The last time I installed MythTV I had the same problem with XMLTV. I don’t know if it’s something that I keep missing but after the installation mythfilldatabase never seems to works properly. The problem is that the XMLTV file containing the list of channels to fetch program information for never gets created. Luckily it’s easy enough to fix. What you do is take the name of the Video Source you setup in the MythTV Backend Setup program (in my case NTL) and then create a file in the directory $HOME/.mythtv called <video source name>.xmltv (e.g. NTL.xmltv in my case). When I refer to $HOME here I’m referring to the home directory of the user that you’re asked to create during the Mythbuntu installation. Within that file you list the XMLTV channel ids you want to retrieve program information for. Here’s what I have…

channel northern-ireland.bbc1.bbc.co.uk
channel northern-ireland.bbc2.bbc.co.uk
channel channel4.com
channel discoveryeurope.com
channel e4.channel4.com
channel livingtv.co.uk
channel mtv.co.uk
channel paramountcomedy.com
channel rte-1.rte.ie
channel rte2.rte.ie
channel 1.setanta.com
channel sky-news.sky.com
channel sky-one.sky.com
channel tg4.ie
channel tv3.ie
channel utvlive.com
channel nickelodeon.co.uk

This is the program listing for NTL’s analogue network in Dublin. Unfortunately (I suppose) Channel 6 isn’t available from the Radio Times XMLTV feed.

The second problem I had was configuring my wireless network card. The card I have is a Linksys WMP54G (version 4, PCI id 1814:0201). What I did was follow the instructions on this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper. When it comes to installing the windows drivers I used the files from the directory /Drivers/WMP54Gv4/2KXP on the installation CD that I got with the card. At the end of the process the card still wasn’t working. The problem was that a kernel module shipped with Ubuntu, namely rt2500pci, was getting loaded before (and hence interfering with) the module I wanted to load, i.e. ndiswrapper. To fix the problem I blacklisted rt2500pci and rebooted. The line I added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist was blacklist rt2500pci.

That’s it, a relatively easy install and nowhere near as timeconsuming or complicated as perfoming a MythTV installation from scratch.

P.S. another useful resource if you’re stuck is https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessTroubleShootingGuide.

After reading through the MythTV website and seeing what it could do I decided to see if I could get my own PVR up and running. The first decision I had to make was what Linux distribution to use. I already had Debian installed so I thought that might be a good start. I gave up on this pretty quick though because I had issues with package dependancies. Then I came across KnoppMyth. I don’t know why but every time I tried booting the CD it kept crashing. I tried a few times but gave up after a while. Eventually I came across this website (commly referred to a Jarod’s MythTV guide). It explains how to install MythTV on a Fedora system. It seemed to offer really good and detailed instructions so I went with it.

The next decision was what Tuner to go with. I already had an ancient Hauppauge Wincast card but I’m a glutton fot technology and I really liked the sound of the new Hauppauge PVR-350. After looking around a number of shops the cheapest I could find was at Amazon.

Here’s my hardware lineup…
Dell Dimension 4550
CPU: P4 2.8 GHz
Memory: 256MB
Video: ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra
Sound: Intel 82801DB-ICH4
Tuner: Hauppauge PVR-350

The first task was to install Fedora. I’ve installed quite a few distributions in the past but I hadn’t installed a Redhat distribution in years. I have to say, their install program is really good, by far the best I’ve seen. The whole install process was very quick and easy. The only problem I had (and I always have this problem with Linux on this machine) was getting ALSA (for sound) to work. The acid test was to see if I could get any sound by issuing this command…

/usr/bin/aplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Startup.wav

These are the changes I had to make…

• Added this ‘alias sound-slot-0 snd-intel8x0′ to /etc/modprobe.conf
• Muted everything in ALSAMixer except Master, Headphone, PCM. Set these to 74
• Disabled the KDE sound system, aRts (it seems to hold on to the sound device) Control Center->Sound System->Enable Sound System

After I got sound working I followed Jarod’s guide to the T. Everything went pretty smoothly but there were a few hiccups. I’ve summerized most of what I came across below.

1. In the section “Running X on the PVR-350′s TV-Out-” there’s s section on rebuilding your system’s initial ramdisk. Before running the script /sbin/mkinitrd-ivtv I had to edit it. I replaced the string tveeprom with tveeprom-ivtv.
2. I’m on NTL’s basic package so when I was setting up the channels in mythtvsetup these are the channels I used.

   Channel	Frequency ID	XMLTV ID
   RTE1	A11	rte-1.rte.ie
   RTE2	A6	rte2.rte.ie
   TV3	A9	tv3.ie
   TG4	A15	tg4.ie
   BBC1	A17	northern-ireland.bbc1.bbc.co.uk
   BBC2	A18	ireland.bbc2.bbc.co.uk
   UTV	A13	utvlive.com
   Channel 4	30	channel4.com
   E4	21	e4.channel4.com
   Sky 1	A19	sky-one.sky.com
   Sky News	A24	sky-news.sky.com
   MTV	A21	mtv.co.uk
   Discovery	34	discoveryeurope.com
   Nickelodeon	A22	nickelodeon.co.uk
   CNBC	A32	europe.cnbc.com
   Setanta	A20	1.setanta.com

3. One of my biggest problems was getting MythFrontend sized & positioned on the screen so that I could see all the fields & buttons. To correct this I went to the screen Utilities/Setup->Setup->Appearance->Screen Settings. These are the values I entered…

   GUI Width: 662

   GUI Height: 545

   GUI X Offset: 38

   GUI Y Offset: 10

4. My next problem was positioning the on screen display (OSD). What was happening was that the channel name and program information were half on screen and half off screen. After some reading I found that the problem was due to overscan/underscan. To correct this problem I went to the screen Utilities/Setup->Setup->TV Settings->Playback->Overscan. These are the values I entered…

   Vertical over/underscan percentage: 4

   Horizontal over/underscan percentage: 4

   Scan displacement (X): -8

   Scan displacement (Y): 0

5. My final problem was that the EPG wasn’t centered on the screen. To fix this I went to Utilities/Setup->Setup->Appearance->Screen Settings and ticked the box marked “Use GUI size for TV playback”.

Now that I’ve finally got my Myth box up and running there are only four remaing issues that I can’t seem to fix.

The first of these is channel changing. It’s taking about 3 to 4 seconds to go from one channel to another. Apparently this is normal behaviour. It’s to do with the way MythTV buffers the your TV signal. It’s a real pain though.

The second problem is that when you exit the program guide you get a black screen. You can still hear the TV but there’s no picture. To get it back I have to press a key on the remote that will refresh the screen, e.g. change channel, show program info.

The third issue is that I can’t get teletext. This is something to do with the PVR-350 I think.

My final issue is that I can’t control sound output from MythTV. What this means is that I have to use the TV’s volume controls. This works of course but it does mean I need two remotes, one for MythTV and one for the TV.