MythTV install log Purpose: An online log of trials and issues creating a MythTV system. Author: kamikazi at blastzone dot net |
Using wilsonet.com/mythtv as a guide, created a custom FC3 install with the following partitions: 75mb /boot 10gb / 768 swap all other /video others are ext3, vdo is xfs. using GRUB loader. total install size is just over 1.6GB. big, but not too bad. eats up about 16% of the 10gb partition. added NTP service, created a mythtv user (mythtv) video & audio checked out! did an rpm for atrpms-kickstart and apt-get update did apt-get dist-upgrade needed 325MB of updates. yikes.. as bad as windows... I'm not going to worry about the graphical APT. shut down system when updates complete. restared next day. DEAD QUIET. kinda scary, actually. booted, ran for about 5 minutes while laptop started, and when i went to switchdesk, had hard-locked. que? hard locked again. getting wierd... booting into windows. see if it locks. kernel is 2.6.11-1.14_FC3 windows has not locked. sensors show OK.. so linux problem, somewhere. dropping to older kernel via grub (myth 2.6.9-1.667 versus 2.6.10 warned that system shut down uncleanly. let boot as default. kde opened and mounted the cd drive up2date sees not using available kernel & can update to 2.6.11-1.14_FC3. let it sit for 5 min and see if it locks... nope! using up2date to update kernel. set up GPG key & RH updater now we reboot and see what happens... into 11-1.14 nope. hardlock. installed GCC to try the new ATI video driver yum install gcc failed. yum install libstdc++.so.5 it installed... now driver is installing /lib/modules/2.6.9-1.667/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglrk.ko operation not permitted. reboot into latest kernel.. see if it locks.. or what at login screen. wait 5 min. see if it locks. locked. tried safe terminal. locks. progressing to install myth using old kernel added kver variable not concerned w/ video drivers yet not concerned w/ audio drivers yet tried to apt-get install mythtv-suite -- failed broken packages. checked out the mythtv-suite page at atrpms.net/dist/common/mythtv-suite info there on using yum yum install mythtv-suite asks for perl(Net::Server:Fork) and perl(the) 4.23.05 format- reinstall A companion using the same hardware setup, but without the SATA drive is not having the same lockup issues. reinstall with same basic configuration. added GCC. ran apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade yum install kernel i686.2.6.11-1.14_FC3 reboot hardlock will just stick with 2.6.9 kernel ARGH comment about using the pci=routeirq startup argument messages ended @ agpgart & loading R200 microcode found msgboard on https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-December/msg06742.html about AGP 4x mode, etc. rebooted int 2.6.9 to compare messages file.loaded to sign-in screen, waited 5 min, then going into rescue CD to not taint the file. system continues with hda DMA setup after r200 microcode.. so that's the problem. can we set the AGP speed in bios and slow it? no AGP speed in the bios. set plug & play OS to YES going into 6.11 kernel hardlock set pnp NO video to onboard primary / CRT only hardlock set video to auto HDD to UDMA6 / 32bit xfer ON (was auto) hardlock set to umda5 32bit xfer disabled hardlock reset to all auto, disabled cd drive hardlock 2.6.11 kernel with pci=routeirq hardlock trying new ATI drivers again - http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/printthread.php?t=32300&pp=80 getting libstdc++.so.5 with yum libstdc++ installed. rpm install fails, lsmod shows radeon module active modprobe -r radeon does not remove.. in use went to init 3 removed radeon going through driver install process. accepting defaults for most. allowed SVGA AGP locked user pages enabled (test using glxgears autodetect did not find the pci card. ctrl alt + - to change rez. ctrl alt bksp to exit server if monitor doesnt sync. rebooting into 2.6.9 startx fails... no sync. still seeing hda timeout retry timout waiting for DMA drivers/ide/pci/atiixp.c:205: spin_lock(drivers/ide/ide.c:0236e3a8) already locked by drivers/ide/ide-io.c/168 drivers/ide/ide-io.c:186: sin_unlock(drivers/ide/ide.c:0236e3a8) not locked booted into 2.6.11 wait to see what happens @ login prompt. init 3 kernel panic! atiixp issue? back into 2.6.9 - tried the fglx_gears.. failed. still running on radeon driver. /lib/modules/fglrx/sh make_install.sh