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Perseverance Pays Off

Well, it's February, and I've finally figured out how to get this little VIA box working for MythTV. It was a serious pain in the ass, and there was no way I could have gotten it done by Christmas - thank god I had my main PC up and running in time, or this would have been a very delayed Christmas present.

That said, I now have to decide whether or not I want to leave my Desktop PC as the main (always on) MythTV backend server, or switch out this little guy, which runs quieter and at lower power. I'll probably be mulling that one over for at least another month.

Read on for the technical stuff

Summary

• Start with a fresh install of your favorite Apt-enabled OS. (I've used both Fedora Core 1 and Debian experimental)
• Update your distro
• Compile the latest Xfree86 (4.4.0rc2 for me, but any 4.4.0 release will work in the future)
• This step is way easier than it sounds
• Refresh your KDE install
• Switch to the VIA display drivers
• Install MythTV

This guide is meant to be an overview/summary for people familiar with MythTV who are now looking to get it working on a Via board without resorting to the crappy binary drivers Via supplies on their site.

IF YOU HAVE NEVER GOTTEN A MYTHTV BOX WORKING!!! Please read this document first:

If you're already comfortable, or are building a system on a MiniITX board from Via, read on.

The only advantage to using the binary Via drivers is that the board has built in Mpeg2 decoding, and you need their "proprietary" code to get this working.

For MythTV, hardware Mpeg2 decoding won't even really help you. You'll be encoding either to RTJpeg or Mpeg4 for most of your shows, so you'll still need to use the processor to pull the compressed images apart. After over 30 hours of fighting with my system to get a proper kernel which matched the binary Via drivers, it would sporadically hard crash the kernel. My system is rock solid and has compiled the kernel and tested clean without this binary driver, so it's no great secret that it was the cause of the trouble.

Unfortunately, if you just attempt to use the standard vesa display driver, you will find that the lack of Xv support and overall slowness will make video unwatchable.

This is where the new open source Via drivers come to the rescue. They're built right into the latest version of Xfree86, and they work like a charm. The M10000 is more than enough chip to get the rest of the decoding work done, and with a proper video driver in place, watching videos encoded with MythTV is smooth and enjoyable.

• Start with a fresh install of your favorite Apt-enabled OS. (I've used both Fedora Core 1 and Debian experimental)

This part is easy enough, and should be fairly self explanatory. There are different repositories for each distro which hold the MythTV packages, so you'll want to be sure to add these to /etc/apt/sources.list

For redhat:

PARTIALLY SNIPPED FROM: HOWTO Build a MythTV System on Fedora Core w/ATrpms

Install Axel Thimm's ATrpms-kickstart from http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/dist/fc1/atrpms-kickstart/. This provides you with apt and a pre-configured set of apt repositories, which include everything we'll need.

This caused some conflicts between the basic apt package and the Atrpms verison of apt. Simply forcing the atrpms version to install (rpm -Ivh --force packagename.rpm) and then updating the rest of my packages with apt cleared this up.

On debian:

you must also edit the /etc/apt/sources.list to include the proper repositories. MythTV for debian currently resides at

# Eric added for MythTV
deb http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian unstable mythtv 
#I want the 1.3 release to match my 1.3 backend server,
# so I install from unstable, and comment experimental
#deb http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian experimental mythtv
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ experimental main
deb-src http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian unstable mythtv
deb-src http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu/~mdz/debian woody mythtv

ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ supposedly holds one of the packages you need to install MythTV on debian, although it has constantly 404'd on me. I had to go and find the offending package myself and install it with dpkg to get MythTV to install

To get the rest of your system up to the most recent packages, change /etc/apt/apt.conf to include

• Update your distro

This part might not be that necessary, but a lot of the pieces of MythTV rely on other components to be fairly fresh. Getting current is the safest bet.

approve any updates, then for good measure, apt-get update again to refresh the package lists for when you install MythTV later

if you're feeling really frisky, and want to take you system all the way up, you can do the whole shebang with

This will intelligently upgrade your entire system and try to resolve any weird dependency loops on the way. Worked pretty well for me getting up to debian experimental.

• Compile the latest Xfree86

  (4.4.0rc2 for me, but any 4.4.0 release will work in the future)
• This step is way easier than it sounds

After all that updating, as of 2004-02-02, I still hadn't gotten up to a version of XFree86 which allowed me to switch to the via driver. This should change VERY soon, and you may be able to skip this section. to find out, run

If its greater than 4.3.99, you're probably in business. Change your XF86Config-4 to use the via driver, and see if you can boot X.

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Card0"
        Driver      "via"
#      Driver      "vesa"
        VendorName  "All"
        BoardName   "CLE266"
EndSection

IF X FAILS

This is the trickiest part of the install, which actually, isn't that hard at all providing you know how to get X. This isn't made that clear by their site, and they will direct you to use CVS to download the latest source. Doing this is a bit risky, as CVS is constantly in flux, and happened to pull it down right as there was a compile-stopping bug comitted. I'm sure it was fixed later, but that's the problem with CVS.

They make experimental snapshots available as tarballs on the site, and that's the best thing to go with.

(substitue your file for the one here)

#tar xfvj XFree86-4.3.99.902.tar.bz2 
#cd xc
#make World >& world.log

For me, this is where I nearly tore my hair out. kdm started, and I could see the desktop for a second, and then it went away. kdm tried to restart several times to no avail. Something was wrong, but it didn't look like X was broken.

I tried startx, and was greeted with a desktop and the error kdeinit failed, check your install.

I exited out and played with a few things, and then decided that the first thing I should do was make sure kde was up to date.

i did

and

a new version of kde was available, and this installed, and the --fix-missing cleaned up a dependency error I had.

Determined to give it a shot, i edited /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to use the via driver, rebooted, and BAM! my working desktop was back, and I was really on the via driver.

I didn't take long for me to get mythfrontend fired up and connected to my backend server, and I was watching perfect video in second.

• Install MythTV

If, unlike my setup, you don't already have a mythbackend running on another server, you'll want to do the rest of the install right there on this machine. This is no problem, as we've already set up the repositories to include the servers where the apt managed mythtv packages reside.

Pretty easy, right?

There are some setup specific actions you must take, such as setting up MySQL and the other MythTV plugins, but the MythTV install is covered in much more depth over at MythTV.org so I'll let you venture over there for the rest of the install.

Hope this helps!

TODO:

Figure out and add section on Video Out - are their drivers options for this?

3:27 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |