Pat's Blog

Thoughts on Mythbuntu 9.10 (MythTV 0.22)

Patrick Davila — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:09:38 +0000

I’ve been running Mythbuntu 9.10 on both my main MythTV box and frontend Zotac Ion box for a couple of weeks now. Here’s a breakdown of what I like and don’t like:
Likes:

Support for the Hauppauge PVR-1212 HD capture device. This is huge and I’m very happy a mainline Linux distribution finally supports this device out of the box. Now that most people are getting their HD content via encrypted digital sources this device is the ONLY viable option for most. The device works as advertised and my recordings (HD & SD) look great. The PVR-1212 is poised to become the defacto capture device in MythTV.

VDPAU support out of the box. VDPAU is huge. Being able to offload playback of HD & SD h264 and mpeg2 videos to a graphics card processor is a game changer. This enables very low powered machines to handle HD playback without issue. The little Zotac Ion box (Intel Atom processor) I put together works great as an HD outputing MythTV frontend. Playback is crystal clear with no audio sync issues whatsoever. Simply amazing! Because of this Nvidia graphics cards are the only logical option when putting together a MythTV based HTPC system. None of the other graphics cards manufacturers have anything like it. It’s so good that Windows users running Boxee or XBMC are migrating to Linux based setups.

The new Qt4 based interface is a huge improvement. The developers have based their entire interface on the completely re-written MythUI. MythTV now has the tools to compete against the slick interfaces of Boxee and XBMC. It no longer looks dated like a Tivo or SageTV interface. Slick custom themes and fan art can be incorporated fairly easily and more uniformly now. In the coming months you’ll see some sweet looking skins and themes coming down the pipe for MythTV.

MythBrowser has been completely redone. It’s actually pretty usable on a tv now. It’s webkit based and can handle flash. This is a huge improvement over it’s previous incarnations.

Shutdown choice from the main menu. This is a such simple thing but makes a huge difference in user experience. Being able to cleanly shutdown your system via a tv remote is a must for any serious HTPC solution. Oddly it appears only on my frontend system. What gives? It should be on all MythTV systems.

Dislikes:

Ext4. Not really a dislike but more of a concern. While ext4 just flies on a regular desktop it’s a bit of questionable choice as the file system for a MythTV system. Previously Mythbuntu used XFS for the recordings partition. This makes sense as XFS is suited for large files. I think video recordings in the 2-8 gig size range qualifies as large. Hopefully the early file corruption issues that plagued ext4 with large files doesn’t come back to haunt this choice. Only time will tell.

The installer. As previously discussed in my last post the Mythbuntu installer has some serious issues that need to be addressed. Nothing ruins a person’s first experience than a bad installation process.

MythMusic. While not a Mythbuntu specific issue it is a MythTV issue. The music player is just plain klunky and outdated. Setting up music playlists is very counter intuitive and a total pain. Check out the audio player in XBMC for a simple and slick audio application in an HTPC solution. Mythbrowser got a great re-write with MythTV 0.22. Mythmusic should be the next item targeted for a re-work in MythTV 0.23.

Mythbuntu has a great centralized configuration application called MCC (Myth Control Center). One of the cool things you could do with MCC was setup diskless frontends from your main MythTV system. The diskless management tools seem to have disappeared. What gives?

Overall MythTV 0.22 is a great leap forward. Great things continue to come down the pike from one of my favorite Open Source projects. Mythbuntu 9.10 while having some minor deficiencies is still overall ahead of the crowd. It is the first MythTV specific Linux distribution shipping with MythTV 0.22 and the 2.6.31 Linux kernel. For that alone they should be commended. I’m really ecstatic to be able to finally make the Hauppauge PVR-1212 the centerpiece of my home theater experience. VDPAU is a simply amazing and Nvidia should be commended for making it available in the Linux driver for their products. People should take notice.

Mythbuntu 9.10 (MythTV 0.22) installation

Patrick Davila — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:31:16 +0000

In my previous post I mentioned accidentally upgrading my MythTV system to Myth 0.22 via the Avenard repos. I had some serious issues that pushed me to decide to do a clean install on both MythTV boxes I have. I moved any recordings I hadn’t had a chance to watch to my MythVideo folder on my server and backed up my database. The Mythbuntu site recommends the following:

1) Get your MythTV database password with the following command:
cat /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt | grep DBPassword

2) Backup your database with the following command (it will prompt for the password from step 1:
mysqldump -u mythtv -p mythconverg > mythtvbackup.sql

3) Copy mythtvbackup.sql and all other files you want to keep to another drive

4) Install Mythbuntu 9.10

5) Copy all the backed up files onto the computer:
mysql -u mythtv -p mythconverg < mythtvbackup.sql

