NoisyVoid.com Brothers Myth Machine

Introduction

I have taken the contents of http://www.wilsonet.com, and fixed it so that it is a record of my build. I am re-writing the webpage as I build, so the formatting may be off. I also have left in any thing that does not consern me (but may need later). But I may remove this later.

Equipment

1. Processor: AMD Sempron 3000+ (1804MHz)
2. Memory: 512M, 64M given to onboard graphics
3. Graphics: Onboard VIA graphics
4. Sound: Onboard VIA sound
5. HDD: 81G
6. XFX GeForce FX5200 256MB AGP D/VO (38.56UK pounds)
7. Nova-T PCI (39.99UK pounds)

For future reference the motherboard has 2 SATA interfaces, but no SATA power cables on the PSU. There are only 2 PCI slot on the MB, one is taken up by the Nova-T capture card.

I will have to move the 200G HDD from my current test machine to this new machine as video storage.

OS Install

I have picked fc5 as the OS. FC5 has been out for a while and should have stabilised. I continue to use Fedora Core as I have the most experience on it. The only issue with Fedora is that the lifetime of each core is not that long.

The FC5 image needs to be downloaded for the web and burn to DVD. You can download from Fedora mirrors -

But I choose to download a respin of FC5 that already had some fixes in it. this should same time and bandwidth when I need to update.

On booting the FC DVD, you will be given the chance to add boot options. It is a V.good idea to add support for a file system that supports larger files. The two to choose from are jfs or xfs. In this case I have chosen to use "linux jfs xfs" so that I can mount my old drive and copy onto the new jfs drive.

On one of the first screens you will be asked to partition you drive(s). Select 'Create custom Leyout'. A suitable custom partitioning setup is as follows (assuming a single IDE hard drive):

I have used jfs on the last partition, but will add a seperate drive later and move the /video onto the new drive. The hda partition will be used for music, video's (not recording) and DVD burn type scratch space

Leave the grub screen alone

On the Network Configuration screen, I leave it on DHCP and then change it later when I get to be brothers house.

On the package selection screen, select (at least) these package groups:

• X Window System
• KDE Desktop Environment
• MySQL Database (be sure mysql-server is selected under the "Details" section)
• Web Server (if you want to use MythWeb)

Some other packages that might be of interest, but are not required:

• Graphical Internet
• Gaim
• Firefox (very handy for following this very guide -- think copy and paste)
• Sound and Video
• Windows File Server
• Network Servers
• vnc-server
• Development Tools (if you want/need to compile anything)

You can find my jumpstart file here if you want to see exactly what options I used.

Firstboot setup -- create MythTV user and enable ntp

At the first boot setup screen, create a user called mythtv, with a password of your choosing. All further documentation assumes you are logged in as the user mythtv. Lines with $ as the prompt are executed as user mythtv, lines with # as the prompt are executed as root. You should NEVER log in to your machine directly as root. Log in with the normal user account, then assume root privs with 'su' wherever a command needs to be run as root.

For the beginners out there, type 'su' (without the quotes) then hit return, and you'll get prompted for the root password. After entering that, you'll have a root prompt. Do what you need to do as root, then type 'exit' (again, without the quotes) to get back to your normal user prompt.

In that same first boot setup area, there is an option to enable ntp. This is highly recommended. You want your shows to start (and stop) recording at the right times, don't you? ;-) Check the box to enable ntp, and either enter an ntp server you know of near you (I happen to know time-nw.nist.gov is just up the road from me in Redmond, WA, on the Microsoft campus) or leave it with the pre-populated values, which are from the ntp.org pool (pool.ntp.org aliases to a bunch of time servers around the globe). I actually have one system on my network that slaves off time-nw.nist.gov (and a few others for redundancy) then serves as the ntp server for the rest of my home network.

On the Firewall Configuration page, life will be much easier if you simply disable both the firewall and SELinux. I generally turn both off and turn just the firewall back on when I know what rules I want.

