- 1Gb DDR memory
- Seagate Baracuda 7200.7 80Gb hard drive (see below)
- Hyundai ImageQuest LCD monitor
- Antex Sonata quiet case + True380S PSU
Activities:
- Downloaded the CD via Bittorrent.
- Started the install - didn't work. Received messages like "cdrom inconsistent" and result was a "limited shell". Eventually concluded this was because hard drives were not in the right order (eg first drive has to be hda1). Solved this by changing BIOS settings.
- Installed knoppmyth, following the defaults. Install completed ok, initial mythsetup found tuner card but not any channels. Then retrying it would not find the DVB card.
- Read lots of stuff on the internet.
- Did some searching on the internet.
- Downloaded scan, szap and dvbstream
- Ran scan to get channels - worked first or second time I think (probably failed the first time because mythtv was holding the tuner card).
- Ran tzap to confirm lock on tuner frequencies.
- Ran dvbstream + mplayer to get video/audio output. Didn't work. Searched for and found the different syntaxes for pid settings, what the output from scan meant, etc.
- Eventually got a visual (and audio) output on various channels using dvbstream + mplayer.
- Back to mythtv-setup - could not work out why automatic channel-getting did not work.
- Manually setup channels using each "major" channel frequency from scan output.
- ran mythfilldatabase
- ran mythtv
- edited channels to match name, channelnumber, channelid etc to match guide in [input].xml (the xmltv input file).
After this it seemed to be basically working (I could see and record tv, use remote). Some frustrations:
- issues with some of the HD channels with choppy playback - probably because of my playing with libmpeg2 and XvMC settings.
- Wget "seemed" to work (not 100% sure of that now) but Lynx would only give me 1 web page per reconfig of network adapter. Network and ADSL seemed ok. Resolved by editing resolv.conf with
multiple external DNS servers.
I then have carried on with the following
- ensured resolv.conf remains after reboot
- installed firefox using apt
- installed SATA drives for tv, cache, music and gallery, using xfs. I had 2x300Gb new Maxtor drives to use for video, mp3s, pictures, etc. [Luckily wife needed the digital space and thus had to approve the purchase!] This setup was fairly straightforward.
- moved the cache, swap and other directories to better suit the new disk setup.
- Set ownership/group of all key items to mythtv. After the SATA install there were several errors (eg mythfilldatabase failed because xmltv failed) because permissions were not correct
after I moved the directories around.
Still to do:
- make DVD burning work (haven't tried yet).
- work out some niceties with the UI - such as removing modules that are not needed (eg phone), moving module links around (eg mythweather to the front), changing key bindings, etc
- install spare analog tuner for PIP or conflict recording
- work out how to access MySql using a query front-end, just for interest (and then to hack)
- move display to Samsung LCD TV (via DVI -> HDMI, I assume there will be some 'modlines' issues...)
- ensure streaming using mythweb can stream to Windows Media Player - I only tried it once 5 minutes ago but it didn't work, don't know why yet
- confirm xfs issues - doing a large copy (to restore previous data) between SATA drives resulted in a shut-down of the SATA controller. I think it was temperature related but not sure.
- make laptop and other unused PC work as frontends. Booting and setting up laptop (Dell Inspiron 9100) using CD-only locked up after the initial setup first time I tried it.
And that is my KnoppMyth story so far.
regards,
Lon
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