rebooted int 2.6.9 not loaded; modprobe fglrx reports will taint kernel loads. fgl_glxgears opens black window.. no image locks x fglrxinfo is kewl though display:0/0 screen:0 OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies INC OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9000/9100 IGP Series DDR Generic OpenGL version string: 1.3.5010 (X4.3.0-8.12.10) switching to K. glx_gears still freezes x. wtf? attempting to shut down ac 97 audio. ac97 audio on mobo disabled booting to 2.6.9 dma timeout still a problem rebooting to 2.6.11 hardlock. bugzilla #133743 apparent workaround: shut off DMA for hdd. - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/35/2005/04/1/276139 set /etc/sysconfig/harddisks to USE_DMA=0 clearing extra labels from boot in GRUB added ide=nodma to 2.6.9 boot string has cleared dma error. enabled on-board audio again added ide-nodma to 2.6.11 boot string. booting into 2.6.11 waiting for failure... (did not appear to run ide=nodma) hardlock. booted. ide=nodma entered. modified grub.conf to include nodma for the time being. changed /etc/inittab back to runlevel 5 default switched to runlevel 5 apt-get update 54mg of updates! woot! myth is installed. or so it says. attempting to build drivers for pchdtv cards - fails. archives appear bad? sounds like 2.6.12 is a better kernel w/ drivers built in. trying it script found at http://www.xmission.com/~pchdtv/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3661#3661 to rc3 kernel not listed in grub. mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.12-rc2 2.6.12-rc2 not listed in grub added a line to grub to attach kernel to list mkrootdev: label / not found mount error 2 mounting ext3 kernel panic - no syncing: attempted to kill init - possible bad .config to build 2.6.12rc3: make menuconfig > select Device Drivers / Multimedia devices / Video For Linux > select "DVB Support for cx2388x based TV cards (new)" > (also removed and added other modules as needed) make rpm cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386 rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.12rc3-1.i386.rpm (this will install the kernel) /sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.12-rc3.img 2.6.12-rc3 cd /boot/grub added to grub.conf exit success! can see the hd-3000 cards in dmesg up2date asks to update myth rpms. complete. restarting w/ dma success! 3 min and stable. not worried about lirc yet (will need this later) enabled mysql to startup automatically added myth database script added recommended mysql configurations (cache) rebooted to test mysql time to set up myth! english language delete card settings/ configured myth, added the hd-3000 cards, did not change the channel info finished setup running mythfilldatabase starting mythfrontend! playing dvd! no audio though. no live tv. testing audio now works testing dvd plays, but still choppy. proc is @ about 50% shut off nodma no sound. still choppy.. no sound. run detect and sound comes up. dma on DVD drive: # hdparm -d 1 /dev/dvd #hdparm -d /dev/dvd shows it off. go in via root, and hdparm -d shows it on. created custom.sh file to load alsa driver & dvd dma reboot still seeing atiixp errors in the dvd. choppy, shutting off dma. update bugzilla entry? aumix was not loading. changed custom.sh to cmdline aumix entry aumix -w75 added custom.sh to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d as #81 reboot finally. audio :) **dma error** hdparm -Tt read: ~700MB/s cache ~15MB/s disk read. claims hdc DMA is on. DMA issue is also shown in Windows boot. DMA determined to be on MOBO. 1 month later & 2 shipments later, finally have new mobo from ASUS. DMA problem in windows is fixed, but still a problem in Linux. DVDs are smoother, however. did an apt-get reinstall of xorg-x11-devel - errors found in installation, but removed it from the dependency list apt-get reinstall fam-devel - errors found, but removed (as above) add / remove programs successfully added x-devel stack .configure on xine-hd was successful, added Xv player make failed - possible patch not applied? dont want to install the drivers though... download new 2.6.12 extras download xine-hd 0.8 applied all of the extras (make) rebooted seeing DMA errors on the DVD drive building xine-hd0.8 as in the readme. added /usr/local/lib to .so creating xine-lib created xine-ui added tools3 dtvscan failed.. no /dev/dtv device. not using udev? rebooted modprobe cx88-dvb created /dev/dvb rebooted not there. there once modprobed. but no dtv maybe just forget about dtv for a while :) no broadcasts here anyway added a DVB.sh script to create the proper /dev/dtv objects may need the modprobe cx88-dvb though.8/2005 - Gentoo