Get your system up-to-date

To get your system fully updated, simply run the command:

WARNING: Do NOT attempt any other rpm activity while the upgrade is in progress. Performing multiple exclusive rpm operations at the same time can lead to very bad things happening (rpm database inconsistencies, race conditions, completely hosed database, etc). After the big upgrade, you MAY get an error about being unable to open the rpm database (this used to happen to me w/RHL9, but hasn't ever with FC). If you do encounter this error, try the following:

The database rebuild will take quite a while to complete. After it completes, you'll see an error message, but you can safely ignore it and move on to see if the rebuilddb cleared the problem. If not, good luck... Note that the presence of those __db* files doesn't indicate a problem, they're supposed to be there, they just get corrupted every once in a while.

To make life simpler after we've rebooted and are prepared to start installing drivers for some of our hardware not supported natively by the kernel, we're going to set up a custom environment variable, KVER, that will help avoid problems from typos, user error, confusion, etc. Simply drop a file in /etc/profile.d, like so:

Now you're ready to reboot into that new kernel and start installing kernel modules for your tuner card(s), remote, etc.

On with the show, once your machine comes back up...

Configure 3rd-party package repositories

We won't touch any packages from and 3rd-party repositories until a bit later, but you'll need to tell yum about the ATrpms and FreshRPMs package repositories, and since we were on the subject of yum already, go ahead and set it up now. This is a simple matter of adding a configuration file for each repository in /etc/yum.repos.d/. Pre-configured files can be simply downloaded to your system like so:

As hinted previously, note that Axel maintains a few different channels of rpms, including many packages besides those needed for a functional MythTV install, with varying stability labels on them. This entire installation can be done using nothing but packages classified as "stable", but even "testing" is generally pretty stable. The only channel to *really* watch out for is the "bleeding" channel. If you enable it, you've been warned; things may break. You're on your own to fix 'em, so be prepared (Axel appreciates bug reports though -- http://bugzilla.atrpms.net/). The primary classifications are as follows (from Axel's web site):

Generally, any problems encountered with ATrpms and ATrpms packages should be addressed on the atrpms-users mailing list before being taken to the MythTV list. You can subscribe to the ATrpms lists here:

FreshRPMs is structured a bit different than ATrpms -- it generally only provides add-on packages, while ATrpms provides both add-on packages packages that replace/upgrade/enhance packages originally provided by Red Hat. FreshRPMs only has one channel of packages. You can subscribe to the FreshRPMs mailing list here:

As with any other mailing list, please search their respective archives first (you can find links to them in the same locations as above).

Get and install video card drivers

While Fedora Core includes video drivers for most video cards, they aren't always the best ones for the needs of a MythTV user. For example, many video cards require experimental 3rd-party or proprietary drivers to enable TV-Out. Without nVidia's own proprietary video drivers, the performance of cards based on their chipsets will suffer greatly, even if you aren't using TV-Out.

I am using 8762 version of the driver. To make life easier, Axel has prebuilt kernel modules. Install for your running kernel like so:

Simply replace the 8762 with another version number, and you can install the older version instead. Note that you can actually have multiple versions installed, and switching between them is as easy as:

Axel's nvidia rpms insert a necessary line into modprobe.conf and generate an xorg.conf file for use with the nvidia driver , but you will need to go and change the keyboard layout to gb. The old xorg.conf file is backed up as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.nvidia.bak. I have created three files with the driver extension on the end (one for Via, one for nv, one for nvidia)

Add Load"v4l" in the "Module" section near the top of your xorg.conf file, to enable optimal v4l to X video transfer and v4l picture controls.

If you're in X right now, simply log out to relaunch X with the new configuration. If you're at the command line, either switch to run-level 5 ("init 5") or run "startx". Once you've verified this configuration is working, you'll likely want to look into the additional options below, to enable TV-Out, accelerated rendering, etc.

I am outputting to a cheap bush 26inch widescreen tv. This is via s-video, and the screen res is 800x600. This is slightly blurry if you need to go into a xterm, but does mean you can see the whole app when in network setting etc. The only modification I have made to display better on the tv was adding the following line in the monitor section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I have also tried the following setting in the device section. This was probably autodetected.

I have also set the screen saver to 1 blank screen (active after 5 minutes).

