So last weekend I migrated Lou’s files to her “new” machine (a pants-wettingly fast PIII 1GHz) and repurposed the old machine (a Dell PIII-500 upgraded to a Celeron 1200) as a temporary Mythbox for testing the new hardware.
Initially all went well. The ubuntu install did take ages…but that’s probably because I stupidly left the CD in the drive after the first reboot and I think it installed the packages from the CD rather than the cached HD versions – doh! Following Martin Smith’s MythTV DVB guide and pinching the aerial/booster combo from the bedroom telly meant I was able to view some random footage of the Commonwealth Games remarkably quickly.
At this point I installed MythTV via apt from the TheHunter.ws repository (v0.19-3) and referred to Garry Parker’s guide to setting up Myth with Ubuntu…and bluffed a bit too. I was able to watch and record live TV from all the channels MythTV had found when I’d scanned the frequencies using one card. The other appeared to be working, but as I didn’t have a cable to hand to daisychain the aerials, it had no signal and complained appropriately.
Incidentally, why does TheHunter.ws’s deb versions of Myth default to the GANT theme? I just don’t like it! A quick install of the Retro theme and things were looking much more appealing.
I then tried the Hauppauge remote control, and that’s when I hit my first snag. The new breed of remote control isn’t fully supported by the kernel yet, so not all of the buttons generate events which lirc can catch. Also, the debs from theHunter.ws are compiled without XvMC support, so the Nvidia card I’d bought especially was a bit wasted. I decided to recompile the kernel, and MythTV.
To cut a long story short, this didn’t exactly work. I briefly had a working system with the remote more-or-less fully functional, but minus the XvMC support. Then I fiddled some more and before I even got to recompiling Myth, it all went wrong. The nVidia drivers stopped working and I had to switch back to the nv drivers in xorg.conf. Then Myth failed, segfaulting mythfrontend, mythbackend and mythtv-setup. Great, says I. So I tried compiling Myth, but still got the segfault problem. I then tried a complete Ubuntu reinstall, compiled a kernel, updated the system, and installed Myth only to *still* have it segfault!
I think the problem the second time was that I forgot to add TheHunter.ws to my sources.list, and so firstly installed v0.18 from the Ubuntu default sources before realising what was going on.
Still. I know it pretty much works. When I next have some time (probably in about 5 or 6 weeks) I’ll devote a full weekend to getting it working, complete with TV out. That’ll do for a start.
The eventual plan will be to switch to VGA output once I get a new TV. That won’t happen until I move house though, in about 8 weeks. Then, once all is rosy and I’ve recovered from spending the best part of a thousand quid on a TV, I’ll *finally* do my long-awaited PC rebuild, and the old machine will become the new mythbox.