This proved to be a whole lot easier than I thought. It required
backing up the mythconverg MySQL database on the old system and
restoring it on the new one.
~ /usr/share/mythtv/mythconverg_backup.pl
~ /usr/share/mythtv/mythconverg_restore.pl --filename mythconverg-VERSION-TIMESTAMP.sql.gz
A further step was needed to update the hostname of existing
recordings to the new host.
mysql> update 'recorded' set hostname='peeves' where hostname<>'peeves'
This machine became the frontend at the same time. The i3 GPU support
was included in the xf86-video-intel driver from version 2.10. I ended
up using 2.11 which had just become available and added the following
entry to /etc/portage/package.keywords.
=x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.11.0 ~x86
posted by James Gemmell on Sun, 29 Aug 2010 at 12:13
| permalink
| tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv
After a few of years of fairly intensive use I am migrating a MythTV
backend from a rather creaky and increasingly unstable Pentium 4 to a
shiny new Core i3 530 based box. I was quite impressed with
Phoronix's Linux benchmarks of the CPU. The performance of the integrated GPU
will help too since this box is destined to run an HD frontend at some
point.
It's been a while since I last set up a Gentoo box from scratch and
thought I'd give the Gentoo Quick Install a go rather than the
LiveCD. The i3's Hyper-Threading support meant that the boot was
graced with a 4 penguin salute and I was pleasantly surprised by the
performance.
When partitioning the 1TB drive I settled on the following layout,
setting aside /dev/sda5 as a future amd64 root partition.
/dev/sda1 /boot 256MB ext2
/dev/sda2 swap 2GB swap
/dev/sda3 / 100GB ext3
/dev/sda5 [amd64] 100GB ext3
/dev/sda6 /mnt/mythtv 729GB xfs
I diverged from the install guide in a few places. When the
gentoo-sources kernel download threatened to take more than a couple
of hours I performed the mirror-select step early and portage pulled
it from a local mirror. I prefer using genkernel and, setting
MAKEOPTS="-j5", this and the emerge world steps took next
to no time.
The backend is now up and recording and the next step is to
promote it to master backend status and get the frontend working.
posted by James Gemmell on Tue, 20 Apr 2010 at 09:17
| permalink
| tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv
Following an upgrade to Mythbuntu 9.10, one of my MythTV frontends
failed play back video smoothly and without stuttering. The frontend
is a rather old Pentium IIIM/i830M based Asus laptop but it played SD
resolution video quite acceptably before the upgrade.
The mythfrontend.log revealed that the problem was that the driver no
longer possessed the XVideo extension capability.
VideoOutputXv Error: Could not find suitable XVideo surface.
VideoOutputXv: Falling back to X11 video output over a network socket.
*** May be very slow ***
No kidding. After much Googling of the Ubuntu forums I found a link to
the solution in the Ubuntu 9.10 release notes. The trick is to disable
kernel-mode-setting (KMS) using the nomodeset kernel boot option.
posted by James Gemmell on Sat, 02 Jan 2010 at 13:54
| permalink
| tags: linux, mythbuntu, mythtv
I recently upgraded a frontend to Mythbuntu 9.10 and got MythTV 0.22
as part of the deal. Rather than leap through the fiery hoops
required to revert it back to 0.21 I decided to take the plunge and
upgrade my other Gentoo-based MythTV backend and frontends to 0.22.
This was trouble free as upgrades go but I did encounter the
UTF8/latin1 database encoding problem which requires a backup and
restore of the MythTV database after changing the default encoding to
latin1. Changing the MySQL server configuration is easy to do on
Gentoo as all that is required is to rebuild MySQL with the latin1 USE
flag.
My package.keywords now looks as follows;
>=media-tv/mythtv-0.22 ~x86
>=media-plugins/mythcontrols-0.22 ~x86
>=media-plugins/mythgallery-0.22 ~x86
>=media-plugins/mythmusic-0.22 ~x86
>=media-plugins/mythvideo-0.22 ~x86
>=www-apps/mythweb-0.22 ~x86
>=dev-python/imdbpy-3.8 ~x86
>=x11-themes/mythtv-themes-0.22 ~x86
>=x11-themes/mythtv-themes-extra-0.22 ~x86
and my package.use has;
dev-db/mysql latin1
posted by James Gemmell on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 at 10:36
| permalink
| tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv
Top of my todo list for some time now has been to get my
Leadtek WinFast DTV1000S
DVB-T capture card to pay its way on a Gentoo MythTV backend instead
of gathering dust on the shelf.
Video4Linux (V4L) drivers exist for the individual DTV1000S components
listed below as they have also been used in other DVB cards.