Audio setup

I have not done any Audio setup since fc4, it just works (but I only use Stereo so it is all quite simple). Therefore I skip this section and come back if there is a problem

Get and install MythTV

Now, here's why we REALLY like yum... MythTV has numerous required dependencies to function correctly, which are automatically taken care of with one simple command:

The last time I looked, that one-liner installed 94 different packages, totalling about 85MB. Just a wee bit easier than hunting down all the rpms by hand, let alone compiling everything from source... :)

Get and install capture card driver(s)

MythTV supports a myriad of different video capture cards, and as of version 0.17, firewire input from certain cable boxes as well. See the official MythTV docs at http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1 for details on exactly what are and are not supported.

If you are in the UK and want to watch freeview just buy a Nova-t. This will set you back 40 uk pounds and easy. The only issue I have with them is that they do not pass DVB signal to there outputs, and therefore you cannot string them together (buy a booster with lots of outputs!)

Now Nova-t's work without any configuration work, power off, install, power on ....working.

In FC4 Setup was also relatively easy. Type in the following configuration, then reboot. The card will be initialised correctly after bootup. Run the following command to place the script on the /etc/init.d directory and create sym links.

Get and install lirc

I have never got lirc to work properly. I skip this section, but may try later to get it working for my Bro. Last time I tried to get it to work lircd stopped the esc key working.

12. Set up MySQL

We'll need to enable MySQL to load at startup, set some passwords, and create the MythTV database, which we'll populate shortly. The population of this database is handled by mythtvsetup in the next step, and all MythTV add-on module database additions must be done AFTER running mythtvsetup at least one time.

Set the mysql root password, replacing ROOT_PWD with your chosen administrator password:

Now we create the mythtv database (called mythconverg) to get us started:

Again, all subsequent database population for MythTV's add-on modules must now be done AFTER running mythtvsetup at least one time.

It's worth customizing some parameters in /etc/my.cnf for optimal performance with Myth. I know next to nothing about the topic, but from experimentation and listening to people who do know what they're doing (I think), I found these adjustments to my.cnf under the [mysqld] section improve performance with both MythTV (esp. in the GUI) and MythWeb:

13. Set up MythTV

There are a number of things you might want to figure out in advance to successfully complete your setup. First, recall what your video device was set up as (likely /dev/video0 if you have a single v4l card, DVB #0 if you have one DVB card). Note that the actual device number is NOT what determines what order MythTV will use your cards in. What matters is the order that you enter them in mythtvsetup, so your best card doesn't have to be /dev/video0. Set up /dev/video8 first, and it'll be the first card used for recordings.

Before you dive into the setup, you may want to make one little change so that you can actually see all the text you're supposed to see. There's a bug in Fedora Core 4's urw-fonts package that causes fonts to display MUCH larger than they should. Details on how to fix this can be found here:

Now on to launching the MythTV setup utility. For this part, you need to have an X session started up, as the setup utility is an X application. Fire it up like so:

Note run this is run as root (as the DVB cards can only be accessed via root)

I'm told that non-US folks may have issues correctly getting through the tv_grab_xx/xmltv part of the setup if "focus follows mouse" is already set (in KDE's Control Center), so keep that in mind. Just set "focus follows mouse" when everything else is already configured.

Recent changes in the mythtvsetup and database population methodology broke the default path settings for the MythTV rpms, which should be /var/lib/mythtv/ for storage of recorded shows, and /var/cache/mythtv/ for live TV buffer. These directories are automatically created at install time, but you'll have to manually enter them in section 1 of mythtvsetup.

Those using a dedicated /video partition, per my example, should obviously set /video/recordings/ for storage of recorded shows and /video/buffer/ for their live TV buffer. However, you can do pretty much whatever you like here, such as recording to an NFS or samba mount, a software RAID array, or even to an LVM group so you can expand your /video partition sometime down the road (I use LVM myself, someday I'll write about it more...). Just make sure your mythtv user has permission to read and write to whatever location you choose.

It is highly recommended that you go through the setup steps in order. Follow the on-screen instruction, with aid from the MythTV website's documentation on this page:

NOTE: your system may appear to hang at step 3; give it time, it isn't locked up, that part just takes a while!

