[mythtv-users] Adventures in upgrading my MythTV hardware

Will Dormann wdormann at gmail.com
Thu Oct 11 22:14:06 UTC 2018


I usually try to stick to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra.
But recently my combined BE/FE MythTV box (A330 ION) crossed over into
the "broken enough" zone.   The thing that put me over the edge was
glitchy recordings from my HDHR.   Based on my prior testing, I
determined that the forcedeth driver wasn't that great (at least on
Ubuntu 14.04).   The HDHR uses UDP, so any bad packets result in a
glitch in the video and/or audio of a recording (as opposed to
re-sending the bad packet).   Up until recently, running at 100Mbit/sec
seemed to help the problem.

Anyway, I'm sharing this information in case anybody else is planning on
upgrading hardware, and hoping that the switch will be as simple as
swapping a hard drive (HA!).  My goal was an inexpensive system that
would be faster, have an Intel NIC (or a slot for one), and be cheap.

Motherboard: GIGABYTE B360M D3H
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813145065 $76
CPU:  Intel Celeron G4920  (Coffee Lake, 3.2 Ghz, Dual core, $50)
RAM: 8 GB
Case: Apevia X-Master-AL https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B005UFLP4U/
(Note: This is a horrible case!  I didn't have much luck for a micro ATX
case that wasn't taller than 6", and I settled on this one.)
Video: GeForce GT 730 https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NN97MMY


To get things working, the hurdles I ran into (many of which were
related to running Ubuntu 14.04, which is pretty old by this point).
Upgrading both hardware and the OS seems like a recipe for disaster, so
one thing at a time:

 - Enable Legacy boot.  I forget which 3-letter option it took in the
BIOS to do this, but without this change I couldn't boot from my hard
drive.  Only the DVD-R.

- USB - enable XHCI handoff.  Without this, I couldn't see my USB devices.

- Add "pci=noaer" to my grub configuration and run update-grub.
Otherwise I'd get "PCIe Bus error severity=Corrected" pretty consistently.

- Download, compile, and install Intel e100e drivers:
https://downloadmirror.intel.com/15817/eng/e1000e-3.4.2.1.tar.gz
By default, Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't have drivers for the onboard Intel NIC.

- Install the nvidia-384 drivers.   My ION used nvidia-304 I believe,
and those drivers didn't appear to work right with mythfrontend.  I'd
get into X, but no frontend would ever appear.  Possibly OpenGL-related,
though I don't recall seeing any relevant errors in the log file.

- I had to delay mythfrontend when it starts.  I'd occasionally boot up
and I'd get a screen where I'd select my country/keyboard and select the
backend location, and from there it loaded up fine.  I figure that it's
some sort of race condition between the FE and BE, which I never saw
until switching to faster hardware.


Because my new motherboard doesn't have optical SPDIF output, I needed
to reconfigure mythfrontend to use audio over HDMI to my receiver.  This
was actually easier than I had planned, but I also needed to reconfigure
my Harmony remote to adjust to this change.   Unfortunately, when I
loaded the Harmony software, it pulled up some configuration from the
web that was probably 4 years old, and had no device that I had acquired
since then.   I removed the old devices that I don't own anymore, and my
activities needed to be reconfigured.  Including any custom buttons that
I had configured.   Sigh.   Murphy's Law was definitely at play with
this upgrade at every stage.     This event also made me ponder the
utility of this perfectly-fine remote control at the point when Logitech
decides to pull the plug on the old Harmony server.


Anyway, the new system is up and running fine now.   The ION has always
been just barely good enough for a combined FE/BE system, but now I'm
realizing what I'd been missing.    Commercial flagging and doing
queries with MythWeb definitely required a huge amount of patience with
the ION.   Not anymore!  I know that a Celeron is a low-end CPU, but I
can say that it's leaps and bounds better than the Atom in the ION
system.  Also being able to have the MythTV system connect at gigabit
network speeds sure is nice.


As for power usage, it's more than the ION system, but I think it's a
reasonable trade-off for a system that is so much more functional.
Plugged in, but powered off: 6W (Wait, what?)
Idle: 44W
Watching TV: 49-55W
Max CPU load: 59W

I don't have an apples-to-apples comparison (I currently have an SSD),
but when I tested my A330 ION with a 7200 RPM hard drive, I got:
35W - Idle
38W - 100% CPU for both cores
44W - 1080i HD playback

Those numbers could probably be even lower if I had a high-efficiency
PSU.  But wanting to save money, I went with whatever came with the
awful case that I bought.  The PSU fan is a bit loud, so I'm going to
try my luck with wiring a zener diode (or two) inline with the FAN power
lead to slow it down.   I see no reason that the fan needs to run at the
speed that it is when the system is relatively low powered.


That's about all.  If anybody else is planning on upgrading hardware,
keep in mind that new hardware and an old OS can sometimes not play
well.  I had originally planned on an AMD Ryzen 3 system, which would
have been much faster than the Celeron.  But I had also heard that the
Ryzen won't necessarily play well with Ubuntu 14.04 by default.   It's
possible to fix this by updating the Linux kernel
<https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-with-ubuntu-here-is-what-you-have-to-do-to-fix-constant-crashes/>,
but that was one too many variable for me for a "simple" upgrade.
Given the number of headaches I had with the route I took, I'm glad I
did the Celeron route.


-WD


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