We now have TiVo January 11, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers, mythtv, pvr , add a commentMy PVR has died. It freezes up and doesn’t do anything.
Unfortunately, my MythTV box has yet to prove itself capable, let alone easy enough for Bree to use. So since it’s in Australia now, we got a TiVo. They’re being sold as TiVo HD but it seems to be just a Series 3 box.
Based on usage so far, the TiVo is much easier to get around than my old PVR though it actually has less flexibility and is slower to use as a result (eg. things are in menus rather than relying on hardware buttons for various functions).
Surprisingly, the thing I most miss from my old PVR is the bookmark feature. TiVo saves the position of each video when you stop watching but my old box could set arbitrary bookmarks. This and other little niggles reveal that TiVo is designed for a single viewer. I guess that may have been true when it first started out (early adopters were most likely geeks) but these days, I would have thought most people had families and thus multiple viewers. TiVo’s suggestions? Useless when people with different tastes use the same unit (so we’ve turned them off). The now showing list? There’s no way to organise it and with multiple people’s shows, that’s a pain in the arse. There’s KidZone but it’s a separate mode and limits shows by rating rather than by any kind of organisation.
Still, these are relatively minor issues. The addition of recording via EPG makes up for this and the fact that Bree can use it cinches the deal.
It’s not all roses though. My box has reset itself twice now. Once at 2am while I was watching it (the TiVo folks say that’s not supposed to happen) and again last night but I’m not sure when. I suspect it was at 2am again because that’s the time TiVos apply system updates. The TiVo support people think I might have a faulty unit.
MythTV FAIL August 4, 2008
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentSo, once again my MythTV box is sitting in the garage. I got in some testing and found that all channels were ok (but not by much) when a single tuner was plugged directly into the wall point. MythTV showed under 30% signal while my current PVR shows almost full signal. Then again, my current PVR gets occasional glitches in video and audio and that doesn’t seem likely with such high signal. I think it might be lying.
The splitter I’ve got is crap. Here in Australia we have SBS on the UHF signal band and the rest of the channels are on the VHF signal band. The splitter has 1 inputs, one for TV (UFH) and one for FM Radio (VFH). I guess it’s got filters and happens to be filtering out the VHF TV channels because everything except for SBS comes out at 0 when run through the splitter.
HD reception wasn’t good. It’s purely a signal thing though. I guess the errors aren’t enough to stop an SD channel but are enough to interfere with HD reception.
All up, I’m pretty sure a powered splitter is something I’m going to have to get. Either that or a more expensive masthead amp. It would be great if I could get some measuring tools but those things are expensive. Getting an antenna guy in will cost $75 and there’s no guarantee that’ll fix the problem (if for example it’s just because my tuners aren’t good enough at pulling out a signal).
One more thing I might try is a good unpowered splitter. That’s under $10, compared with at least $100 for a good powered splitter and more for a masthead amp.
I’ve done as much reading as I can and the aerial itself and the cabling are supposed to be really important but our aerial isn’t that old (installed 4 years ago, during the Olympics) and it was setup specifically for digital TV. All of the extra distribution wiring was removed leaving just one new cable from the aerial to the TV. In other words, there’s probably not much more that can be done there (without upgrading to some massive aerial).
MythTV Lives July 21, 2008
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentSo a little while ago, I did some “computer person” work for my family. One of their machines died (it had been unstable for a while) and they got a new one so I took away the old one. My cousin got a laptop to replace their desktop machine and I got that too.
Despite my earlier optimism at my previous configuration it was never going to work out because it was still too loud and some bits (like the video card) remained unproven. I don’t think I ever got that box displaying TV.
So now I had 3 machines to pick the best bits from. Both of the newer ones used DDR RAM instead of the PC133 the older machine used. One of the new machines was a Celeron 2.2Ghz. The other was an Athlon XP 2100. I guess you’d call them comparable. I went straight for the Athlon system though because the Celeron was the unstable one. It was a nicer system anyway, with a quiet CPU fan (must be a retail or third party fan/cooler) and S/PDIF output. I grabbed the power supply from the Celeron system since it was the quietest by a significant margin. I’ve got a 20GB Seagate disk to boot the system from and a 300GB Maxtor for my recordings. Video comes from a NVidia 6200 that was purchased for another machine but it got swapped around and ended up being surplus (so I got it). The card can use the current NVidia driver so everything just works, which is awesome.
