Moving to MythTV Part 1
Going to preface this by stating this will be a multi-part blog post, and I have no idea how many parts there will be when I'm all finished. Oh, and like most other things I write, it will probably be really verbose. Sorry 'bout that, its just the way I tend to write.
So, lets begin then.
This all started a couple months ago, some time in early February, I would say. I started looking at MythTV to possibly replace our D-Link DSM-520 MediaLounge with something a bit more capable. I set up an older box we had been using in our entertainment room as a workstation and re-tasked it to handle MythTV. This involved quite a bit, actually. The video card in it was an old ATI AGP card and MythTV really only works well with nVidia cards. As luck would have it, I had an nVidia 7200 AGP card that a friend had given me a few months ago. Perfect. I installed MythBuntu on it and connected it to the TV. So far so good. I installed MythBackend on the server that is running the uPNP server and we're off and running. Point it at the video directories and we're good to play videos.
Now, granted, this was all very, very, very (did I mention very?) simplified. The whole process of the above actually took two or three weekends to get everything just right.
I managed to get an ATI remote control that I had working, but wasn't happy with it at all. Then I went with the Sony BD Remote for the Playstation 3 and that was okay for a couple weeks, until.....
Now, here's the part where I break from simply the steps I took and divulge the real motivation behind the last few months of working with MythTV....
DirecTV took away our TiVo.
Allow me to repeat that. DirecTV took away our TiVo. Give that a moment to sink in. If you have a TiVo now, imagine how you would watch TV without it. Not a happy thought is it.
After being a TiVo early adopter and being a happy TiVo user for the last 10 or so years, DirecTV decided they wanted to dissolve their relationship with TiVo. Apparently, TiVo's grahpics hardware can't handle the MPEG-4 stream that DirecTV decided to use for their HD, so if we wanted to keep our HD programming, we needed to "upgrade" our equipment to DirecTV's own DVR "solution". To be fair, DirecTV did this for "free", which I suppose they pretty much had to do to prevent backlash from forcing an additional expense on customers without notification. I guess that makes it a wash on the good/bad scale.
That did free up the TiVo "peanut" remote, which I ordered an IR receiver cable for and got working with the MythTV frontend with very few difficulties. So, part one, we have videos (I've ripped most of our DVD's now), and a good remote control on the myth box.
Back to DirecTV. The DVR they installed is, how shall I put this.... I know. A total piece of shit. That about sums it up.
Its not that it doesn't work, or that the picture isn't great, its that the user interface looks like it was put together by programmers only, with no thought to usability. Now, I'm a programmer, and I know how much trouble we can get into when left unsupervised. But even I though this was a particular bit of nastiness. Its laggy at best (2-3 seconds after pressing a button on the remote before it reacts sometimes), its overloaded with information on every screen, you have to drill down at least 3-5 menu options for even the simplest of tasks, buttons have multiple functions depending on what screen you're on, there is no way to turn off the picture-in-picture when in your list of recorded shows, the remote isn't ergonomic and the buttons aren't well laid out, in fact you have to slide a lever to turn the TV off without turning off the DVR itself. Coming from a TiVo's very elegant menu system, and extremely comfort remote control, its a huge step down.
The installer even commented "you'll hate it for the first two weeks, and then you'll love it." Well that didn't happen. Its been about six weeks now and we still hate it.
MythTV to the rescue?
Well, not quite. The problem with all TV providers these days is they're worried about their content being pirated. Well, they shouldn't be. My uninformed opinion is that 95% of their subscribers have no desire to, nor will they ever pirate a show. So, why make it so hard for people like me (and all the other geeks out there) to build their own DVR? I don't have the answer to that.
The problem is getting the content from DirecTV into my file server in a format that my MythTV front end can deal with. Easier said than done. Lots of research later, I determined that to use DirecTV with MythTV, the best option is the Hauppauge HD PVR. It takes a component input and does a real-time encoding to h.264 and allows it to be saved via a USB port. Add a $35 serial to USB cable designed to control the DirecTV tuner and we're golden. In theory.
So, Jessica called DirecTV today to tell them that their DVR sucks and that we're building our own and to convince them to send us an HD receiver, gratis. In about two weeks, we would send them back their DVR and we would be happy DirecTV customers again. Well, after two calls and nearly an hour of total time on the phone, DirecTV tells us that they will give us a receiver for free, but not without a technician installing it for $40-$60. WTF?!? I think that somehow we could manage to pull a DirecTV card out of the slot in one box and put it in the slot in the new box and plug in a couple cables. Nope. They weren't going to budge on this. Keep in mind, we've been DirecTV customers for the last 10-12 years. We dropped Comcast after 5 years because they kept raising their rates every year and we got sick of it. We've been pretty happy with DirecTV up until the last 2 months or so....
