MythTV

I have been using MythTV as my PVR since 2003 but I only brought it into full use in 2004 when the mvpmc project allowed me to use a Hauppauge MediaMVP as the front end.

I was lucky enough to visit PCWorld one day in 2004 when they were disposing of their last MVPs and I picked one up for £20. This is now the frontend that I use for my main television. The server runs the MythTV backend recording from the 2 DVB-T cards. These are configured to allow upto 3 simultaneous recordings from each card. I don't run the MythTV frontend software as I manage the recording schedule using mythweb from any of the PCs in the house or over the internet if we are on holiday.

Last weekend, 20th Nov 2009, I decided I wanted to be able to record from Freesat. One of the channels I wanted was not available on Freeserve so Freesat was the way forward. I ordered a Hauppauge Win-Tv-Nova HD-S2 from Amazon and it arrived the next morning. The next complication was that the satellite dish, already fitted with a quad LNB, was quite a long way from my Myth backend and I did not have a run of satellite cable between them. Easy, I thought, in the boiler house below the satellite dish I have a computer that I use to capture video from a couple of birds nest in the back garden. I'll make that into a slave backend.

The slave backend was running OpenSuSe 11.0 so the kernel was too old to have the module for the new satellite card. As it didn't contain anything of long term significance I cleaned it off and install OpenSuSe 11.2 and added another 200GByte hard disk to store the program files. Once this was done I moved it back to its normal home and did all the rest of the work over SSH as I always do with my servers. The installation of mythtv-0.22-fixes went well apart from a few dependencies that were solved using Yast. I now wanted to run this as a slave backend on my existing backend but I was running a version of 0.21-fixes from about a year ago so they were incompatible.

Ok ... next stage, I will upgrade the version of Mythtv on the master backend to match the version on the slave. That was easier said than done ... I was running OpenSuSe 11.0. on that machine and Mythtv need QT4 the libraries to compile. I did manage to find some and get Myth to compile, sort of, but I was getting some odd errors when I ran the setup program so I thought ... better upgrade this machine to 11.2 as well.

To see how the upgrade went see upgrade.

Once the server was back running and doing some of its important jobs I downloaded mythTV 0.22 fixes from svn again and compiled it. I am always a little annoyed when I do this on the server as much of the compilation time seems to be spent on frontend programs that I will never run. I'm sure there used to be a flag to just compile the backend but that seems to have disappeared now.

Before I ran mythtv-setup I restored the backup of the database I had made so that my program recordings and rules would be available. When I ran mythtv-setup the first thing it tried to do was upgrade the database schema. This went fine until it reached 1215 where it stopped.  Luckily someone else on the mythtv-user mailing lists had already found the problem and a solution had been posted. It is a bit complicated but it takes little time to do and the instructions were very complete. Once I passed this hurdle all went well and I was able to start setting up my system.

System setup

I will write some stuff here soon

Using a Slave Backend

I thought I would write a few things about using a slave backend that I wish I knew before I started.

The most important thing to get right on both the master and slace backends is the IP addess. I understand networking but I found the desciptions of the fields to be confusing until you understood what they were trying to say. My simple guide is

On the master backend make sure both IP address are the real network address i.e.  192.168.0.10 . If they are not the same or they are 127.0.0.1 the setup will not work.

On the slave backend make sure that you use the real IP address i.e. 192.168.0.11 for the backend IP address and use the address above i.e. 192.168.0.10 for the master backend address.

The slave backend needs to be able to connect to the remote mysql database and the mythtv documentation tells you the changes you need to make. When I created the mythtv database I was on autopilot so I only gave permission to access from the localhost. This had me going for a while. You need % not localhost.