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
The 60GB root partition of my MythTV server has been gradually filling
up and finally reached capacity over the weekend. The culprit turned
out to be the MySQL binary logs which have never been purged since I
set server up in early 2007. Weighing in at 26GB it was time for them
to go.
All that was needed is a flush and reset to purge the logs.
mysql> flush logs;
mysql> reset master;
posted by James Gemmell on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 at 21:33
| permalink
| tags: mysql, mythtv
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
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