I put the machine next to the TV and it is actually quiet enough that it’s not going to bother me. That’s a big step up from my previous box. I got everything plugged in and started tweaking stuff. I started with a LCD and keyboard plugged into the box but quickly got it to use the TV and my laptop’s keyboard (via Synergy). I started with Ubuntu 8.04 then found out about Mythbuntu. Luckily it was easy enough to get that installed on a regular Ubuntu and to remove the GNOME desktop afterwards. That leaves me with an Ubuntu-based system that’s a little more tuned to my purpose. I spent quite a while tweaking the TV output so that MythTV can fill my TV screen. Mythbuntu lets you setup a VNC server which was handy because it meant I didn’t have to strain to see small text or stuff the overscan obliterated.
The remote was almost a pain until I found this page. Right at the end of the comments someone notes that the format of hardware.conf has changed. With that taken care of the remote works fine.
I’m using SVideo output for now. I’m reading about how the 6200 can do composite output but I’m not sure how to get this to my TV. I’ve got a VGA to Composite converter (that relies on the video card doing the work) which might work but I haven’t tried it yet. I haven’t plugged the S/PDIF into the AMP yet either but I do have stereo output working.
Now for the tricky part… the tuners.
I have 3 tuners that are all the same. See here for the details. I realised that I haven’t actually had MythTV running live TV since that post. I certainly never got more than 1 card going at once. This time it was supposed to be good but it wasn’t. It seems these cards have a reputation for being badly shielded so the fact that I’ve got all 3 in adjacent PCI slots is definitely not a good thing. There was also the issue of aerial splitting but I’ve now got a powered splitter so that shouldn’t be a problem. When I got MythTV to scan for channels it only found SBS and Nine. Of those, I could only watch SBS (it wouldn’t signal lock to Nine). So I have watched live TV on this box but it’s a little underwhelming at the moment.
I’m stuck till next weekend (Bree likes to watch TV in the evenings) but I’ve got some ideas to try. I’ll test a single card in the machine. I’ll also test that the signal path isn’t being screwed up along the way. If I can get one card to work fine then I’ll try the tuner cards in every other PCI slot. If it’s a shielding issue I guess I’ll put some aluminium foil around them (or perhaps I’ll try putting some other PCI cards in the slots between them first).
MythTV box is now awesome August 24, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentI got two more tuner cards from a guy that didn’t have enough signal to use them. They’re the same as the one I already had so I’ve now got 3 tuner cards in my box.
I also have a video solution. It’s an NVidia Riva 128 (8 MB VRAM) with both TV in/out and MPEG 2 decoding. I was playing around with other options including using Bree’s old iBook as a front end (since it can output to the TV) and using a VGA to composite adapter (which finally arrived but I haven’t tested it yet).
The video card came with a computer I bought. A workmate is going overseas and they’ve got a collection of computer junk bigger than I could have amassed (if Bree hadn’t made me throw stuff out). I got a complete system mostly for the video card but the RAM and HD are useful too. I also got a 17 inch monitor to replace the broken 19 inch beast I use as a backup screen for the non-laptop machines.
256MB RAM with my existing 2 sticks gives 640MB. Should be enough for watching TV ;)
The hard drive is interesting… It’s a Seagate and it got me experimenting. You see I’ve now got 6 IDE drives ranging from 13 to 40GB but PCs only take 4 drives at once after installing (one needs to be unplugged so I can install from CD). So far I’ve had the biggest disks in the machine but I took the time to listen to each of the disks in isolation and found that the 3 Seagate disks I’ve got are an order of magnitude quieter than any of the other disks. I’ve got 2 IBM disks (one noisier than the other, both noisier than the Seagate disks) and a Quantum disk that’s really noisy. So I’m now going to use the 3 Seagate disks and possibly the quiet IBM disk but perhaps not because it’s still significantly louder than the Seagate disks. It all depends on what happens with the CPU.