Soooo, we ordered Comcast this afternoon. DirecTV can shove their DVR and customer loyalty up their ass. Comcast is giving us a similar channel lineup compared to DirecTV, except we'll be getting it at about $30/month less -- regular price.
As a bonus, I now have more options for the MythTV backend. I'll probably be ordering a Hauppauge HVR-1250 in addition to the PVR. That will give me two tuners, one for recording the local channels (and any other that isn't encrypted) and one for recording the basic cable channels that are encrypted. I'll still be able to record two things at once and watch a third...
I'll post again once the final hardware is in place and I start recording things with MythTV. I'll also try to post my configurations for the TiVo remote control and a final setup. I should have most of the necessary hardware within the next two weeks.
Until then...
Remote Desktop on Xubuntu 9.10
So I was planning to work from home on the Friday after thanksgiving so I wanted to be able to access my work desktop from home just in case. Normally I just ssh and use terminals and such, but for some reason I decided I wanted a full desktop. I use Xubuntu at home and at the office, and there is no default VNC setup like there is with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. A couple of quick Google searches and I came across this post:
vincentkong.com » Blog Archive » Remote Desktop on Xubuntu.
It pointed me in exactly the right direction. Just a few package differences for Xubuntu 9.10.
Here are the steps I used:
Install VNC Server and tools
$ sudo apt-get install x11vnc vnc4-common
Once the tools are installed, setup a password for the VNC server:
$ sudo vncpasswd /root/.vncpasswd
Install and configure xinetd
$ sudo apt-get install xinetd
Now, enable the vnc service via a new xinetd.conf using whatever text editor you like, I prefer vim.
$ sudo vim /etc/xinetd.d/x11vnc
service x11vnc
{
port = 5900
type = UNLISTED
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/bin/x11vnc
server_args = -inetd -o /var/log/x11vnc.log -display :0 -auth /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth -many -bg -rfbauth /root/.vncpasswd
disable = no
}
Finally, restart xinetd.conf:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart
You should now be able to connect with a VNC Viewer. Under Xubuntu I prefer the vinagre package.
$ sudo apt-get install vinagre
Thats it. Thanks much to Vincent for his initial post. This helped me tremendously.
Fedora out, Xubuntu in
The number of minor annoyances in Fedora 11 turned into a major annoyance. Last Saturday I wiped Fedora 11 from my home machine and installed Xubntu, which is the Xfce-centric Ubuntu distribution. I did the same on my office machine on Wednesday.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with Xubuntu and Ubuntu in general. For the most part, everything just works. The Synaptic package manager made the installation of most things pretty painless. I've installed all of my "non-standard" apps without having to first find the right repository, then hope that there aren't conflicts, and then fight with different versions of things because there were conflicts, etc. Everything that I use on a normal basis is in one of the repositories that Ubuntu has included. On Fedora I always had to fight with them. I didn't realize just how many extra steps there were in Fedora until I didn't have to do them.
The extra software that I normally install (either at home or at the office) include:
- Synergy - For letting me use a single mouse and keyboard on several computers and monitors. This makes moving back and forth from my Windows machine a matter of moving my mouse off to the left edge of my screen. Shared clipboard and all. Can't live without it.
- Motion - For grabbing web-cam images and saving them when it only detects changes in the image. In Fedora this was a huge pain.
- Nvidia proprietary drivers. An optional part of the Ubuntu install, but incredibly easy. Just told it to search for hardware drivers from the menu, and there it was. No muss, no fuss.
- Logitech G15 keyboard daemon. Ubuntu got this out of the box.
- XCache and APC for PHP.
- Conky
- Mplayer codecs
- MP3 support
I'm sure there were others, but those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There is still room for improvement, of course, but the ease of use, the sane dependency checking in Synaptic/apt-get, and the huge repositories (mutliverse/universe) meant that I didn't spend two days downloading, compiling, and keeping my fingers crossed just to get a system I could work on.
My time from install to productivity with Xubuntu was less than a few hours. Very impressive and well polished.
Fedora 11 First Impressions
So this week I did something unprecedented for me. I downloaded and installed a new Fedora release the same week it was released officially. After reading a bit about how stable and quick it is for others I decided to take the plunge. I've now installed it on three machines (in this order):
- My laptop, an older Toshiba Satellite system. Previously running Fedora 10 and dual booting with Windows XP.
- My home system, previously running Fedora 10.
- My work system, previously running Fedora 8 (see my earlier post on my experience with Fedora 9)
The install on my laptop would have made a Linux novice ditch Fedora completely and run screaming from it. The actual upgrade went smoothly. I booted up from the DVD and told it to upgrade my previous installation which it found with any problem, and update my boot loader config. The updating of the boot loader was a mistake. I rebooted the machine and "GRUB" was filling the screen as fast as the poor laptops GeForce4 chipset could pump it out. I booted the DVD again and chose rescue mode and re-installed grub. After that all was fine. It booted up and Xfce came up with my old desktop settings. Looked good, faster boot. I was a bit disappointed to not see any suspend or hibernate options, which was part of my decision to do my laptop first since these were included in the latest Xfce. More on that later, though.