The Myth system has been running for about a month, but not running myth. DVDs are watchable (but not great) under Xine, and XMMS has been installed for playing MP3s. TVTime has been good for watching TV, once the color adjustments were made. pcHDTV cards apparently have a problem tuning NTSC cable 61 & 62. MythTV works using v4l setup, but does not recognize ALSA subsystem, and does not shut off the sound when closing TV. Also, Myth does not like running 2 tuners. Have not been able to successfully record TV, or play DVDs with a reasonable framerate in Myth. Also have dropped back to the stock Radeon driver, that seemed to help DVD playback. Also switched to an ASUS DVD drive, which appears to have resolved some of the read errors I was seeing with the NEC drive. DMA on the DVD drive is still not working, forcing DMA access on with hdparm works, but once the drive is accessed, DMA is shut off. The windows partition does not even access the ASUS DVD drive, and can read DVDs using VLC, but not CDs. Got the Hauppauge card in today. Will install into system, format, and try gentoo linux. The Gentoo install LiveCD kept failing, right about where the system tries to mount the CD. I saw this with multiple other discs, Knoppix, KnoppMyth, Debian, so finally pulled the Hard Drive out and replaced it with a PATA drive instead of an SATA drive. The system came right up. So, Asus Pundit-R + SATA Hard Drive + PATA DVD Drive = BAD. Anyone want a real nice Maxtor midline 250gb SATA drive? Circuit City had a deal on a Seagate 160gb, so I ran out and got one of those. Gentoo installed immediately. Now that DMA works on the DVD drive, DVD's play MUCH nicer. oooh. framerate! Following the instructions on the Gentoo-wiki page, I got things running fairly quickly. At least, I thought I did. (see wiki at: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_MythTV ) Turns out the PVR-250 was not tuning correctly. That took a few hours to troubleshoot The New PVR-250s are not detected correctly by the ivtv drivers, whether built from scratch or emerged. I built mine out using the instructions at the ivtv site. New PVRs show up in lsmod -v as: Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01) If you're in NTSC and unable to get the card to tune correctly, it's probably not being detected properly. Reload the tuner kernel module with the correct type. First, check your loaded modules to see if it's there: #lsmod | grep tuner (if it doesn't show up, you've got other problems) remove the module #rmmod tuner load the tuner with the correct type #modprobe tuner type=39 NOW try to tune the card. (I used ptune-ui in X to do it in real-time while watching using "mplayer -vo xv /dev/video0" to view the MPEG stream off the card Right now, editing the /etc/modules.conf doesn't stick, so I'll probably write a startup script to set the module correctly. Now that I've successfully tested the PVR-250 card, I need to get myth running. Emerged mythtv (takes a while!) and set it up according to the instruction on the Gentoo page. Watching LiveTV segfaults immediately. I've tried the requested approach in the Myth documentation, building from scratch and using the ./configure --debug flag, but I cannot seem to start Myth from a remote or virtual console. Running mythfrontend -v all (verbose logging) helps, and points that Myth is looking for /dev/nvidia0, which doesn't exist on an ATI board. Information in this thread: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/144660 points to disabling XvMC in the Mythfrontend setup, but I can't find that option. Also, XvMC support was not indicated in the output from ./configure when I built Mythtv. I've uninstalled myth 0.18.1 and dropped back to Myth 0.18, and bumped a message off to the Mythtv listserv. With luck one of these will lead to a resolution. No joy on playing live TV using 0.18 or 0.17. Removed the --nolisten TCP flag from the /usr/bin/startx (location?) script, and that lets me get GDB output from another virtual terminal. Posted that to the MythTV listserv, have seen no response yet. I have also built the fglrx driver from ATI. It looks like it's running, as I'm seeing related output in my xorg.log files, but it did not help the problem. Building the ATI driver was pretty easy, just make sure you download the .run file and the correct RPM for the environment (gentoo 2005.1 is Xorg 6.8) and pretty much just accept the defaults. At least recording works. Now, if I could only find a solution to manage these silly file names. I'm re-emerging world again, and may try to rebuild the kernel to include DVB support for the HD3000. Might as well make SOME progress.8.27.2005 - Moving to FC4
