MythTV Upgrade

I have just completed an upgrade to my MythTV box. I originally set it up in 2007, basing it on Mandriva 2007.1, and it's been running mostly seamlessly since then. I have had occasional problems with session management, in which multiple frontends would start upon boot, but after some tinkering this became a matter of routine maintenance. However, I've been more recently interested in leveraging the streaming options of my NetFlix subscription, and unfortunately, they do not support streaming to Linux. I understand that this must be due to contracts with the content providers, who insist upon DRM. I wish there were a better solution to this, but I honestly don't have one, and the more pragmatic issue was that I was disappointed with my inability to stream video to my family room TV.

A few days ago, I was browsing the Web and came across a mailing list post from earlier this year in which the author describes how he configured NetFlix streaming in MythTV by way of running Windows XP within VMWare Player. I usually use VirtualBox for all my virtualization needs, but the mythtv-users thread suggested that there are impassable audio barriers with VirtualBox that don't show up with VMWare Player. I have a spare Windows XP license, so I installed it on my myth box about two weeks ago. There is a sense in which it worked, but it was painfully slow: the machine only had 512MB RAM on a Sempron 3000, and trying to do anything with VMWare Player caused hard drive thrashing with swap access.

Poking around my closet of abandoned hardware, I found a case from my previous desktop machine and booted it up. Finding everything in working order, I picked up a 1TB drive on a Newegg Thanksgiving deal and proceeded to transfer the Myth hardware to the other box. This one had 2GB RAM and an Athlon 64 3700+, a vast improvement of memory and a significant improvement of processor.

Unfortunately, getting the new system installed was not as seamless as I hoped. I tried many different distributions and each one ended up with some kind of problem. The odd thing is that moving the old hard drive into the new shell worked just fine, and I was able to check that the hardware configuration was working. However, Mandriva 2007.1's ALSA drivers were too old to work with VMWare player, and so the audio was garbled when streaming video.

After quite a bit of tinkering, I started doing more diagnostics of the installation media themselves, and I found each to have an error. It appears that the burner on my workstation cannot accurately burn 700MB CDRoms. Who knew? When I took the ~700MB image and put it on a blank DVD instead of a blank CD (and swapped the graphics card, which may or may not have made a difference but definitely reduced noise), the installation went more smoothly. I still had to specify "nomodeset" as a kernel parameter in order to get to an installer, but now I have a nice shiny Mythbuntu 10.10 installation working great.

Two unexpected changes from the old installation: First, my USB wifi device worked automagically, without having to download any extra drivers or anything. Huzzah! Second, my StreamZap remote control was automatically recognized as a keyboard, but it was also configurable through the Mythbuntu control center. The odd result was that I was getting double input for the four arrow keys. After some digging online, I discovered that I could just comment out the arrow keys in the ~/.lirc/mythtv configuration file, and now it's working fine.

One of the nicest features I originally set up was for the machine to wake itself up to make a recording and then shut itself down afterwards. This way it doesn't have to be an always-on machine. On the Mandriva 2007.1 installation, this was enabled through nvram-wakeup, and because my motherboard was not in the database, this required a good deal of tinkering to get set up correctly. By switching to Mythbuntu and a newer motherboard, it is all done now with ACPI calls. Specifically, I followed the instructions for configuring ACPI wakeup on the mythtv wiki, and this worked like a charm.

Installing Windows on VMWare Player was not a problem, but hooking it up with the MythTV frontend was not as easy as described in the mailing list. I had an odd situation: if I opened a terminal through the desktop environment (XFCE), then I could run vmplayer with no trouble. It generated some warnings, but it started and run without issue. However, if I launched a terminal from mythwelcome or via the mythfrontend button, running vmplayer would generate the same error messages but then do nothing. After many fruitless attempts to fix this, I asked the resident Unix expert in the department, and he suggested I use printenv in both terminals and diff the results. I had been trying to do something similar but in a much more awkward way—always nice to learn a new *nix command! After a few failed attempts, I discovered that by unsetting GTK_PATH, I could start vmplayer consistently.

So there you have it! I have a machine that boots faster, runs quieter, and allows me to watch streaming Netflix movies from the comfort of my living room. It also has four times the hard drive space, so my son can record as many Dinosaur Train episodes as he wants without my wife's America's Test Kitchens needing to be deleted to make room. My original build four years ago was supposed to be built of spare parts, but it ended up costing me about $400 due to my hardware being faulty or having the wrong interfaces. This revision only required purchasing a bigger drive, and the rest was accomplished with existing hardware and elbow grease. Thanks to the Myth community for all the excellent software and resources, thanks to Spencer for the Unix help, and thanks to Paul for the TV tuner cards that allowed me to build it at all the first time.