The Inner Circle

Well it’s been a weekend of discovery. Last week I decided that it was time I built a PC to drive our 40″ HDTV, so far I’ve just been running it from my desktop and the Xbox 360. I dislike using my PC for watching DVD’s, I like to reboot often and play with sound, etc. Even those the Xbox360 makes an excellent games console (IMO), it’s DVD play back features are crap. It doesn’t support up scaling from 480i to 720p. So it leaves it to the HDTV to up scale (which it isn’t very good at, read: you’ll see MPEG blocks).

So the solution was to build a media centre, I had three real options, Windows Media Centre (a lot of coworkers use it), MediaPortal (a long time friend of mine has used this with success) and of course MythTV. I had decided a while back to reduce the numbers of Windows machines in the house, there’s now only one and that’s part time, my desktop. So to MythTV it was, sadly there is no real support for MythTV on FreeBSD, so I was forced to use Linux (those who read know I’m a BSDite at heart).

First was to buy a new PC to do MythTV, I decided to get an Intel machine, so I’ve ended up with a Pentium D 2.8Ghz machine with 1Gb of RAM. I pulled out my old Nebula Electronics DigitTV card that I got for a birthday a long time ago.

Debian Etch installed with it’s usual speed and grace, I used a base system install so I could add everything as I needed it. I had issues getting the nVidia driver working the “Debian Way”, so was forced to install it using the driver installer. Debian detected everything on boot, which was a pleasant surprise.

However, I had an issue, the DigiTV card wasn’t recognised as a DVB device. It turns out that when I tried to load dvb-bt8xx it would complain:

dvb_bt8xx: unable to determine DMA core of card 0,
dvb_bt8xx: if you have the ALSA bt87x audio driver installed, try removing it.
dvb-bt8xx: probe of dvb0 failed with error -14

Everything I read suggested that snd_bt87x was the cause of the problem, but it wasn’t loaded. I scratched my head for many hours. Until I found the foot note on a German message board, it suggested (through a badly translated version) that btaudio.ko was responsible.

Sure enough, as soon as I unloaded btaudio.ko and reloaded all the bttv stuff, it worked and /dev/dvb/ appeared. In order to stop it loading, I could either delete it, or create a file in /etc/modutils/ called nobtaudio and put the following line in it.

options btaudio enable=0

On Debian you then need to run “update-modules”, reboot to be sure. I’m sure the same can be put in any modprobe.conf type system. Then in order to force the load of the dvb drivers in /etc/modules:

nxt6000
bt878
dvb-bt8xx
This brought a machine up that had a working DVB card. Installing MythTV was far to easy ;). Following the following guides:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_MythTV_on_Debian_Etch
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_Mythtv

The HOWTO doesn’t mention but you need xmltv-utils for the EPG side of things. Also doing apt-cache search mythtv shows a lot of extra packages you might want, like mythdvd, mythtv-themes, mythnews, mythweather, etc.

The EPG is a bit of a hastle to get to work, there is a guide that helps, it’s important to read it, especially that you have to match things up in the database.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Uk_xmltv

There are a few issues still to sort out, I have odd lipsync issues on BBC channels, and occasional stutters, it just needs playing with reallly. I’m sure there’s a voyage of descovery to go. I’ll post more as I figure stuff out that’s worth knowing.

D.