The machine I got had an Athlon chip in it running at 1200Mhz on a 133Mhz bus. It seems that I can’t change the multiplier unless I do a hack to the chip but I can change the bus. Dropping it down to 100Mhz gives me a 900Mhz Athlon that runs cooler. The heatsink has 2 fans on it. One changes speed while the other runs full. As an experiment I disabled both of them and the system booted to the BIOS just fine (whoa! stable at about 35 degrees too). I set the system to halt at 60 degrees and tried a normal boot but it got too hot. I’m currently using the variable speed fan only since it sounds “nicer” than the other fan but it’s still loud. Running without fans was perfect but well… it overheated. If I could change the multiplier I could clock the chip down even more (I’m not supposed to need much CPU to run my rig). I can run at 900Mhz with the VCORE all the down at 1.5V (the minimum) but without some sort of fan I’m never going to get very far. The machine did come with a case fan that piggybacks off a molex connector. It’s a large fan that spins more slowly but it does move air. If I could get it mounted so that it blew air over the big heatsink it might be enough…
The alternative is to use the other board which appears to be very similar. I’m not sure how a 1.3Ghz Celeron is supposed to compare to a 1200Mhz Athlon. I don’t think it’s particular quiet either but then I didn’t try underclocking it before (the frontside bus can be pushed all the way down to 66Mhz). I might try this angle first because it doesn’t require mounting a fan in the middle of nowhere.
So yeah… if I can get one of these CPUs running as quietly as the PSU does then I’ll probably drop the 13GB IBM disk but if I have to have a loud CPU fan then the extra volume from the IBM disk won’t make a difference.
Update 25 August 2007
The Celeron wins by 10 degrees and 0.3V. With the FSB clocked down to 66Mhz the huge 13x multiplier gives 866Mhz. I booted the Ubuntu CD without a fan but then I figured I should do the install with the machine running at full speed and a fan (since installing should require more grunt than normal operation).
Update 25 August 2007
So it seems the ambient temperature is quite a bit lower in the middle of the night. During the day the Celeron was hotter… I’m not sure I’m going to be able to run it fanless and with it’s fan on it’s not really any quieter than the Athlon running with one fan. If anything the Athlon fan sounds better because it doesn’t have a whine, the noise sounds like air moving through tight places (something even the big, slow case fan causes when held up against the side of the case).
So now I’ve got the Athlon in there again. I got as far as installing Ubuntu onto an LVM partition last night but the instructions I used must have missed a step because I couldn’t actually boot afterwards (oops).
I’m not sure what temperatures are considered safe for the two CPUs. I know my MacBook Pro can get up to 80 degrees when it’s maxed out. I heard that the large-multiplier Celerons have a lower tolerance (because the P3 design was pushed so hard to get the clock speed up) and given the larger heat sink on the Athlon, it might actually have the edge when it comes to quiet operation (though clearly I’ll need to do something about that fan…).
Oh yeah… and I found a 512MB stick of RAM in my old (dead) Mac so I’ve not got 1GB RAM in my box. I’m not sure how useful lots of RAM is in a box like this. Strangely the Celeron motherboard only lets 2 sticks work at once (it’s not even consistent which of the 3 slots are visible) so I’m limited to 768MB if I use that (another point for the Athlon?).
MythTV finaly works April 25, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentHooray! I finally got it to work.
It all started a short while ago. Although I was trying to get the most recent version of KnoppMyth going, the GPL bit me and despite much struggling, I was unable to get TV-out working. So I followed the instructions here. Note that the akamai link is dead. I used Google to find the install note that lives next to the rpm, modified the URL and manually and downloaded it that way (it was also an akamai link, just a bit different). Unfortunately, AMD/ATI no longer hosts that particular file so if you’ve got an older ATI card, it’s going to get hard to get the right driver.
While I’m here, I’ll take a moment to whinge about the comments on that page. It says that releases after 8.20.8 contain a crippling bug in the TV-out support (which was fixed after 8.28.8, the last release to support the 8500) but it doesn’t describe the bug at all. Short of downloading a newer release and attempting to install it, I can’t see how I’m supposed to find out what this “bug” is.
So the other missing component arrived yesterday. It’s a VisionPlus VisionDTV Ter PCI card, apparently a rebadged Twinham part. The first thing I noticed (to my dismay) was the lack of an aerial output. Splitting an aerial cable 4 ways won’t do nice things to the signal quality. Pass-through may lose some quality but at least it remains useful (I should know, I’ve got one aerial cable going through 4 devices before it hits the TV, which can still receive analogue reception fine (or as fine as you can these days). I’ll have a look around, I think I saw a signal booster device once with multiple outputs on it.
Strangely enough, tuner cards come with entirely separate USB remote dongles. I suppose you’re going to want one if you have the other but they’re not tied together at all. I found a configuration file for the dongle that came with my card. It seems to work but there’s no MythTV presets for it so I’m going to have to map the buttons to MythTV functions. Worse, MythTV doesn’t seem to understand modality so it might be hard to make all the buttons act in a useful way. Since I’m planning on getting more tuner cards, I’ll end up with more remotes so a different one may prove to be better.
