Adam & Amber’s Blog

About a week ago I saw this post on mythtvnews.com and was immediately inspired to try hacking together a mythtv frontend for our bedroom TV (connecting to the backend/frontend mega box we have on the living room TV). I have been using MythTV on the TV in the living room for over a year and I love it, it is the perfect one stop media box for us.

The specs on the frontend/backend in the living room are:
Quad-Core Pentium
2 Gigs RAM
2 TB Storage
6 Tuners (4 Standard Def, 2 HD on HDHomeRun)

Point is it is a beast of a machine, but we use it all of the time for recording/watching tons of TV, it holds our entire DVD collection, it holds my entire (non-DRMed) music collection, it holds a gallery of all our pictures, we use it for weather, internet radio, and as our print and file backup server. Which is all great in the living room, but we have two other TV’s in the house that are used frequently and we really wanted to bring all of that media to them as well. I had been looking at running mvpmc on a MediaMVP box as a good low cost solution for these TV’s, however it does not have a full MythTV frontend and has no prayer of being able to play HD. As a fill in solution we have been using MythTV Player which is a windows program that can play recordings off the backend along with accessing the movies and music over samba share. It was a workable solution, but HD did not work over the wireless and it meant watching TV on a laptop which isn’t a great bedroom solution.

When the Apple TV came out (as when any media playing device comes out) the entire MythTV community started asking if it could be hacked to run Linux and what kind of MythTV performance could be expected. Just on face value the Apple TV looks like a perfect MythTV box, it has Ethernet, HDMI, Digital Audio, Component Out, Analog Audio, an IR Sensor, and a USB port.

On the Inside it has:
1.0GHz Intel Pentium M
NVidia GeForce Go 7300
256 MB DDR2-667 RAM
40 GB Hard Drive (min)

It is definitively not a heavy-weight in the power department, but considering it is in a small elegant package and is passively cooled it is not bad. The question was, is it good enough? After reading the mythtvnews post and doing a little research I decided to try it for myself. I ran to Best Buy, laid down my $229 dollars and was ready to start.

What I did

I decided that I would try the Gentoo install following this wiki page. I chose Gentoo for two reasons, I liked that I would be compiling everything for the hardware and I wanted to learn about Gentoo (My other MythTV box is an Ubuntu install). There are other options out there (including Ubuntu) and even some that work in conjunction with the Apple TV software so you don’t have to loose the Apple TV functionality. Seeing as how I really just wanted MythTV and I wanted it to perform as best it could, a Gentoo clean install seemed like a good path.

As far as the Wiki HOWTO, it was pretty good. From looking around online you can see the sources that were pulled from to compile it, and sometimes they have a little more information. For me it worked great up until getting into the thick of the Gentoo Install, specifically after booting onto the live system (no USB patchstick) and attempting to install everything. Most of my issues were because I had never used emerge before and had to stumble a few times before I got everything configured correctly. After getting everything installed I ran into a couple issues getting the sound to work (the wiki explains how to get digital sound working, I needed analog) and getting XvMC and MythTV to play nicely together (looks to be related to the MythTV version I installed). However, after 12+ hours of time spent compiling (it is just a 1 GHz processor) and another 6+ hours of time on my part debugging and learning about Gentoo, the system is up and running.

Conclusions

First off, this little box is impressive. It can play HD, stream movies, and is pretty snappy (not like running on a quad-core but good enough). However, I will say that hacking the Apple TV is still in it’s early stages and while all of the information is out there on how to do it, it is definitely not for the faint of heart or the easily frustrated. Many of the threads that talk about problems end abruptly with no solution and sometimes you have to look at other distributions Wikis and translate it to the one you are using. Of course this is a problem with finding help on any Linux install, but with the scarcity of sources on doing this the frustration can be amplified. I imagine that all of the information will mature in the coming months and the Wiki pages will get more complete. I would be interested to hear if people have an easier time with Ubuntu (I imagine so) and if the performance is as good.

I currently have only one issue left to resolve (getting XvMC to play nice with MythTV) and this looks more to be a legitimate bug somewhere then a problem related to Apple TV.  Even with this problem I can watch up to 720p HD with no issues, it is just the higher resolutions that are choppy.

