Uptown Rhythm & Brass Performing at Penn State's THON!

Uptown Rhythm & Brass will be performing at Penn State's THON this year. There are two upcoming gigs related to this event. See this page for more details.

Happy New Year: mythtv on ubuntu

The wife and I rang in the new year with a nice meal at the Sewickley Hotel. Lobster risotto and grilled scallops, a lovely cabernet, and delectable desserts. I dig the atmosphere there better than just about any restaurant in Pittsburgh.

It's been over a year since I installed ubuntu on my wife's Dell. I've been running linux desktops for years, but I was really amazed when my wife, who is not a technical person, began espousing the benefits of her ubuntu system to relatives over the holidays. This is the result of a user experience that provides usable office software, web, email, IM, ipod and digital camera support, while being free of reboots, viruses, malware, and spyware. I really believe there is a sea change going on here.

Anyhow, in the copious spare time I've had around the holidays, I decided to build my first myth boxen. I've been watching mythtv develop for about 3 years and finally felt I was ready to put it all together. I had a dell poweredge 2.4ghz P4 machine laying around with 512 MB of RAM and an 80GB disk so I figured this was an adequate base for my DVR system.

I replaced the feeble video card with a geforce 6200 (s-video,VGA,and DVI) and used a Hauppauge PVR-150 as the TV card.

I decided to use linux mint as a base for this box as I had been experimenting with it lately, and felt it was a good start for this purpose. As you'll see, that turned out to be a good decision, mainly from the standpoint of saving some work with configuration. The envy script is really handy. The only trouble I had is that it fails silently when you run it from an xterm, I started it from another VT and it ran fine. Also, there appears to be a problem with the nvidia binary driver and updates to xorg from apt. That is, if you do an update after installing the binary driver and it includes an update to xorg, it will reset the driver to use the one from xorg, and this will result in the xserver failing to start on reboot with a no screens found error. I was able to correct this by merely running the envy script again.

I used several guides along the process, which went smoothly for the most part:

• Systm video about mythtv
• youtube: Exploring mythtv and mediamvp
  
• Background information for mythtv on unbuntu
  
• Run X across TV and monitor (note: this can be done completely in the nvidia-settings)
  
• Installing mythtv on ubuntu edgy
• Getting the remote working
  
• Converting mythtv to ipod video

I had some trouble with the channel configuration after the intial mythfilldatabase. There were two unknown channels that appeared in place of channel 2 and 3 which caused all of the correct channels to be offset by 2 so that channel 2 was 4, 3 was 5, etc. This was solved by deleting all the channels from the mythfrontend interface, exiting mythfrontend, and re-running mythfilldatabase. I've still got no idea why the problem occurred in the first place, but it was relatively minor given the complexity of the install.

At this point, the TV functions work, the remote works, the music player works, the video player works, the news module works, the images module works, the web module works, the weather module works but appears to have some bugs where the extended forecast will be off by a few days from the current day +1. Update: The weather bug corrected itself this morning. No idea why, but it's been fine ever since. Update: I was wrong. The weather bug is recurring frequently. I'm guessing that the date math is off, but I haven't had time to look at the source.

In addition, my mythtv user doesn't appear in the ubuntu user administration GUI, and ripping CDs fails with a permission denied error. I believe this is due to the mythtv user not having the proper access to the devices but I'm not sure how to fix it yet, or why it didn't get setup properly. The only other issue is that transcoding fails with a 247 error code, which I've yet to figure out. Update: All of the issues with ripping and burning went away after I installed k9copy. I'm guessing that there were dependency and/or permission issues that k9copy's installer somehow fixes as I'm able to rip and burn as the mythtv user now with no issues.

I'm using the retro theme and OSD, which I hacked to use my own custom logo that I put together in gimp since I'd taken to calling my system "davo" and I sound like I have a speech impediment every time I say "mythtv".

Overall, I'm thrilled with the mythtv system. For a small investment in hardware, and a bit of sweat equity, you get a really useful DVR system with features to spare.