I assembled all the components and booted up the system. I used the instructions here to get MythTV up and fix up the guide data. I can now watch live tv via MythTV.
There’s some problems yet though:
1) TV-out isn’t running at “native” resolution (which I’d prefer) and isn’t overscanning (which is annoying).
2) TV-out doesn’t include the “widescreen” marker so while I can get X to scale the content properly, my TV thinks the signal is 4:3 and scales it again (stretching some bits to make it fill the screen without looking overly distorted). I can force the use of native widescreen but that will ruin the display of the other input sources.
3) 80% CPU overhead during playback. This is what I’d expect from the open source driver (which has no MPEG2 acceleration). The binary driver is supposed to accelerate MPEG2 but then I’ve read that Xv (the way it accelerates MPEG2) isn’t usually supported on the TV-out port. Dumb. Perhaps a better option would be to create a VGA to component/S-Video/composite cable and just use the VGA output.
Here’s some more thoughts on video cards:
1) I have a Matrox G400 which can use a binary driver to accelerate MPEG2 playback. No TV-out but a VGA to component/S-Video/composite cable can be used.
2) A cheap NVidia card (GeForce FX 5200) will work with the latest software and has working MPEG2 playback.
As to KnoppMyth… I can see myself building a distro from scratch or at least starting from something else. Unless I upgrade to more modern hardware I’m going to need lots of tweaks to ensure my system doesn’t slow down, especially if I can’t get the MPEG2 acceleration going.
When the GPL bites April 21, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentBugger. The lack of API/binary compatibility combined with a lack of support for old hardware in ATI’s proprietary driver means that I’m stuck. I have 2 options.
1) I can go back to an older version of KnoppMyth that the ATI drivers will actually install on and then avoid upgrading the kernel (which will break the binary driver). It might be a worthwhile solution right now but I just know that sooner or later I’m going to be required to update the kernel and at that point I’ll be screwed.
2) Apply a patch to the xorg radeon driver to support TV output.
Of course, number 2 seems like a better long term solution but then it’s also the reason I’m writing this post. You see, the TV output support comes from the GATOS project, which released it’s code under the GPL. As a result, the code cannot be distributed with xorg. This also means that when the xorg folks update their driver the code gets harder and harder to patch in. Sure, it’ll never _quite_ be as bad as the situation with the proprietary driver but it’s a major hassle.
Update 22 April 2007
I tried #2 first. I’ve banged my head against the wall time and time again. The best picture I can get is whatever KnoppMyth sets up but it’s out of sync so while I can see that there’s something there, I can’t tell what it is.
I’m all set now to try #1 but it’s late.
Actually… there is another possibility and that’s going from the VGA port to the component input on my TV but I’d have to pay for a cable to get that going (and if I was going for that solution I’ve got 2 other video cards that would be possibilities too). My boss reckons that there should be no less than 10 cheap NVidia cards (fx5200 spec) between the guys at work and that someone is bound to give one to me. If I don’t get this damn video card going tomorrow, that’s what I’ll be aiming for.
MythTV progress April 19, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentI’m currently sitting on my couch using my Myth box. It’s hooked up to the TV and thanks to a USB extension cable I had lying around, they keyboard reaches over here.
I’m not typing this on the Myth box though. It’s not quite ready for that.
Because the mirror I downloaded KnoppMyth from was waaay out of date, I installed an ancient version. I’m downloading the current version now and hopefully it’ll work a bit better than the last one did.
In the mean time I’ve installed the ATI drivers for Windows (I took a _virgin_ 98 box online!) and I’ve got it running relatively nicely through the TV.
Counting the days until my MythTV box is done April 18, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentIt’s official. I’m building a MythTV box. I snapped up a bargain price on a TV capture card (on eBay) so I now have (or will, once the card arrives) all the parts I need.
I doubt it’ll be hard to convince Bree that we should just spend the $500 it’ll take to turn it into a replacement for all our current TV stuff once I get it up and running.
Update 18 April 2007
Ugh.
I’ve been trying to put together the box. It had everything in it except for the Radeon (which needs to be reflashed anyway). I removed some useless PCI cards to make way for the tuners. Booted it and it was all good.
