TechTalk

Wow, what a weekend, I went to watch The Dark Knight on iMax and it was great, watch the rugby had a few drinks, and continued with my HTPC build. Headaches galore from hangovers and head-bashing caused by struggling into the wee hours of the night! But I have made some progress.

In my previous post, explained what a HTPC was and how I wanted to use it I also listed the 2 possible hardware platforms I wanted to use. I finally got fed up trying to get working old parts, that I went out and bought myself a brand new system to use. I got a pentium D 2180 a cheap foxcon MB with 1gb DDR2 memory a 7200GS, because of its cheap price and Tv-Out and a 200Gb HDD.

Building it was easy, but strange, this was my first Intel build and the CPU pins on the MB, was very strange. Got it up and running in about 30mins. Tried knopmyth, but could not get the TV out working, read on I did figure out what the problem was there, so I may still try and use it later, it is still installed on a partition on the drive. Tried to get MythBuntu going, worked for the most part but the tv-out was all black and white, I later learned that it is easy to get it to work, open up the nvidia controls and tune the colour settings for some reason it is all turned down, or something also it may have been caused by my home made extra long RCA cable. I may have given up to quickly on mythBuntu, but i was getting irritated. I then opted form “Roll Your Own” approach. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and updated it (500mb worth) installed myth and all the goodies it required. Then I had yet another TV-Out issue, even though I tweaked all my settings, following countless guides, using Nvidia settings tool, I could not get it to display on both my TV and my LCD monitor connected to D-Sub.

After some tweaking I got the TV and Monitor to play along, Handy tip here, on my NVidia GPU, I was not able for some reason have a dual monitor setup with the d-sub and TV out, don’t know why, but I could not get it working. This had me screaming until I finally plugged out the D-sub connector and rebooted, my TV suddenly had an image, I still wanted to use my LCD monitor to do the rest of the config but also have the TV connected and running to test results, I changed my Xorg.conf file to have 2 X-sessions running. I then used a DVI to D-sub converter to plug in my Monitor in to the DVI plug and it worked! Now I have one X-session on the TV and one on the monitor. This would help allot with the tweaking, it really is hard to read small text like console output on the TV.

Next I tried to get my remote to work, as I mentioned in part 1 I am using a Hauppauge pvr 150 it includes a nice remote, IR receiver and transmitter (blaster), after a few hours of trying I gave up and I used a “home brew” serial receiver I had built a while back. Followed a guide and after a few hours of tweaking it finally worked. The basic steps I followed:

• Get set serial, sudo apt-get setserial
• Use it to disable the port in the kernel, well not disable but stop the kernel form using it so it is free to use by LIRC
• run sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc, choose serial receiver, and choose the correct port!
• Always check your hardware! I was convinced my receiver was in a working condition, but one of the wires got severed from the plug when I inserted it, this made me loose about an hour in debugging!

LIRC
After Lirc likes your remote you still have to tell myth to use it, there is a lircrc file that you need to edit and place in your home dir, and in .mythtv, or as I did, use a symlink. You also need to setup your external applications to play along with lirc, like vlc and xine this is also done in the lircrc file.

DVD features
DVD Ripping is still not as I want it to be, the ISO mode works great, but you need loads of space, in the same breath the “Perfect” mode also works it is almost the same as ISO except video is dumped in mpeg2 and obviously lacks the interactive, parts. The problem comes in with the “Good” mode, this is suppose to rip the movie in mpeg4 aka Xvid. I installed all the xvid libs and apps from synaptic, and tried to rip an episode from My Family series one DVD, I used this so that I can quickly test, seeing as a single episode is only 30mins long. The results were not satisfactory, the process worked great, you can continue to watch TV or a video while the rip is in progress. But like I mentioned the results where bad, the quality was not great, and the visuals had horizontal scan lines like it was not de-interlaced or something. This still needs tweaking.

