SPIRALOZDOTCOM » HTPC

Myth TV Woes

Sebconn — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 01:30:23 +0000

So I’ve hit my first major snag with my Mythbox. The signal is… less than acceptable. It’s like watching a DVD that’s been skimmed along sand paper. On top of that it doesn’t pick up channel 10 at all when scanning for channels. There’s an option on my Nova T 500 to turn on amplification, LNA Activation is what it’s called. This is turned on, but it doesn’t seem to effect much. I’m half hoping it’s the aerial port that I’m using, there’s a chance it’s not the quality it should be. I’ll have to grab a set top box and sort that one out. Other than that the only real thing I need to set up is the remote, and the VFD. I also need to get a wireless card for it, and I want to eventually install a bit torrent client to it, but other than that, she’s apples. If I can’t fix the signal issues I think I’ll have to plonk the tuner on to eBay and find myself another one. Which is annoying, the functionality and quality of it when it works is great, it’s HD for a start, and it’s a dual tuner with one aerial port, which aren’t real easy to find. I’ve got some googling to do.

Mythbuntu – TV Tuner Install & Configure.

Sebconn — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:57:41 +0000

So here’s the first thing, the TV tuner driver installation. This page is a godsend and according to the article, the latest firmware from linuxtv.org gets rid of the hanging problem.

(fast forward 3 hours)

And I’ve found out that it seems to have done just that, I’ve had it going for about 3 hours now and it hasn’t frozen at all, awesome stuff. installing the tv tuner driver was a breeze with the above site and I didn’t hit a single glitch. I’ll probably get stuck back into it tomorrow and sort out the VFD, which doesn’t work at all, and configure the remote. Which it does recognise, but the buttons are just all wrong. But it’s starting to look pretty good considering I’ve really only spent an hour or so on it.

Myth TV Mach II

Sebconn — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 06:07:15 +0000

So a while ago I dove into the world of Linux based HTPC’s, namely, MythTV. I have all the hardware. a Silverstone LC20 Media case with Soundgraph iMon Pad remote control and VFD display. I run o’ the mill MSI motherboard with an AMD Athlon X2 4000+ CPU, 512MB of RAM, 250GB IDE Hard drive and a Hauppauge Nova T-500 Dual HD digital TV tuner. For the record. I DID get it all working, everything, the remote, the VFD the TV tuner, it was working quite well. But there were issues, both due to drivers and my laziness. The TV tuner driver wasn’t super good, after a few hours it would simply hang and not pick up any channels anymore, and the remote wasn’t particularly good because I never really got around to configuring it properly. Back in the day I went for Mythdora, probably the simplest Myth TV distribution out there. It uses Fedora, which was new to me, yum installs and whatnot. I had to do a whole mess of things just to get the TV tuner going and the VFD, I had to download drivers, make, build, all that fancy Linux stuff that I have never really bothered to learn. This time, I’m going for another recently released package, Mythbuntu, which is like Mythdora, but based off the Ubuntu distribution. It seems to have a much bigger community so I’m hoping driver support and general setup support is a bit better.

So I’ve just started to run the Mythbuntu installer CD now, and I’m going to post everything that I do, mainly for my own reference if anything, and it may help others along the way. The standard install process for Mythbuntu is incredibly easy, put in the CD, run the “install Mythbuntu” icon and follow the Wizard, which is what I’ve just done. The iMon PAD remote was in the list of supported remotes, which is nice, whether it works or not is another question. My first place of business though will be the TV tuner, which apparently has much better support in the latest kernel, but we’ll see.