So then I realised that to flash my Radeon I’d need a PCI video card. Who has one of those anymore! Luckily, I had a Matrox Millenium card that I bought years ago to run an old SyncOnGreen monitor, originally used by seven before I made it work headless. I got it for almost nothing at a clearance auction and it was actually quite impressive compared to what I had available at the time. It was a 21″ tube that could handle 1280×1024. It’s biggest downfall? SyncOnGreen. Seven was designed to drive that particular monitor so it could handle it without a problem but PC video cards aren’t designed to run SyncOnGreen monitors. However, the Matrox Millenium was capable of driving a SyncOnGreen monitor. The driver didn’t expose this but there was a buffer overflow you could exploit somewhere to cause the support to get turned on. Rather convoluted and totally useless when not running Windows but it let me use a big monitor with good resolution.
So one of the things that the Matrox Millenium could do is dual card stuff. However, it was doing this back before PCs were designed to handle more than one video card at a time so you had to disable the VGA part of the second card with a dip switch. I _finally_ remembered that after spending ages trying to get the damn machine to boot with the Millenium as the primary card!
Update 19 April 2007
Well… that was quick. And uneventful. I went to copy files to the floppy disk that had been sitting in the machine only to realise that it was the same floppy disk I’d used when I first flashed the card! I booted from it, flashed the PAL 250/250 bios and it was all over in a matter of seconds. Time to get KnoppMyth going I think…
Update 19 April 2007
While I was burning the KnoppMyth CD I booted the Linux that happened to be on my machine. It was CenOS 4. It identified my video card as a Radeon 8500 LE (it’s an OEM one but that’s the same as the LE) and got X running without any hassles. Nice!
I’m currently installing KnoppMyth over the CentOS partition (there’s a Windows 98 partition too but it’s got some old games I still want to play, not to mention that it’s the only system that can update my PVR). The boot messages indicate that the on-board audio works (I was using a PCI card before but I need the slots). The boot messages also indicated that the card was detected (again, as a Radeon 8500 LE). I’ve got a cable to connect it to the TV (single cable, 5 pins). Before too long I really will be hanging out for the tuner card to make the box do useful things. I put the DVD RAM drive from the Mac into the Myth box, replacing the old CD drive it had (that can’t even read CD-RW). At some point I’ll probably want to put a DVD burner in there for sending recorded shows to other people. Transfer to tape will still be possible but it’s tedious. Of course, the only DVD burner I have right now is the one in my MacBook Pro.
VMWare Boot Camp April 17, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : computers, eve, mythtv , add a commentI finally bit the bullet, ignored the unsettling warning dialog and booted my Boot Camp partition on VMWare today. So far, all seems well. I did notice that VMWare is emulating the RTC in “local time” which of course breaks the time sync feature (since Windows is expecting it to be in UTC). Sigh. At least I can get the NTP client I setup to connect over VMWare’s NAT without any hassles.
So what (I hear you ask) prompted me to finally do this? I’m preparing to build a MythTV box. I was chatting to someone who’s got one and it turns out that I already have most of the hardware I’ll need. In some cases, older hardware works better (eg. more PCI slots on older motherboards). So I’m going to use Asteria as the base with the Radeon 8500 card that’s currently in Luksusdyret. Of course, I didn’t bother to save the original 8500 BIOS before I flashed the Mac one on there (I never thought I’d need that card in a PC again) so I’ve been scouring the web to find a suitable 8500 BIOS. It turns out that nobody wants to intentionally flash a 250/250 (slow) BIOS to their cards :) Luckily I found what appears to be a good BIOS and an BIOS editor that let me set it to PAL 250/250. So with Boot Camp running in a window, I can get files between Windows and Mac really easily and prepare stuff for the flash. All I need to do now is grab Asteria, put in a PCI card (I think I’ve still got one of those) and flash away.
Of course that doesn’t quite get me a working system. That gets me a TV capable output card and a box to hold everything but I’m going to need some TV capture cards and a big hard disk. It looks like TV capture cards can be found for under $100 while a 320GB disk is about $100. Best of all, this is Linux so it won’t matter that such a huge disk is being used in such an old machine. I should have enough disk space for a test build and I’ve just downloaded KnoppMyth so the only thing I need to do now is get the hardware sorted out and get a capture card. That’s less than $100 for a system that should be pretty comparable to my current PVR for basic operation (whoa!). I’m guessing another $400 will get me a system with 320GB storage and 4 tuners. When I go for that I’ll probably also spend a bit more on case/fan/psu so that the box is quiet (how much depends on just how loud it is and how much of a problem proves to be).