[mythtv-users] Anyone using arm with mythbackend?

[Quinten Steenhuis]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 4:14 PM, Tyler T <tylernt at gmail.com> wrote:

> I see the anti-ARM crowd has already jumped in. Here's the reality: I use
> a SheevaPlug (same ARM CPU as the Seagate mentioned earlier) for my Myth BE
> and it works just fine. Reschedules take a little while, so if you schedule
> a new show it doesn't show up in the Upcoming Recordings right away.
> Otherwise, I'm very happy with it. I do not commflag or transcode however.
>
> Performance is not an issue. The thing is shoveling bits from HDHR to a
> hard drive and from the hard drive to a FE out on the network. If some
> people get a kick out of using quad-core 3GHz CPUs to do 400MHz of work,
> well, it's a free country. But don't tell me ARM is a downgrade because I
> consider a big, noisy, hot, inefficient x86 box to be a downgrade in every
> important way from my tiny, silent, cool, efficient ARM.
>

I hope I didn't come across as anti-ARM. I really wanted to jump into a
fanless FE/BE combo, but the Seagate has been enough of a pain to hack that
I put it aside and went back to my noisy Windows 7 MCE for recording TV.

Here's what I ran into: some issues were OS related, some were that it was
a headless system, some were MythTV issues, and some were limits of the
hardware. For me, they added up to enough to stop me from what I had
intended to be a fun project.

Maybe you have some tips that could make it something I pick up again.

* ArchLinux/ARM is the recommended distro for this device and only OS I
could find install instructions for, so I went with that, despite my past
experience being mostly in Debian and Red Hat/Centos. I had to learn
configuring it from scratch, as I've never used Arch before. Everything was
more annoying and took much longer when I had to relearn how to install
packages, where basic config files were stored, how to start and enable
daemons, etc. I also am new to uboot so that was a bit intimidating. Also:
Arch defaults generally don't work, so /everything/ had to be configured.
I'm used to Debian's sane defaults.
* MythBackend requires X (as far as I can tell any way--correct me if I'm
wrong, but that's all I could find out) and I no longer have a Linux
desktop. So I had to learn how to run an X server on Windows just to test
basic channel setup, etc. I'd done this 10 years ago, but memory's rusty
and the software available now is different. So it took some learning again
and quite a lot of time.
* MythBackend over X on a Windows X server was super slow. I had to
configure some extra swap to get anything to run and even then it took a
lot of patience to configure anything, accidentally clicking too quickly
meaning having to start over with an agonizing screen render.
* After installing/configuring MythTV, mythweb wouldn't work. I tried lots
of things to get it going. Without a way to configure recordings without an
X server, it was never going to work for me, but nobody could offer advice
on this uncommon configuration.
* I tried switching to TvHeadend (don't bite). At the time it didn't
support the HDHomerun Prime's third tuner. However when I realized this I
had already spent time configuring it, learning how to add a DVB module and
how that whole system differs from ATSC/QAM, compiling the right drivers,
etc. I think this tuner limit is gone now so might be the approach I take
again if I pick this project back up.
* I started to upgrade to Debian, which I know and love much better.
* The netconsole wouldn't work.
* I have limited soldering skills, but if I want console on this, I will
need to solder on a serial cable. I don't really want to risk messing with
the kernel or firmware without some kind of console.

So I stopped.

In the end I invested 10s of hours learning skills I will never apply to
another project and ended up with a Seagate device that I don't even use
for storing data on, halfway through the Debian bootstrap install until I
buy a serial cable online and can solder it on to get console and start all
of the above all over again. For me there were just too many things to
learn and it was draining, un-fun experience to try to get everything
working, not at all like my experience setting up MythTV on standard Intel
hardware.

It took me 20 minutes to set up Windows MCE with all of my channels and
recording rules. I've done MythTV for years on Intel, although I don't have
a current Myth box (this one unfortunately has some driver issues that
prevent me running Linux on it). That was a few hours, but still so much
less effort than trying to do it on the ARM device I chose.

I do think that ARM + HDHomerun should be a perfect setup for a DVR. It
would be amazing if someone could build and document a simple reference
system out of a widely-available piece of hardware like the Pi. As it is I
think trying to learn so many new systems at once is a daunting project.
It's not just the limits of the hardware (mostly that just makes every
configuration step take more time, doesn't limit what it can do), but how
complex it is to run Mythbackend on a headless system contributes to
issues, and then the limited OS options on less common hardware and lack of
documentation when you run into a stumbling block of some kind.


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