- TDA18271 - terrestrial / cable silicon tuner
- TDA10048 - channel decoder/demodulator
- SAA7130 - PCI video broadcast decoder
What was lacking was the support for the card. I made an unsuccessful
attempt at putting it together at the beginning of the year. Now
Michael Krufky has done all the heavy lifting and
committed his changes.
The easiest way to incorporate these into the 2.6.30-r8 kernel was to
follow the V4L build instructions. Revision 13263 has all the
necessary changes.
hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb
cd v4l-dvb
make
sudo make install
I've not tested the IR capabilities of the DTV1000S as I'm using an
AverTV DVB-T 777 for that purpose.
I used Steven Toth's instructions to get the TDA10048 firmware drivers
from http://steventoth.net/linux/hvr1700/ and followed the
readme.txt. Hat tip to Terry for his Leadtek product page.
posted by James Gemmell on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 at 10:17
| permalink
| tags: gentoo, linux, mythtv
This guide started off some time after I upgraded the 10Gb drive on
the C400 to an 80Gb Hitachi and replaced the Debian installation.
Gentoo has a wealth of documentation so this is intended as an
installation specific supplement.
Disclaimer: This document comes with no guarantees. The steps I
followed worked for me but may not necessarily work for you or your
hardware.
Configuration
- Gentoo
-
linux-2.6.18-suspend2-r1 kernel
no Windows installation
- PIII-M 866MHz CPU
-
768 Mb RAM (256Mb + 512Mb)
A12 BIOS
Crystal 4205 audio
3c905C-TX FastEthernet adapter (built-in)
- 80Gb 5400rpm Hitachi 5K80
- TrueMobile 1150 wireless (disabled)
-
Netgear MA401 PCMCIA adapter
Netgear WAG511 PCMCIA adapter
Post-install
genkernel
Thinking the genkernel built kernels to be a little bloated I resorted
to using the more traditional make menuconfig and make bzlilo. After
much fiddling, recompiling & rebooting every time I needed another
driver it was time to give genkernel another shot. I was pleasantly
surprised - it actually built most of what I needed! I'm now a
genkernel convert.
Read more...
posted by James Gemmell on Wed, 24 May 2006 at 17:09
| permalink
| tags: gentoo, laptop, linux
This is a list of sites I found useful while setting up a Debian Linux
system for use as a Video Disk Recorder and router for satellite
broadband.
- The Satellite HOWTO is a little dated but a good starting point.
- The linux-dvb mailing list is both for developers and users alike
so can be a bit technical. Be sure to search the archive before
diving in here as your question may have already been answered.
- The latest drivers can be obtained via CVS but are also available
as daily tar bundles from www.linuxdvb.tv
- For IP over DVB I had the greatest success with the older driver
refererred to in these instructions. The DVB data firmware update
from Hauppauge should be used to replace the
driver/Dpram and
driver/Root files in the distribution.
- dvbtune is used to tune the DVB card to the desired frequency and
bring up the network interface at the same time.
- The pptp client is usually required to connect to the satellite
ISP. This allows the routing of outbound traffic to the net via a
VPN tunnel to the satellite ISP.
posted by James Gemmell on Fri, 02 May 2003 at 17:29
| permalink
| tags: linux, mythtv
This document started off early in 2002 when I installed Redhat 7.2 on
the C400. I've been through several Redhat versions since 3.0.3 but,
after enduring a hard disk crash, I decided for a number of reasons
that Debian was the way to go.
Disclaimer: This document comes with no guarantees. The steps I
followed worked for me but may not necessarily work for you or your
hardware.
Configuration
- Debian 3.0r1 Woody
-
recompiled 2.4.18 kernel
no Windows installation (see later)
- PIII-M 866MHz CPU
-
1x 256Mb RAM
A09 BIOS
Crystal 4205 audio
3c905C-TX FastEthernet adapter (built-in)
- 10Gb Toshiba MK1517GAP
-
TrueMobile 1150 wireless (optional)
Installation
Partitioning the disk
The replacement drive was empty. The first step was to create a 768Mb
save-to-disk (s2d) partition using mks2d.exe on the disk from
Dell. The reason for choosing this size is that I intend adding
another 512Mb RAM at some point in the future. Dell recommends that
you set it up as 768Mb * 1.01 + 4Mb on the first partition so it's at
a little over 800Mb now.
/dev/hda2 is set up as 50Mb boot partition (probably overkill here)
and the remainder the root partition. No swap partition required at
this stage as I've found swapfiles to be quite adequate in the past.
Read more...
posted by James Gemmell on Wed, 30 Apr 2003 at 17:26
| permalink
| tags: laptop, linux
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