MythTV Project

This page is all about the process and duration of my creation of a MythTV box. For all you listeners at home, MythTV is an open-source package for Linux that allows one to turn a correctly configured box, requite with TV Tuner, into the equivalent of a TiVo (a DVR, for the unbranded). I plan to turn mine into a multi-purpose media server, for playing DivX and DVD's, music, and also acting as a FTP and web server. I will list my progress on this page.

Myth Box Today

7-7-2006

I bought my box today, for the anticipation of my MythTV project today, for $60. I had been hoping to get a decently powerful machine on eBay for extremely cheap, after noticing that hardware costs all over the board have dropped with extreme prejudice. The machine that I bought was a 1.6 Ghz Athlon XP, with 256MB of DDR RAM, a 20GB HD, and a crappy GeForce MX 200. It's pretty sad, though, because this machine is almost in the same power class as the machine that I currently own, which would probably go for around $300-350 if sold. Anyway....onward and upward!

Capture Card

7-13-2006

Next step in the MythTV project: capture card. I bought an extremely, extremely cheap Philips based card, a generic one, for $20. Most capture cards start at around $50 and go quickly above $100, especially for good ones, like the Hauppauge cards. The Philips chipset is Linux-friendly, and is supposed to capture video well, when properly configured.

Capture Card Arrives

7-23-2006

My capture card arrived a few days ago, but Leah and I were out of town for a little bit, and this was my first opportunity to mess around with getting the card to work in my vanilla Ubuntu installation.

First off, I installed the card in the PCI bay ( I know, duh...) and started up. I had read on the Ubuntu forums that these cards with the Philips chipsets would required the loading of the module saa7134, and that you would have to figure out what the card and tuner types were before you could pass in the information to the module at load time.

Upon first boot, the saa7134 module wasn't loading at all, and ALSA was blocking access to the card, which it had claimed as a sound device on boot, with the module saa7134_alsa. After doing an "rmmod saa7134", I was then able to "modprobe saa7134". However, it would not be this easy. Because this was a generic card, I had absolutely no information as to the manufacturer of the chipset that was inside the card, and the machine wasn't recognizing the chipset or the tuner type, and throwing an error as such.

I got out the list of supported cards from the Gentoo wiki, and after cross-referencing with the chipset that I knew it was based on (Philips 7130), and the TV type that it supported (NTSC), I was able to come up with a very short list of cards that would match mine.

I installed and loaded TvTime on my machine, to test the TV capturing capabilities of the card.

I spliced into the cable box and ran a line from the other Television into the basement, where I could then decide with the output results, whether my experimentation would be a success.

After trying combinations in the lower ranges like "modprobe saa7134 card=2 tuner=3", I finally got results with "card=3 tuner=3". However, these results were less than expected, as the video quality was awful, and even with messing with the cable frequencies, couldn't get more than a couple channels to come in at all.

Capture Card Correctly Configured

7-24-2006

After trying again last night to correctly configure the card card inside my computer to correctly view and record TV from the cable, I struck gold by going down the list of cards and tuners that I had made the evening before. I used
"rmmod saa7134"
"modprobe saa7134 card=2 tuner=43">
and then checked the output of the "dmesg | grep saa7134". Success!

I loaded TvTime and watched a bunch of different channels, configuring the resolution and output dithering features. Overall, it looked pretty good on the crappy CRT that I was working on. It should work much better on a TV, with higher dot pitch and whatnot.

Up next: compiling and installing MythTV, and configuring the hard drives to allow the live recording of TV. Also, figuring out lirc modulization for the remote control. Stay Tuned!