This would allow me to restore all my recording schedules once my system was all setup cleanly. Perfect. Part of my new setup would be removing my Hauppuage PVR-150 capture card as my main recording device. I’ve had a Hauppauge PVR-1212 waiting in the wings for some time now. This device lets you record from any HD outputing STB (set top box) via component connections and is supported out of the box with the 2.6.31 Linux kernel. Ubuntu 9.10 is one of the first mainstream Linux distributions shipping with this kernel. So the plan was to migrate the main Mythbox down to the mancave and move the small form factor Zotac Ion box up to the family room. I hooked up the main Myth box to my HDTV down in the family, inserted the 64 bit install CD and started the machine. I see the boot splash then the screen goes black. MMM LinHES lets you install from the couch with only a remote without issue. I then disconnect my system and hook it up to an LCD monitor via DVI. That seems to work ok and I’m presented with the option to either install directly or go into “Live CD” mode. I choose the former and the installer starts up and goes about it’s business. Around 98% completion the install just stops and drops back into the live desktop. What just happened? Did it complete successfully, did it fail? I restart my system after removing the installation media. The system starts to bootup and gets to a terminal login and the screen is flickering wildly every 2 seconds. I try logging in but I’m unable to. I restart the installation process again this time choosing “Live” mode. From the desktop I click on the “install Mythbuntu” icon. The installer runs all the way through this time indicating 100% completion. All is good. I first configure my QAM based HDHomerun tuners. I create a separate Schedules Direct lineup just for the QAM channels and assign them numbers in the lower 800’s range. My cable company recently killed it’s analog feeds and re-ordered all the channels. As a result the cable company is going from around 30 HD channels to over 100 literally overnight. Unfortunately I can still only access 6 HD channels (OTA networks) via QAM. I’m o.k. with that as long as I can get everything else via the PVR-1212. Setting up QAM capture devices is still tedious but not terribly complicated once you’ve done it previously. Next up was setting up the PVR-1212. Just select it as a supported capture device in ‘mythtv-setup’. You have the option of doing basic stereo audio or doing 5.1 capture via an optical audio connection from your STB. I kept it simple and just went with stereo. I next selected my new reorganized cable line-up from Schedules Direct. Prior to doing the actual install it’s good idea to review what channels you’ll actually get from your provider. In the Schedules Direct website you can omit individual channels. This will save you bandwidth and storage space on your system. Why pull down guide information every night for channels you don’t get? You will need a channel changer script of some kind for your STB. During my initial setup I just entered /bin/true as a dummy entry (as per the wiki). I have an HD cable box so I opted to use a firewire channel changer for the very first time. Up to this point I have always used IR blasters. Most people like the Mythchanger firewire script. I downloaded and compiled the script. From the commandline I was able to change channels by issuing the following commands:
/usr/bin/mythchanger -f 6 -c 1169

I used the -f 6 flag for my specific cable box (Motorola DCX3200) as instructed by the script’s README file. -c 1169 is the channel I wanted to change to do. Everything seemed cool so I went back into ‘mythtv-setup’ and replaced
/bin/true
with
/usr/bin/mythchanger -f 6 -c

I then setup a bunch of recordings using my PVR-1212. The MythChanger script seems to do the job just fine. Before watching anything you need to make sure VDPAU is setup correctly. Go in the media settings and select tv playback. Makre sure VDPAU is selected. I selected “VDPAU Normal” and then tried the different de-interlacers listed. On both my main box (Nvidia 8600GT) and my Zotac Ion (Nvidia 9400M) the ‘Bob 2X’ de-interlacer delivered the goods. Playback was ultra smooth on any format (mpeg2, h264) and resolution (480, 720, 1080) I threw at it! No stutters, hiccups or audio sync issues whatsoever. This post is getting long so I’ll talk about my thoughts about what’s new in Mythbuntu 9.10 and MythTV 0.22 in upcoming posts.

Karmic mysql upgrade gotcha

Patrick Davila — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:14:37 +0000

I just upgraded my Ubuntu server to Karmic Koala and had an issue afterwards where mysql refused to start at bootup or when manually restarting it. I checked out my logs and found an error related to ’skip-bdb’. Normally when I upgrade my server I keep my configuration files untouched. Apparently the new version of mysql no longer supports BerkleyDB. So if you do keep your current mysql configuration files after upgrading comment out the following line in ‘/etc/mysql/my.cnf’:
#skip-bdb

Once you do that mysql should start up without any issue. Hope this saves you some grief.

