Ryan Homan

Here are a few options to optimize playback so you do not use 100% cpu. I have found these too dramatically help performance on my systems. You may need to tweak a few of these to your liking depending on your system setup.

First off, the biggest thing to turn on is XvMC.

• Edit your /etc/X11/XvMCConfig and make sure you change your line to libXvMCNVIDIA_dynamic.so.1
• Make sure that file exists (updatedb and use locate)
• In the mythfrontend setup, choose use Standard XvMC - if its running, your OSD should change to b/w

The next things are to manually edit your xorg.conf with nvidia optimizations.

• Option “NVAGP” “1″ in your device section, also try “2″ - helps with prebuffering pauses
• Option “UseEvents” “True” in the device section as well
• Also use BOB or linear blend for deinterlacing

With these changes, you should have your HD playback running with about half the cpu it did prior to turning these settings on, try tweaking with other settings and let me know if you have anymore from your own experiences that may be helpful.

Just saw that schedules direct hit their second milestone and those of you who signed up for the 3 month plan at $15 now gets 6 months for that price. The next goal is to get enough members to get the pricing down to $20 a year. Good Luck and thanks for all the hard work guys. Without it, my MythTV box would be useless.

Well as some of you know about over here in the midwest part of the United States is that greed has moved not only from the NFL, but over to college football as well. This year, games that used to be broadcast regionally over ABC have now been moved to a new network called the Big Ten Network. Now every Ohio State game that is not nationally broadcast can only be found on the big ten network. This also applies to men’s basketball as well. So as for right now, the only provider in my area that will have the big ten network is DirecTV. The big ten network is charging an enormous amount of $1.10 per subscriber and wants it part of the basic cable package therefore the cable companies have to pay that for each subscriber which all of my local providers were unwilling to do. So as for me, I’ve decided to make the switch to DirecTV so I can get all the games, but it poses a problem with my simple MythTv setup. I now only have a limited number of feeds available for my myth box and also need to be able to handle changing the channel. This project is in the works and I hope to be able to document step by step what I did to get it working.

For those of you who use MythTV for their DVR got some exciting news this last day or two. Schedules Direct just released the pricing of $15 / 3 months to start out, but after they get a lot of subscribers, they hope to get pricing down to $20/year. I know its not free, but I could gladly pay $20/year once they get it all worked out. I’m just glad those guys have been able to get something together so we can continue to use MythTV. Check out their website at www.schedulesdirect.com for more information as the time gets closer to the Sept 1st deadline.

Since I’m sure about everyone out there that has mythtv has heard that Zap2It Labs is discontinuing the free TV Guide data that we all use. So what are we to-do. I heard that some people were getting together to create a nonprofit organization to provide free listings for personal use. The website was www.easytvdata.org but due to the trademark and copyright infringement possibilities, they have renamed themselves to Schedules Direct. Check out schedulesdirect.org for more info and lets hope that they come up with a solution for us by the September 1st deadline.

Well this Monday evening, I attempted to upgrade my MythTV box from the gentoo-sources kernel 2.6.17 to 2.6.20 so it would support my new HD-5500 card. Let me state that I started this at about 4:30pm and my shows that I wanted to record started at 8pm (24 and Two and a Half Men). The kernel upgrade started out smoothly and I built everything into it that I needed. I followed Gentoo’s guide to kernel upgrading just to make sure I didn’t miss anything and it went rather smoothly. I knew I would also need to update IVTV to support my kernel. This process was the difficult one.

So after realizing that in grub I called my kernel bzImage instead of kernel like I normally do, I had to update grub to get it to boot, IVTV did not work as expected. I attempted an upgrade to IVTV 10.1 which supports kernels 2.6.20-r1. I then realized that I had just built 2.6.20-r6 so to avoid and issues later, I just rebuilt the kernel using 2.6.20-r1. After booting with the 2.6.20-r1 kernel I tried the install of IVTV again. This time I received the following errors:

* CONFIG_VIDEO_HELPER_CHIPS_AUTO: should not be set. But it is.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_WM8775: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_MSP3400: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_CX25840: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_TUNER: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_SAA711X: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_CX2341X: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_SAA7127: is not set when it should be.
* CONFIG_VIDEO_TVEEPROM: is not set when it should be.

After some quick research, I figured out that in the newer kernels under the device drivers section / multimedia devices / video capture devices, the default setting is Autoselect pertinent encoders/decoders and other helper chip. So I disabled it and went in to individually pick the modules I needed. After several tries, I finally just picked all of them so it would install and went back later to filter through the list.

The list that worked for me was the following.