I've been looking on the mythtv users list, etc, but have found no solutions to the problem of having segfaults while using the Myth internal player. Since I know that it worked on FC3, and Jared has just released the Mythology on FC4, this seemed like a pretty good time to switch back from Gentoo. So, I blew away all the work so far (again) and loaded FC4. First: RedHat wants you to DL all the CDs. I don't really want to do that. My connection at work, where I do most of the bulk work is only a frac T1, and getting 2.4G of data still takes a while. I did manage to convince the installer to do a network install by entering "linux askmethod" at the boot prompt. Then, point the system to a mirror that has an "os" directory (not the iso directory!). This way, I only needed to DL disk one. It still took the better part of 4 hours to get FC4 installed. Following Jared's guide, the system setup went quickly and smoothly. I brought up the HD3000 card as a V4L in order to test the Myth player. Getting Myth, the HD card running, and testing ALSA took about 2-3 hours. When all that was done, I had a running Myth system but I still have problems with the sound using the HD3000 as a V4L. It seems the sound will not pipe through the ringbuffer, so I hear things before they happen. At least Myth works, though. Now, I'm back to having problems with the PVR-250 tuner. This is a new PVR-250, with the CX23416 chip (see above). I could get it running in Gentoo using the "modprobe tuner type=39" command, but that chokes here in FC4. Running that command places an error in the dmesg: tuner: Unknown parameter 'type' and the dreaded "tuner unset" message. After some work and googling, here's the modprobe.conf that makes this card work: #ivtv-setup alias char-major-81 videodev alias char-major-81-1 ivtv (NOTE: my pvr is detected as video1, otherwise, use 81-0) alias tveeprom tveeprom-ivtv alias tuner tuner-ivtv alias msp3400 msp3400-ivtv options ivtv tuner=39 With those settings, I have TV from the 250! With that success, it's over to LIRC, which installed quickly. Below you'll find links to my customized lircrc file (tuned for Xine and using the new hauppauge lircd file from Jared's guide). Rebooting proved to be a disaster, though, as neither the IVTV nor the LIRC systems worked. I ended up solving this by creating a short script run from /etc/rc.local that runs /sbin/modprobe ivtv /sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c #and then runs the mythbackend and lirc daemons /sbin/services mythbackend start /sbin/services lircd start Perfect? no. But it works! It took some tweaking in Myth to pick up the PVR-250 for default video instead of going to /dev/video0 (the HD3000 NTSC output). Basically, I just removed & added and removed & added until I got it working correctly. Another note: While reading through the forums, there was a thread where a member told another to look for the "use XvMC" checkbox, which wasn't there. FWIW, I also did not have this checkbox in the TV Settings on Gentoo, but do in FC4. Now, to modify the theme menus and start recording!Closing Thoughts
This project took much longer than I thought it would. From miscellaneous hardware problems to niggling software bugs that caught me just as I was about to think I had it. I've got almost enough hardware left over to build another system, and I have yet to get up the HD card, since OTA HD won't even be available in my area until late next year. In the process I've played with 3 different distro's of Linux (with a 4th burned to CD, but never loaded, and 5 if you include KnoppMyth), and spent countless hours looking at myth-related websites, forums, and mailing lists. Are there still things to be done? Sure. I don't have my 5.1 system or SPDIF, But I've been paying for cable TV for 2 months now, with no an easy way to watch it. Finally, that's solved. I can now start watching Adult Swim again. If they start playing FLCL, I'll be set! But mainly, I've got a pretty cool entertainment system that does almost everything I need it to. Below are a few links that new users might find helpful, Jared's guide (which everyone should know by now), and my lircrc file, with some tweaks to control Xine. Enjoy, and good luck with your project.lircrc file - download it and place in your /home/<mythuser>/.mythtv folder. then, create a link to /home/
