Sunday, February 3, 2013

My Mythbuntu setup

I watch a lot of TV. Although I would really like to get rid of my satellite provider and switch to streaming the shows I like off of the Internet, living in Canada means a lot of the streaming video services aren't available, and even if they were, the bandwidth required to watch them would bust my download quota.

I'm also really picky about video compression, and some of the streaming services compress so much that watching their shows on the 55” TV I have in my living room is painful. Also, for some reason, half the shows and movies on Netflix have audio sync issues on my setup.

MythTV plays a large part in my household. All shows I watch are scheduled and recorded in HD off my satellite provider. While I wait for Ubuntu TV to take shape, I've recently upgraded my MythTV setup to Mythbuntu 12.04.

Backend


My MythTV backend is running on an HP Pavilion a4310f, with 4GB or ram, and a 1TB HDD. It's hooked up to a Hauppauge HD-PVR which records the video stream coming from my satellite provider's box. I have set the satellite provider's box to output 720p, as that gives me reasonable file sizes with an acceptable picture quality. Video is recorded over component cables, and sound is recorded in 5.1 over a TOSLINK cable. I use the IR blaster included with the HD-PVR to switch stations on the satellite box.

Instructions for setting up the HD-PVR in MythTV can be found in the wiki. This pretty much works out of the box with Mythbuntu. Although I originally had stability problems with the HD-PVR where every couple of months it would switch to recording audio at 25fps resulting in audio drift, a firmware upgrade to version 1.6.29353 has made it rock solid. I haven't risked upgrading to the most recent 1.7.x firmware as I don't currently have any issues.

You can obtain the script I use to change channels, my lircd configuration files, and the rc.local file I use to set the audio input here.

To set the picture control values to reasonable settings, I change the defaults for all channels in the MythTV database by running the following SQL command:

update channel set contrast=16384,brightness=32768,colour=16384,hue=3840;

I schedule programs to record using the MythTV web interface, and recorded shows are streamed in HD over the built-in UPnP server to any one of the three Playstation 3s I have around the house which also serve as Blu-ray players. I also have a dedicated MythTV frontend in the living room, which allows me to view TV shows without commercial interruption, and to delete shows once they've been watched. These are all connected using the wired gigabit network I installed during house construction, preventing the problems associated with streaming HD video over a wireless network.

Frontend


In the living room, which is my main TV viewing area, a dedicated MythTV frontend is used. I am using a Jetway HBJC600C99-352W-BW mini computer. I chose that model because it came with a built-in remote control, which allows me to power it on and control it from my Sony RMVL610 universal learning remote. It also features Nvidia Ion2 graphics, which enables me to use VDPAU with MythTV in order get the performance necessary to decode HD video.

I added a 1GB SO-DIMM to it, along with a cheap 32GB KingSpec SSD. It is also running Mythbuntu 12.04, and is hooked up to the gigabit wired network.

Getting the remote to work was a bit of a challenge. The device has a bogus HID report descriptor, resulting in a compatibility issue with the kernel HID drivers. Before a kernel fix was available, I discovered an application called “hid-mapper”, which allows converting any HID event into a keypress event. This is what I use on my frontend. I have packaged hid-mapper, along with some fixes, and all of the configuration scripts necessary to get it working on my frontend in my PPA.

If you do use my configuration files, please be aware that since I use a universal remote, I opted to make use of all buttons on the original remote without any regard to their placement or function. If you intend on using the original remote, you may want to reconfigure the button mappings to your liking.

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