[mythtv-users] Myth in 20 hours!

Jon Waite jon at jonwaite.com
Fri Jan 23 13:26:23 EST 2004


Hi all,

Just thought I'd drop a note in here to let you know my experience with
setting up MythTV for the first time.

At 12:00pm yesterday the last bit of hardware I'd been waiting for (a molex
to SATA HD power adapter of all things) arrived, so I began constructing my
MythTV backend box. I thought I'd start out with something that could be
expanded later if needed, or reused for other stuff if necessary so the
hardware was:

Lian-Li PC9320B desktop microATX case / 230W SFX PSU.
Asus P4P800-VM microATX motherboard
Pentium IV / 800MHz / HT / 2.8GHz
Dual 256Mb Samsung PC3200 (400MHz) DIMMs installed as Dual DDR
Seagate ST120.7 7200rpm / SATA / 8Mb cache HD
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 Capture Card
Sony DVD-ROM drive

For the software I'd already downloaded Fedora Core and aimed to use Jarod's
atrpms guide to get the thing up and working.

At around 4pm I finished getting the hardware put together, and run through
some basic diagnostics to check heat output, memory configuration / timings
etc. all looked OK.

By 7pm I'd installed Fedora Core 1, and started configuring the backend
services - mysql et al.

By Midnight I'd followed Jarod's guide through and finished the apt updates,
and grabbed the mythtv-suite package.

By 2am I was having fun with ivtv trying to work out how to capture and
check recordings, hit a bit of a deadend with xawtv until I read the stuff
saying why it wasn't going to work with the PVR-350, plodded on...

By 4am Video capture was working (from the composite input anyway, no luck
as yet with the tuner) and I started to try and figure out why I couldn't
get any sound captured from the PVR-350.

By 6am I'd got everything working! Sound was being recorded, the tuner now
worked (although not yet with MythTV), I could schedule recordings and play
them back, started to do some configuration of other MythTV modules. IR was
also now working from the Hauppauge remote.

By 7am I finally sorted out enough hacks to get the channel information into
the database (the mythfilldatabase --manual process seemed to keep barfing
asking for the channel details and I'm in New Zealand so that was the only
way to do it I think), and everything looked good.

So here I am at 7:20am, having spent the best part of 20 hours solid on this
thing and it rocks! Next bits to sort out will be the TV-out from the
PVR-350 (I'm saving that one for when I'm awake a bit more), possibly add in
another capture card I've got kicking around (WinTV 2000XP Deluxe) and to
build an IR sender or figure out the serial port to change channels on the
satellite box once I move it from my desk to the living room - WAF allowing.

So *many* thanks to Jarod for the hard work he's put into the install guide,
certainly paid off for me, although I did have fun trying to figure out the
differences for a PAL B/G tuner / installation and New Zealand TV channels,
but would have taken me MUCH longer without the guide.

Jon.







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