Building a MythTV PVR (DVB-HDD-recorder)

From RC-Autopilot Wiki

Hardware

• Biostar GF7050-M2 Mainboard with AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ and 2GB RAM
• Standard minitower (for now... may change to nice HTPC case later)
• Skystar2 DVB-S card (At the moment I have Rev 2.7 which the Linux drivers for are not done yet... considering exchange for Rev.2.6)
• TSSTcorp SH-S202J DVD-RW drive
• PC complete for 299,- EUR from csl-computer.de, DVB card for about 40,- EUR

Software

MythBuntu 7.10 Install CD for AMD64

Setup & Config

• Suspend/Hibternate/Framebuf info: http://ph.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?t=579781&page=26
• /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh seems to work well, seems to come back up ok
• configure poweron hotkey in BIOS to i.e. Ctrl-F1 and then later maybe we can somehow make the remote control emulate that

Step by Step

• installed mythbuntu using the safe-video option, since the normal install ends up with a blank screen on this mainboard
• found out the skystar2 rev 2.7 card isnt supported yet
• found an old (5+ years) USB DVB-S box (ttusb), tried that, according to dmesg recognized ok
• installed kaffeine: sudo apt-get install kaffeine, but didnt find DVB device, and reported libdvdcss missing
• used Mythbuntu Control Center to enable proprietary codec support
• now kaffeine can play commercial movie DVD's (and hey, the sound even worked out of the box :-)
• apt-get install dvb-utils
• when trying "scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-s/Astra-19.2E" it reported "device busy"... then I remembered to "/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop"
• now kaffeine recognizes the DVB adapter and successfully scans for astra channels
• run mythtv-setup, configure diseq (!!!), and run channel scan "tuned by frequency" starting with 12109000 / symbolrate 27500000.
• after finding a few channels, go back and do a "complete scan of all known transponders". This time, all channels should be found. Dont abort the scan if it pauses for a minute or so, seeming to hang... even if it seems to say "finished" in the background! It might hang for a minute or two but eventually it should continue, taking upto 30mins for the complete scan.
• After scanning, mythfilldatabase, load frontend, try to "watch TV". In my case, this option crashes mythfrontend, giving a "mythfrontend.real: munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer" error and a backtrace. Tried changing the player command (config/config/media/videos/playback) to "internal", this time it just crashes without any console output. Tried using "xine": again got a coredump and the "invalid pointer" error.
• tried using the proprietary nvidia driver (was using the opensource one without xv/xvmc support): now no crashing, but DVB playback is terrible quality (more random-looking square blocks than picture), dmesg shows lots of missing frames, same effect (slightly different picture) now in kaffeine
• reverting back to opensource nvidia driver: playback works again, but uses upto 20% cpu (xv apparently not utilized) ---> really strange: video driver shouldnt have impact on signal quality of DVB!
• tried downloading newest NVIDIA drivers, to install needed to "apt-get install gcc libc6-dev"
• also needed to install apt-src, and get the kernel source... compile... blablabla... finally got it to install, after reboot Xwindows starts in low resolution and nividia-configurator tells me "you dont seem to be using the nvidia driver" :-(
• after a few more tries, got the new nvidia driver to work. now xv works, nice fluid video with <10% total CPU usage. but mythtv still crashes with coredump sometimes, but i suspect that may be because of the USB DVB box (I even suspect its using USB1 and not USB2). Another thing that really pisses me off, is everytime i restart, the nvidia driver gets "lost". X starts with "unknown config" and I have to manually tell it which screen I have, etc., and reinstall the nvidia driver and restart the x11-server every time.