Links to information sources

http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/
This is the boot loader project that makes all of this possible. The have some good information in their Wiki and also the config options to using inside MythTV to get HD to work.

http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/wiki/PostMythbuntuHardy
The “Audio” section here is where I found the fix for Analog sound. Everything else I found told me I had to patch and recompile the Alsa driver, this is much easier.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-690419-view-next.html?sid=2878926708a80088c6b2048b61927580
This forum post (and the bug reports it links to) is the closest match to the issue I am having with XvMC.  Unfortunatly following the directions did not fix the problem.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_NTP
Setting up NTP in Gentoo (Time Syncing)

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_LIRC
Setting up LIRC in Gentoo (I did not try to get the remote that came with the Apple TV working, too few buttons).

So I realize that it has been a few months since I started this thread of posts, and it is my goal to get them finished up soon.

The first hurdle we had to get over was life without digital cable, having been in that mode now for a few months I am here to tell you that digital cable is not all it is cracked up to be.  I am getting ahead of myself though, what did this change mean to us?

1. No Pay channels – We had them all, Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, even Starz, Encore, and TMC.  My original plan was that I would get Netflix to offset losing these channels and the hole it would undoubtedly leave in my life.  Honestly though, it hasn’t bothered me enough yet to warrant that.  The nice thing is, it is always an option once winter rolls around.
2. No HD – This was surprisingly easy for me to live without, I hit a few quality issues (that I will talk about later), but all-in-all tv is tv and none of it’s entertainment value comes from it’s quality.  The flip side here is that HD is always an option on the MythTV Box, so if I start to miss it I can always put it there.
3. No Upper Channels – This was really easy, didn’t change my life at all….good riddance.
4. No On-Screen Guide in Bedroom – The Moxi still attached in the living room, we didn’t have this problem, but in the bedroom were we went from a cable-box to nothing, this was an unexpected adjustment.  It kind of brought me back to being a kid and just organically memorizing channels and basic schedules.  The nice part is that because it is in the bedroom there are only a few thing we normally watch anyway.
5. Channel Surfing – The one absolute positive.  Digital cable is great, but God bless you if you have the patience to channel surf with the infuriating delay between channels.  Take away the Digital Cable, I get my channel surfing back

This simple change dropped a little over a third off our cable bill (cost of the MOXI went up when I dropped digital cable) and we survived just fine.  Now onto the fun stuff!

After this weekend I am complete with Step 1 of my MythTV Project. On Saturday Jon, Andy, and Jim came over and helped me get the upstairs wired up for ethernet. This is not a glamorous part of the process but it allowed me to add a very small amount of value to the house and make it much easier to hook everything up later. I also took this opportunity to upgrade our wireless router to hopefully help our connection issues.

The Supplies

Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router
SMC SMCGS8 Gigabit Switch
cat5e Cable
Faceplates with two ethernet and one coax ports

The Work

There are a few goals for this project:

1. Wire the living room and two bedrooms each with 2 ethernet ports.
2. Move the Cable Modem and Router up to the living room to help signal strength and resetability
3. Install a switch to serve internet and provide a high speed network to the living room and bedrooms

The original thought was that we could easily replace all of the coax jacks by attaching a string to the coax cable, pulling them down, attaching the two cat5 cables and pulling them back up. A perfect plan, unfortunately I failed to study my basement well enough to realize that all the coax cable is routed up through one location and run around the house on the main floor. This meant that we would instead have to do it the hard way, by drilling a hole in the floor and using a couple hangers to pull up the cables. Keep in mind that there are all external walls and so we had to do all of this through the wall insulation. On top of all this we had to route all the cables through the floor which involved lots of drilling and grumbling by Andy.

In the end it took us about 3 hours to get it all done and more importantly gave me my invented reason to put in the order for the MythTV Components which I will spend much more time on soon.

The Reason

I was looking at our cable bill last week (something I rarely do thanks to autopay) and I noticed that it was really high. Now granted we get everything, we have basic, expanded basic, digital, the sports tier, the family tier, Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, Stars, Encore, TMC, HD channels, a digital cable-box, and a DVR. As I said, we get everything and we pay ~$130 a month for it (which is about $30 more then when we originally signed up). The thought I had that made me realize that we need to change is that expanded basic costs ~$50 a month which means that we pay $80 a month for what? Digital, Sports Tier, and Family Tier have a bunch of stuff that we never watch (minus Nogin, Amber loves Degrassi). The premium stations are great, but we watch them for maybe 5 hours a month, hard to justify the cost for that when Netflix could serve the same purpose. The HD Channels are a little tougher, I really enjoy HDTV but our TV doesn’t do a great job with it (switching between 16:9 and 4:3 is not the best). We have started keeping it in 4:3 mode and noticed that the difference is tolerable, besides there is always over-the-air if we miss it. The digital cable-box is useless without digital cable so that is an easy thing to let go of. That just leaves the DVR, we got the DVR a couple years back and it is a very important part of our TV experience.