Once you've gone through the setup, you have to populate the MythTV database with some program info. I spent a good long time tweaking my channel lineup on zap2it's site to remove all the junk channels I didn't really care to have show up. Once you have your listings to your liking, you're ready to fill your database with programming info. A change in MythTV 0.17 requires that you start up the backend first. We'll daemonize it a bit later, but for now, just start it up like so:

Assuming all goes well and the process doesn't exit on you (if it does, check out the troubleshooting section below), lets get some guide data:

If you're using a guide data source other than zap2it (i.e.,anyone outside the US and Canada), I'm told that you may well need to add a "--manual" flag to the end of that command to get it to work. Look at the output of "mythfilldatabase --help" for more clues if you have problems.

Also, BE PATIENT! This step can take a fairly long time, depending on your internet connection speed and how many channels your service provides... It is also recommended to run mythfilldatabase every night from cron, to keep your show information up to date. To help mitigate possible flooding of our listings provider's servers, we'll set mythfilldatabase to run at some random time in the afternoon. This allows the database to be updated with the most upto date listing ready for the evening (when most of the recordings take place). We'll simply add an entry to the mythtv user's crontab, like so:

On this machine I have set this up the method, but only download one channel (qvc - I hide this channel anyway). This means the mythfill that is needed to keep averything in order is done, but makes it easier to implement RT scheduling in the future.

Now start up the MythTV front-end (I recommend doing this in a separate shell window, so you can distinctly see the different output for the backend and frontend processes)...

Configure automatic startup

The necessary init script for the MythTV backend to automatically start at system boot is already in place for you, just simply turn it on:

If the backend isn't already running, save yourself a reboot and issue this command:

Now, because I have a few things that don't seem to want to play nice anymore (i.e., nvidia-settings don't load like they should, alsa volume levels aren't restored), I decided to create a quick little shell script in ~/.kde/Autostart/myth-load.sh to handle loading up all the extra goodies I need/want to auto-start, as well as force stubborn things to work. This script loads my nvidia settings, restores alsa volumes, launches irexec for my little power button script (on the Tips 'n' Tricks page), then launches mythfrontend, all in one fell swoop. Just copy and past all this into ~/.kde/Autostart/myth-load.sh (adjust accordingly for different desktop environments):

Don't forget to make it executable:

While logged in to an X session, you'll also have to run gdmsetup, to set autologin for your mythtv user.

In GDM Setup, click on users tab add mythtv and move it to the left hand side. Then, go to the security tab. Tick timed login and select the mythtv username. Set the timelimit to 5 seconds (just enough time to break in if you need to fix something).

Adding a extra Harddisk

I originally build this machine with /video on the 81G drive. I have now added a 200G drive to act as dedicated recording storage. The space on the 81G drive (63G), I will use for music, dvdauthor stuff and any video storage.

Procedure was as follows

• Power off PC and install disk
• Power on PC
• run fdisk -l to check disk is seen
• run fdisk /dev/hda
• press 'n' to create partition, and make it primary.
• make the size the complete disk (default start / stop sectors)
• press 'w' to write changes
• use the following command to create the formatted partition
  # jfs_mkfs /dev/hdb1
• stop backend
  # /sbin/service mythbackend stop
• unmount the current video partition
  # umount /video
• create the /date mount point and remount partitions in the correct places
  # mkdir /data
  # mount -t jfs /dev/hda1 /video
  # mount -t jfs /dev/hda5 /data
• edit fstab file to make automount in the correct places at boot up
  vi /etc/fstab and remove label=/video add following lines

Hardening access to the Machine

I initially installed the machine with the firewall turned on (ssh and web enabled). I now need to harden the security so only valid ip addresses can access it. There are two jobs to be done, reconfiguring iptables, and hardening sshd. The changes that need to be done on the iptables is shown below.

Add the following lines (where 1.1.1.1 is the trusted external address and 192.168.1.0/24 is your internal network).

Remove the following lines (or comment out)

Now just restart the iptables service

Now we need to lock down ssh access so only one user ssh to the machine (NOT mythtv as the password is trivial). Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add the following lines

Now just restart the sshd service

I use a industrial class firewall on my DSL connection which also manages access, so all this is just creating 'security in depth'.