Finally, I've been able to get out and pick up my own projector - no more taking the one from work home on the weekends. It's an InFocus ScreenPlay 5000, a Hi-Def ready unit running 1280x720 LCD panels. A nice unit, and Costco had a good deal on them, including a discount on the screen. And since I need a 96" diagonal screen, that's a good thing. Getting the projector set up and running was actually pretty easy. I posted out to the MythTV mailing list looking for modelines and was pointed a page at linuxis.us containing ATSC modelines. Dropped in the two modelines for 1280x720, and it came right up. Luckily for me, the ViewSonic E771 that I'm using as a secondary monitor accepts the same resolution and timings as the projector. The desktop is a bit squished, but 4:3 content looks fine, and anything I'm going to watch in 16:9 will be on the screen. I also modified the displaysize value in xorg.conf to 340 x 191 - a 16:9 size. That should solve the problem of auto 16:9 stretching on the projector. The biggest issue I had so far was finding the setting that changes the X desktop - virtual desktops do not play well with Myth. (right-click, configure desktop, display node screen size). I'd also like to find a reverse KVM to switch between the monitor and projector quickly. Something to look for on my next trip to Fry's. So, I decided to move on to the HD-3000, and see if there was anything available on HD. (not that I'm holding my breath) this site: http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DigitalTelevisionDVB was the most useful in getting the HD3000 operational, at least, as good as it gets with no HD content OTA. I found that I did not need to restart UDEV, and the command posted doesn't work under FC4 anyway. The scan that is done in the page is via 8VSB, with no services. So the next piece would be to get a list of QAM channels and try a scan with those. As luck would have it, there's a us-Cable-Standard-center-frequencies-QAM256 listing as well! 307 hits! now, we need to go through those hits & check the bandwidth to see if there's anything on there. It's not likely, but I'm suprised I got this far. I'm looking forward to OTA DTV, but that's not slated to get here until Aug 06.linuxis.us - modeline help
307 hits with the DVB scan on standard ATSC frequencies. What's this mean? I filtered all of the results out that had video PIDs of 0, since that didn't seem to make much sense. That left me with 98 hits. Starting to go through them, and Ch02 (567000000:QAM_256:75:76:13) synchs up with MPlayer and starts spitting out chunks of DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. Looks like I hit on the digital radio stations! But it's not playing smooth. I get a few chunks, then it loses synch and mplayer dies. Lots of CRC checks fail. some looking on the pchdtv boards shows I'm not the only one. trying mplayer -novideo -cache 8192 -autosync 20 /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 still puts up quite a few crc failures, but at least it kinda works for audio only. Troubleshooting on this seems to have started in mid-Oct, so we're bleeding edge here. set the grp on /dev/dvb/* to video, now the mythtv user can read from it. Seeing some segfaults in myth now, very strange could have to do with the hd card either in mythv-setup or the driver, but ?? setting up the card as an hd3000 wasn't working well with myth, so i set it up as a dvb. it allegedly found more stations that I did with my manual scan. I ran mythfilldatabase, and will try the frontend. nope, can't get to the HD card. i can see the channels in the guide, though. the backend log shows: ERROR No PIDS set, please correct your channel setup the DVB card was trying to tune to a channel that it didn't have on startup, so it would just lock out. set up the dvb card to point to a channel it does have, and we're running. but 1080i playback *kills* the processor. 100% usage (50% mythfrontend, 50% X).