• <M> Simple audio decoder chips
• <M> Micronas MSP34xx audio decoders
• <M> Wolfson Microelectronics WM8775 audio ADC with input mixer
• <M> BT819A VideoStream decoder
• <M> BT856 VideoStream decoder
• <M> BT866 VideoStream decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7110 video decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7111 video decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7114 video decoder
• <M> Philips SAA7113/4/5 video decoders
• <M> Philips SAA7191 video decoder
• <M> Conexant CX2584x audio/video decoders
• <*> Conexant CX2341x MPEG encoders
• <M> Philips SAA7127/9 digital video encoders
• <M> Philips SAA7185 video encoder

After IVTV installed I rebooted and tried things out. IVTV was recognizing my Hauppauge card, but when trying to view the tuner, all I got was black. At this point, it is about 7:15pm so I’m starting to panic. I did rmmod of IVTV and modprobe IVTV to reload it and try again. When I ran a dmesg, I saw several lines like this at the end of each tuner= i2c hardware 0×00000001 (cx2584x) not found for command 0xc008561c. When searching this error, I found others that had the problem, but no solutions so I decided this post was a good idea. I then tried different versions of IVTV, but the same error messages, so I decided it must be something wrong with my kernel, yet I was unsure. I had looked over my old settings and had everything set. It is now 8:00pm and it is still not working. It actually took me till after 10pm to finally get it. I had actually looked at the answer earlier that night, but didn’t realize it. This page contained the answer for me. I looked at it when building my kernel: On the top screen is what the new kernels need and the bottom is what my 2.6.17 had. Something I looked over on the new kernel was that I had I2C support as built in instead of as a module. After all that work, that solved my problem. Hopefully this helps any of you out there with this issue.

During much of this work, I ended up with kernel 2.6.19 and IVTV 0.9.1 and the problem was solved. I then upgraded to IVTV 10.1 and it still was working so I’m sure I could go back to my 2.6.20 kernel and I probably will here soon.

Well I’m been running MythTV at home now on a Gentoo linux box for about a year and a half and I’m not sure what I’d do without it. I am simply in love with the DVR features and my favorite part is automatically commercial skipping. My setup is a P4 northwood processor at 2.2 Ghz with 512 Mb of ram. I have 2 160GB hard drives striped for speed and have a DVD burner to burn the shows to DVD with MythArchive.  I have the Hauppauge pvr-500 so I can simultaneously record 2 shows at once. I purchased an HD tv last May and have been just playing all analog content from my cable provider on it. The only HD I watch on it is when some sporting events are on the Over the Air channels. This week I was able to order the linux HD card pcHDTV-5500 from http://www.pchdtv.com/  I will hopefully get it next week and get it installed and working. I will post my results once I complete it.

With all of my searching for new info about MythTV, I came across a large list of plugins now available. If your running version .20 then all of these should work. First off are the main ones that are official plugins for MythTV that I recommend using to get the most from your system pending you meet all the hardware requirements.

• MythDVD - allows you to use your frontend as a DVD player and ripper
• MythGallery - provides support for an image gallery that can be displayed as a slideshow
• MythMusic - allows you to play your collection of musicin formats such as mp3, ogg, or even wma
• MythWeb -this provides a web interface to use your mythtv system with almost all features as long as you are running apache
• MythVideo - this plugins is used to interface with video not recorded by MythTV (divx movies, home videos, etc.)
• MythWeather - provides an up-to-date weather report whenever you need it for your location
• MythArchive - now included with version 0.20

Other official plugins that are commonly used, but I have yet to get much use from are listed below:

• MythNews - provides access to RSS feeds
• MythPhone - uses the mythtv interface to allow placing and receiving of phone calls with VOIP (Asterisk is a common implementation)
• MythBrowser -allows you to surf webpages from the mythtv interface
• MythControls - allows you to change your keybindings without having to exit mythtv
• MythFlix - provides an interface to you Netflix account
• MythGame - allows you to play rom based games with a built in emulator

There are also several unofficial plugins that I want to try when I get a chance. Some of them have great potential.

• TVWish - my favorite unofficial plugin - allows for you to have a text list of show titles and when the script is ran regularly, it will automatically schedule the shows when it gets the info from the listing site.
• MythMail - its a pop3 client to access mail
• MythRecipe - allows you to browse an internet db of recipes while playing your favorite mp3 in the background
• MythFM -allows you to listen to FM radio from the MythMusic interface with the radio receiver on your tuner card
• MythStream - provides streaming of audio and video to the fronend from websites and more
• MythCalendar - need I say more?
• MythTiVo - GUI for playing recorded shows from a networked TiVo (no updates for a while on this project though)

Well thats about all. That should keep you busy updating your MythTV box with all these plugins for a while. Be sure to comment about them if you’d like. If you would like more info on any of these plugins, visit ExtremeTech’s article on them.

I was reading up on mythtv the last few days and realized that even though I have been running it for the last year and half or so and keeping up-to-date on it that I was missing a lot of great things that have come about. One very cool thing I came across was using the MediaMVP from Hauppauge as a frontend. It only $90 from newegg and comes with a remote. The only downside is it may not play divx encoded video that well and also only supports s-video out as the best quality so no HD stuff with this thing. It also requires a little work to get it working with your mythtv setup. See this article from mythtv.org about it with the pros and cons. Now you might ask well what do you have to do to make it work as your frontend. Well, the people who work on the MediaMVP Media Center project at sourceforge have made life a lot easier. Just tftp the new firmware to the device and its hooked up and ready to go. I’m looking forward to possibly trying it out sometime.