Upgraded to MythTV 0.22 a little sooner than I planned

Patrick Davila — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:13:41 +0000

I’ve been running Mythbuntu 9.04 (MythTV 0.21) using the Avenard repo’s to get the VDPAU goodness for some time now and have been very happy. Yesterday the system updater ran and decided to pull down the 0.22 RC1 packages in the Avenard repository. During the upgrade I got a message stating “your DBSchema is 20 versions old. Do you want to upgrade?”. I click yes and the database update craps out along the way. On subsequent attempts I get the same message. I posted this message on the mythtv-users mailing list and a short time later I was presented with a workaround that fixed the issue (thanks to Michael Dean). I then reran mythtv-setup and my system was now functioning with 0.22! The new Terra theme is very nice but is very different than the existing themes. The side scrolling menus take a little bit getting use to. VDPAU is turned on by default now and continues to deliver with HD playback goodness (with minimal CPU load). I did notice a bug in Mythmusic where the frontend crashes when deleting existing playlists. I was able to reproduce the same bug two more times with the same result. Yes, I have filed a bug ticket in the MythTV bug tracking system. Another odd thing I noticed was while playing the sample h264 HD recordings made with the PVR-1212. For some reason when the playback starts it’s in 3x speed. Simply clicking the right arrow (as to skip ahead) resets the playback to the beginning of the file at normal speed. Mind you 0.22 is not final and there are some bugs being addressed by the developers. I hear they’re planning to get this completed prior to the release of Karmic Koala at the end of next week. I also upgraded my Ion frontend box to 0.22 as frontend and backends have have to all be on the same version. I’ll post any other odd things that pop up as I use it. While I was originally planning on not upgrading until 0.22 was officially released I have to say it’s pretty sweet to finally have it running on my machines.

My very late OLF report

Patrick Davila — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:32:02 +0000

I know OLF was a couple weeks back but I never got around to talking about it. As usual it was an absolute blast. Lots of cool people and good conversations all around. I led both the Android and MythTV birds of a feather sessions. Me and Dan Frey recorded the MythTV BOF and released it as an episode of the MythTVCast. Unfortunately I did not get to see Dann Washko’s talk on the Linux boot process. I hear he did an excellent job. This shouldn’t be surprising as Dann used to always give very presentations at Lehigh Valley LUG meetings. This was my fourth year in a row going to OLF. Honestly if I come back for the 5th I think I want to do a presentation. Otherwise I might pass on it. I definitely want to got to the Southeast Linux Fest next June in S.Carolina. I can only go to so many Linux conferences. My job won’t send me to Linux conference so I have to use up my vacation time. We streamed live again this year from OLF and I was able to get 3 episodes completed with all the material we had. So far the feedback on these episodes has been very positive. People have complemented me on the content as well as the audio quality of the shows. It’s very satisfying getting positive feedback from listeners regarding these episodes since I handled the production duties. I think everyone was most shocked at how well Dann behaved this year. He was under some major pressure to be on his best behavior once he was selected as a speaker. OLF is a great conference. So many great talks and just a great general atmosphere from being around other Linux geeks. The Linux community does not disappoint.

My Slackware 13 review

Patrick Davila — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:22:05 +0000

Well Slackware 13 was released a few weeks back and I had a chance to install it on my laptop. I ran Slackware as my main Linux distro for about 2 years. It’s reputation as being stable and solid are well earned. If you run Slackware for any significant amount of time you will learn the intricacies of how Linux works. The packages that come by default in the latest version of Slackware are pretty up to date and an official 64 bit distribution is now available. I opted for the 64 bit version and was off to the races. The Slackware installer is ncurses based and is pretty straightforward. The only part a noobie might have trouble with is using fdisk to manually partition their hard drive before installing the OS on it. Once you have partitions setup just go with the default package set for a desktop install and you should be golden. The install is pretty quick (as most Linux installers are these days). I’m not going to get too detailed so I’ll list what I liked and didn’t like.
I liked the following:

This thing screams. KDE on 64 bit Slackware is sooo fast

A very nice selection of default applications

Everything seems very stable. This is Slack, what do you expect?

I didn’t like the following:

Slackware STILL uses lilo as the default boot manager. Come on guys get with the times and use grub/grub2!

By default Slackware does not have a package manager that does dependency checking

Slackware should have Gnome as an option during the install process

Now I have been very critical of Slackware in the past for not having a package manager that does dependency checking by default. This is huge weakness when comparing it to other modern Linux distributions. Chess Griffin along with other developers have created a great utility call Sbopkg that will build packages for Slackware from the Slackbuilds repository. This is a huge boon as it addresses one of the most glaring weaknesses of Slackware. I was able to install a bunch of applications for my system without much fussing. Now there are nowhere near as many builds available as the huge amount of packages in the Debian/Ubuntu worlds but this is extremely helpful to anyone who wants to use Slackware as a desktop/workstation. If you you’ve never run Slackware I highly recommend trying it out.

Finally got vpnc working!