XMLTV, Tv guide.
The guide data was another area which needed work, I wanted to use XMLTV grabber, luckily there was a GRAB_ZA for South Africa, so I could use it, but the process was a tedious one! Again I fired up the trusty Synaptic package manager, Install libXMLTV and all the tools associated with it, it was one version behind the official release, like most binary builds it seams, and as a result the ZA grabber was broken, due to DSTV changing their site almost monthly. So I got the latest version and simply replaced my ZA grabber with the one from the latest XMLTV tarball and presto. Then came yet another time consuming process, I had to manually run mythfilldatabse, because the ZA grabber does not contain Channel number info. DSTV has a couple of channels and it took a while to populate everything! To top it all of the grabber takes about 10mins to “grab” the info!

I still need to “integrate” the guide data with my setup, I am using the composite in, as video source, and as such I need to use the blaster to change channels on my DSTV decoder. Which brings me to my next mission, trying to get the blaster to work!

What is working
At this stage my working list is as follows:

• I can watch Live TV!, I am having some weird side effects thou, Picture quality needs some improvement it is as if the visuals is dull and dead, like those very crappy pirate DVD’s. But all the features associated with watching work like instant replay, rewind Fast forward. Only niggle is that, because of the buffer created for rewinding instant replay commands on the decoder also gets delayed! It is very hard and frustrating to try and navigate the decoders TV guide with a 10 second delay!
• My Hauppauge 150 remote is working great! But I am using the homebrew receiver at the moment
• Can watch, and to a certain extent, RIP DVD’s
• Can watch Videos
• Music and all the rest should work but I have not tried it.

Things that I still need to do or tweak:

• Recording!?! yes I still need to figure out the recording, but I suspect this has something to do with the guide data.
• Better network connectivity, I want to be able to play all my files over the network, form the backend to other pc’s and visa versa!
• Use my PSP as a remote! using the psp’s WIFI connectivity it should be able to use lirc udp or something of the sort to control the frontend via the psp.
• Streaming, apart from playing network resources, I want to be able to stream TV or videos from the backend to other networked PC’s in my home.
• Improve the picture quality, this includes, getting a consistent picture size, between channels the picture size changes on the TV, I suspect this has something to do with the broadcast, but it is fine on the Monitor?
• Make the PC silent, the fans in the case are not as soft as I want them to be.
• Automatically starting mythtv frontend, this will be done when all is working as it should!
• The blaster from the PVR150 needs to get up and running so that I can change channels on the decoder.

Not for the faint hearted.
From my latest adventure I am convinced that the process of building a decent HTPC system, is really not a very easy task to complete, especially if using mythtv and linux! I would suggest, if your are a novice, to either go the windows route and use MCE or media portal or follow someone else’s guide to the letter using exactly the same hardware and software configuration or use some pre-compiled distribution like mythbuntu or knopmyth. There just are too many niggles to sort out for an inexperienced user to try long enough without being frustrated beyond the point of giving up!

Linux may be an obstacle novice users won’t be able to overcome…
Linux has improved allot in the usability front, from the first time I used it. However it still needs to improve allot. Hardware configuration is the major concern here. If I were to install windows, and use either media portal or MCE, I would have been enjoying my HTPC already. To get the TV tuner working I would just have to build the pc, and install all the drivers, from the provided CD’s. In Linux however some of the devices are auto detected I did not have to install many of the drivers, especially the chipset drivers and on-board devices, it detected and configured my bluetooth and sound both of which needed drivers in windows to operate, but and this is a big but, to get the multiple monitors working took some time and effort, to get the sound working at an acceptable volume level took a tweak, not to speak of the hours I spent trying to get the remote to work and to get the guide data.

All in all for normal average everyday use Linux and especially a distro like Ubuntu is great, for novice and Experienced users, but for anything a bit more out of the ordinary it is a different matter.

I will not give up, I spent too much time and money on this, to just give up, I am so close to having my ultimate HTPC.

Watch out for part 3, where I will hopefully have my system up and running.

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