I will say that it did take almost 5 hours to upgrade my laptop, but I kind of expected that since it is about 6 years old now.
The second system was my home system. Same process, and I even the same mistake with grub. My home system is quite a bit faster, and it only took about two hours to upgrade. I upgraded my home system the morning of the 11th. I only had about an hour or so to work with it before heading into the office that morning, but the upgrade itself seemed to be fine (once I finished kicking myself for having to fix the grub setup -- again).
So, great, things appeared to go smoothly. Since I knew I would only be at the office for a few hours on Thursday and probably wouldn't get much else done, so I decided to start the upgrade there, too. That and the fact that I like to be consistent at home and at the office -- I've always been that way, it makes transitioning back and forth much easier for me. That one wasn't so great. You can only upgrade to Fedora 11 from a fully updated Fedora 10. So, I upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, do a 'yum clean all' and then a 'yum update', then boot from the Fedora 11 disk to do my upgrade. This time I finally got smart, though and told it to create a new bootloader configuration. No problems with grub on this install.
Thats where the successes ended. A bit of back story first.
As I mentioned earlier, I use Xfce now. Between KDE's attempts to be like Windows Vista Aero and MacOS/X and Gnome's brain dead window placement (though it has gotten better, it is still not good enough and you can't change it) I chose to go with Xfce. Xfce is light-weight looks good and is well maintained. It stays out of my way, is configurable "enough" and I really like the Terminal and file manager (Thunar). It also plays pretty well with Gnome and KDE apps. It works exceptionally well with non-Gnome Gtk apps (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird) since thats the toolkit it is written with.
The failures of Fedora 11. The most notable was the inclusion of Firefox 3.5 beta 4 and Thunderbird 3.0 beta 2. Its nice that they tried to include the latest and greatest, but it broke almost all of the extensions of both apps. The way that Mozilla tags extensions, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get them re-installed. I haven't even bothered with it yet, I've been too busy trying to get a stable Xfce again.
Something that I figured out yesterday was that after upgrading to Fedora 11 from Fedora 10, it didn't actually upgrade everything. I had to do another "yum clean all" and "yum update" to download another GB of files before I was actually updated.
Now that my machines are all completely updated, I've discovered a few other issues. Notably, a bug was introduced into the Xfce Terminal. The option MiscAlwaysShowTabs if set to TRUE now causes the app to segfault on startup. I prefer to have that option enabled so my windows don't resize when I open a new tab (major annoyance). Several of my custom keymappings also vanished or no longer worked.
If I had done a clean, fresh install it might have been different (except the Terminal segfault), but I'm just not happy with Fedora 11.
Thunar also doesn't seem to support LUKS encrypted volumes, either. Patches were approved for adding that about 4 months ago. I'm thinking Fedora is racing to try to beat some other distro in having the cutting edge, and in that they seem to be succeeding, but for most people I'm sure its not worth the several days it will take to work around the quirks.
As I was writing this post, I was downloading the latest Xubuntu. I know of a lot of people that have switched to using Ubuntu for their desktop and are really impressed with it. I think its mostly because of the compositing, though. I may just end up re-installing today, we'll see...
MediaTomb revisited
As I mentioned before, I keep coming back to MediaTomb, playing with it for a few hours and then going back to uShare. Not this time. For the last couple of days I've been reading a lot more on the MediaTomb wiki, particularly the scripting pages.
I'm not sure why it wasn't obvious to me before, but somehow I'd managed to keep overlooking those pages. Using the scripting I was able to create a hierarchy almost exactly what I wanted. I just wish there was an option to prevent the "PC Directory" from being sent to the renderers.
Building and installing from source, switching the layout from builtin to js and modifying the import.js script is what I needed to do. Probably not something a Linux novice would want to do, but it wasn't too bad -- once I knew what I had to do. I think it was the whole "scripting" thing that made me overlook it in the past.
Its still not what I would call speedy, but that doesn't really matter since I doubt many people will be constantly changing hundreds of files all the time. As I've said before, it is stable, too.
It also solved one of my other problems, too, that of my playlists. I can now stream the same playlists that my MPD server uses to my Netgear MP101. I haven't tried the MediaLounge or the Homepod yet, but will soon. The only thing I have to do differently is tell MPD to use my MP3 "root" directory as its playlist directory and use relative paths. MediaTomb parses these playlists fine and allows me to use them on the MP101. MediaTomb also handles my "internet music" URL's too, so I can now also point the Netgear to my icecast server and listen to my MPD stream directly.
That now covers almost all of my requirements. I still need to put it through its paces for the next week or two but I think I may have found a solution that will work.
Categories
- No categories