Patrick Davila — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:33:47 +0000

For the longest time I’ve been using the CiscoVPN client for Linux to connect to my job’s vpn when working from home. It functions o.k. but there are some annoyances. Every time a new Linux kernel came down the pipe you had to rerun the installer script. It basically creates new kernel modules compiled with the newly installed Linux kernel. Also Cisco doesn’t seem to update the Linux version of their client very often and there are some issues on newer kernels. People in the community have provided patches that generally work. It’s just a hassle that Cisco doesn’t seem to care about it’s users who happen to run Linux. One other annoyance is that once the vpn is running you can’t even access your home directory through your file manager. VPNC runs in user space so no new kernel modules are required every time you upgrade your kernel. Also I can still access my home folder without a problem. The only issue I’ve encountered is this known bug where you get a resolv.conf error after using vpnc the first time. Simply following this workaround fixed the issue.This is a huge win.
Bye bye Ciscovpn!

Hacked my G1 and put the cyanogen rom on it

Patrick Davila — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:55:43 +0000

I’ve had my G1 since June and absolutely love the Android operating system. The fact that it has a Linux kernel and is open source software is the icing on the cake. While the G1 is great it still is the first Android phone and has some limitations. Besides the battery life the only real negative of the G1 is that you only have 256 meg of internal memory to install applications into. I’ve hit the max amount of applications I can install. While Google pushed out the 1.5 revision of Android a few months ago there is no guarantee that 2.0 or beyond will keep supporting the G1. There are tons of newer Android phones hitting the market that leave the G1 in the dust as far as capabilities. There are a bunch of programmers out there who are creating their own customized versions of Android and making them available. The advantages of these images is that they often exceed the capabilities of the official ROM images. One of the most popular is created by a developer by the name of cyanogen. His website has links to his customized Android ROM images plus some very useful utilities he’s written. Installing a third party ROM image means backing up your current image, rooting the phone and wiping clean your phone. This is probably the best how-to I’ve seen around on how to do this along with some videos of the entire process. The entire process didn’t take very long. I recently purchased a 16 gig sdhc card for the phone and put a 5 gig ext4 partition on it. The cyanogen image now automatically places all installed applications into this partition. The amount of apps I can install has now increased by 20x. You can still purchase and use paid applications with this customized image. Another cool benefit of having a rooted phone is I can tether my laptop to my phone and to access the internet. There are also bits of Android 2.0 incorporated into the latest cyanogen ROM image. The only real negative is that you won’t be getting updates through t-mobile. Not a big deal if the rumors of the G1 not longer being supported in upcoming Android releases are true.

10 Reasons why Identica is cooler/better than Twitter

Patrick Davila — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:31:10 +0000

Identica doesn’t have spam. Spam from companies. Spam from posters being forced to spam their contacts for some stupid contest

Identica can survive a denial of service attack. During a recent attack on the internet Identica kept humming along while Twitter and Facebook ground to a halt. Identica follows a distributed model

Identica is completely open. Anybody can download an install the software to run their own Identica (Laconica) server. Twitter is closed software

All the cool people are on Identica. I’m a member of the F/OSS community and like to communicate with my peers. Do I really care about what book Oprah is recommending this week? Do I really care what Ashton Kutcher has to say? No, not really

Identica is licensed under AGPL and all the user content is under Creative Commons attribution

Identica won’t sell your user information to third parties. Twitter openly sells your information to whoever they please

Twitter has suffered from some major security vulnerabilities (user accounts being compromised)

Identica supports tagging within posts

Identica allows you to follow a conversation on a single page. No other service currently supports this

Identica supports bookmarklets

Check out this comparison of Identica and other micro-blogging services.

Tivo goes apeshit and sues everyone in sight

Patrick Davila — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:37:09 +0000

After successfully suing Dish Network for $104 million last year Tivo is now suing Verizon and AT&T over alleged DVR patent infringements. While I am no patent attorney I find this development pretty disturbing. Tivo was an early innovator in the digital recording device market but now has much stiffer competition. Satellite and cable companies offer integrated devices for monthly fees. Software based commercial solutions like SageTV, BeyondTV and Windows Media Center require their users to install the software themselves on the hardware of their choice. Then there are F/OSS projects like MythTV and Freevo which are geared towards the real hardcore do-it-yourself type. How far Tivo takes these lawsuits is the big question. Will they eventually go after end users or just stick to companies with deep pockets? Will they even bother with F/OSS projects if their lawsuits are successful? Interesting enough Tivo lost 146,000 subscribers during the last quarter. This downward trend started in January 2006 and has just accelerated in poor economic times. Perhaps the product life cycle theory should be changed to include suing the competition over patents to extend it’s profitability? Regardless this case just emphasizes the need for patent reform in this country. The technology to record a tv show has been commercially available since 1965. Just because the recording sits on a hard drive instead of an analog tape is not that “innovative”. Troubling to say the least.