Our cable company uses the MOXI DVR which isn’t the greatest but works well. It is Dual HD-tuner, an 80 Gig Hard Drive, an OK menu interface, and that is pretty much it, nothing really to get excited about. It is very sad to say but we actually have issues with the Dual Tuner setup, there are times when we have 3 programs that we want to record at the same time, or a sporting event we want to watch live when two other programs want to record. Also, we have issues with things getting deleted before we can watch them, not all the time but we also have been trained to watch/delete fast. Even with those imperfections it is still the greatest component in our entertainment center, but at ~$20 a month it is kinda expensive ($240 a year!) and doesn’t fit into our move to free ourselves from monthly entertainment costs so it must go.

The Solution

We are now hypothetically down to just the $50 a month expanded basic setup and a hypothetical savings of $80 a month (almost $1000 a year!) all without really losing anything, which is kinda sad. The one thing we have to find a replacement for is the MOXI DVR and that is where the MythTV Box comes in. MythTV is an open source PVR, meaning that the software is FREE you just need to have the hardware and patience to install it. MythTV does almost everything the MOXI does, multiple tuner support, VCR controls for live TV, scheduled recording, and even supports HDTV (over-the-air). On top of that it can support a much larger number of tuners, I can put whatever size Hard Drive(s) I want into it, will hold our MP3 collection, we can rip our DVD collection into it, it does automatic commercial detection/skipping, much smarter scheduling and conflict resolution, web interface for remote scheduling, ability to watch recordings on any PC, and it is a Linux computer so it can double as a file server to backup our photos (that can be shared with and displayed through MythTV) and print server to allow us to do wireless printing to our printer (yes, we have a printer in the living room). Not only is that a run on sentence, it is a lot of good reasons to build the box.

The Plan

I should start by saying what my experience level is. I have built 2 computers from scratch, personally I think most people can figure this part out if they are willing to do a little research, be fearless about trying things, and have some technical friends that can help them through it. I have a novice level of experience with Linux, I don’t currently have any Linux computers at home but I have installed/run it in the past, used it throughout college, and I program in a Linux like environment at work. As that point eludes to I am a programmer (or if you feel proper a Software Engineer) this gives me two advantages to the average builder. 1) I have a really good feel for technology and software. 2) I have access to many people who are equally as geeky and have built, are building, or plan to build a MythTV Box.

Enough about me, what is the plan?

1. Upgrade our home network. This means purchasing a cable modem (saves us $5 a month off our cable-internet bill, which is $60 a year, considering the one I got cost ~$45 this is a no-brainer), wiring our main level with CAT5 (this allows us to put extender boxes in the bedrooms when we get to that point), install a gigabit switch (allow fast wired connections between the rooms), and upgrade our wireless router (don’t even get me started on our current one). This will be the framework for the rest of the project.
2. Get rid of everything except the MOXI. This is the deprivation test, can we survive without the extra cable? (Oh the problems we face)
3. Build the MythTV box. This is the fun part, finding, purchasing, and assembling the hardware. If this part doesn’t excite you then MythTV might not be for you.
4. Install Linux/MythTV. This is the part that will take some time in order to get everything perfect.
5. Extend MythTV to other TV’s. This is one of the best parts about MythTV, multiple “frontends” can use the same “backend” this means that with a small box you can access all the features of the main box in any room. This also means that we can save ourselves some cable degradation by having all our TV’s work over the network. This will help with some reliability and signal issues we have had in the past.
6. Never touch it again. This is the end goal, I want this to be an appliance, a black-box that I forget is a computer. The other major test is Amber’s comfort level with it. Amber is very Tech savvy for a teacher but would have little patience for me having to SSH into the box to kill a runaway process. Point is, it needs to just work or we will have to look elsewhere.

That is the plan, I hope to write about each step along the way and let everyone know how it is going. The network supplies should be going in this week, so look for an update soon.