Configuring MythTV add-ons

When you installed MythTV using "yum install mythtv-suite", you not only installed MythTV, but also all of the add-on modules currently available. You've still got a bit of work to do to make them all functional though.

I have marked each heading to show what I have configured and what I have not.

MythBrowser- unconfigured

MythDVD- unconfigured

MythGallery- unconfigured

MythGame- unconfigured

MythMusic- configured

MythNews- unconfigured

MythVideo- configured

MythWeather- configured

MythWeb- configured

16. Upgrading your system

Upgrading your MythTV installation to a new release is fairly straight-forward. As of MythTV 0.13, all database changes are handled automagically, so you merely have to upgrade your mythtv rpms when they become available. Occasionally, driver updates are also required (such was the case with the ivtv driver when upgrading to MythTV 0.13, and PVR-350 output in 0.14+ required ivtv 0.1.9+). The basic upgrade process should be as simple as:

Note that this will NOT suffice to upgrade all sub-packages in the event of an updated build from ATrpms of the same major version. In other words, say 0.18.1-115 packages are released with some bugfix not in 0.18.1-114 (-114 and -115 are ATrpms build numbers), but mythtv-suite is already satisfied w/0.18.1-114 (mythtv-suite only needs 0.18.1 packages of any build number), so you'll have to specify all components manually (rpm -qa | grep myth for a list of 'em). If a driver update is required, you may need to:

A general note about upgrading and installing rpm packages: you should NEVER use --nodeps to install or remove a package. If you can't get around using --nodeps, there is likely a packaging problem, which you should report upstream, to have it fixed. A tanked rpm database can do Very Bad Things™ to your system, and recovery is sometimes impossible. Try 'yum check' to verity its integrity, should you happen to have committed the --nodeps sin in the past.

Upgrading your kernel is a little bit more involved than upgrading only MythTV, because all custom kernel modules, both rpm-installed and source-installed, will have to be updated also. Kernel modules carry two different versions, one for the kernel they are for (the 'kernel version') and one for the actual module itself (the 'module version'). Everything but kernels and their matching kernel modules get upgraded automatically by 'yum upgrade'. However, note that cases where the kernel version on a kernel module remains the same, but the module version is incremented, an 'yum upgrade' will upgrade that kernel module. Essentially, you really only need to take extra measures when upgrading your kernel, as everything else gets handled automatically.

When you do come to a point where you need to upgrade your kernel, one of the nice features of installing from packages, rather than source, shows itself. For all the ATrpms kernel modules, you can simply type in the command...

...to get a full list of all the kernel modules you have installed on your system. With that list in hand, you can now install your new kernel, along with all the corresponding updated kernel modules. For example:

You can also uninstall an older kernel and its kernel modules with a single command:

17. Miscellanea

This section has been moved to its own page, titled Tips 'n' Tricks.

18. Trouble-shooting

First and foremost, READ THE OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION!!! Specifically, the page on Troubleshooting, at http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-22.html. Second, search the MythTV users *and* developers mailing list to see if this isn't already a known problem that might be fixed in CVS or have a work-around. Again, you can search the archives online at Gossamer Threads. Third, check out the wiki over at http://www.mythtv.info/, which also contains quite a bit of valuable information. Fourth, take a look at ATrpms Bugzilla and the Fedora Myth(TV)ology Wiki and Bug-tracker.

When trouble-shooting, I suggest exiting the frontend, stopping the backend and opening a pair of terminal windows. From one, start up the backend (as root, just type "mythbackend"). In the other, launch the frontend with verbose output (just type "mythfrontend -v all"). There should be a fair amount of output spit to the terminal windows that should give you (and the developers) a better idea of what is going wrong with your system. Please include that output when asking for help. Additionally, if you're getting a segmentation fault, your best bet for getting help determining the cause of the problem is to download the myth source code and compile it yourself in debug mode, then run it with gdb, the GNU debugger (how to do that is detailed at the above link). Only with a backtrace can the developers really help you if your setup is causing Myth to segfault.

I plan to further populate this section over time, when I can...