zen.org Communal Weblog

About a week ago we were able to display live TV thru the box, but the remote didn’t work and we couldn’t move through channels. It’s much happier now. Problems that still need to be fixed:

• Sound for non-AVI video files is out of sync
• The X display is bigger than the TV screen
• I have to switch the audio output between the Shuttle’s L/R audio out for video files and the audio out of the PVR-350 for live and recorded TV.
• I need a way to make MythTV be able to change channels on the NTL Pace 4001NC box, which reportedly uses RC-5 protocol for the remote. Given that, we can also record everything coming from NTL Digital Cable. There is one cool serial hack that on its main page seems to clearly indicate it will work with my box, which after some clarification is confirmed to work with it. So we’re ordering one now and will share the results once we’ve got it.
• Sometimes after a reboot the live TV doesn’t work for more than a few seconds, and more notably the name of the tuner and the current time don’t appear at the top of the screen. After only a minute or two, it goes back to the menu. If I restart mythbackend, it’s then all happy and can keep going.
• The PVR-350 can accept the FM antenna; can MythTV record radio shows too into mp3 format? A google for “MythRadio” has a few hits for recent conversation. But anything I’d try for this has to wait til everything else works. 🙂

What we’ve got now is pretty usable for day-to-day stuff, with the one physical hurdle of having to use an audio switch box to change which of the two audio sources actually gets emitted. There must be a system/MythTV fix, or we could just get some sort of an RCA jack Y-joiner/junction thing to accept output from either one…Hmm….

Some details on how we got it working:

1. The remote problem was because /etc/lircd.conf defines particular names for each button like

   
CH+ 0X00000000000017E0
CH- 0X00000000000017E1
VOL+ 0X00000000000017D0


   The entries in ~/.mythtv/lircrc need to match those names in some fashion. I just had to change
   
begin
prog = mythtv
button = chanup
repeat = 5
config = Up
end

   to instead have
   
begin
prog = mythtv
button = CH+
repeat = 5
config = Up
end


   This helped improve watching live TV or shows recorded by the box. But we were stuck when watching a video file like an MPG (which has its own problems anyway) or AVI file; you couldn’t get it to return to the menu after starting to watch it.

2. I came across Adam Rubin’s description of how he made the remote more usable with MythTV. So I just needed to give ~/.mythtv/lircrc a few entries like
   
begin
remote = hauppauge_pvr
button = Pause
prog = mplayer
repeat = 3
config = Pause
end

   to help improve things.
3. The file ~/.mythtv/NTL Basic Cable.xmltv contains the final list of channels I’m using. It omits the pay channels.
4. I had to make /etc/rc.d/rc.local do modprobe ivtv so the driver, and its ivtv_fb framebuffer driver, are all loaded up before anything else. I also added the lines
   
/usr/X11R6/bin/xset -dpms
/usr/X11R6/bin/xset s off

   to make it stop having a blank screen until I hit a key on the (tucked away) keyboard.
5. My final /etc/X11/xorg.conf file makes everything show up on the TV from the PVR-350’s S-Video feed, but the X display is still just slightly larger than the TV screen. When I’m going through the MythTV setup menus it’s impossible to see the selection boxes along the left side.
6. Playing AVI files using the default mplayer now works by giving it the options
   -ao oss -vo x11 -nocache
   However, playing MPG files doesn’t work quite as well. I found others talking about this and how audio seems to come out directly via the sound port, but the video is going through the MPG decoder first. I did find some bits in the MythTV Digital Sound HOWTO and put them into my ~/.asoundrc. But I’ve not spent enough time looking at it to remember how to make MythTV use that, as opposed to the default /dev/dsp device.

So far so good; much more productive than the efforts with KnoppMyth, seemingly just because the version of the mythtv stuff is much more up-to-date.

I gave a shot at the Fedora Core 3 approach as written out at Fedora Myth(TV)ology after replacing my CDROM (the old one was making a lot of bad noises) and burned the four Fedora CDs to just install directly instead of my repeated failed attempts to install over the network. Now things are going much much better. Last night I did my first successful test of watching current TV on the screen, and there was The Matrix being shown perfectly, with sound! How ironic.

Over at NTL I found a list of the basic cable frequencies for the channels. I was able to use them to find the right frequency codes as listed in /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/Video/Frequencies.pm and a channel.sql file from someone else (it’s late, I’m not sure who) with the XMLTV IDs for each channel (which are now their domain names) and end up with this sort of list:

Discovery Chan = 48 MHz = A1= discoveryeurope.com
Channel 4 = 56 MHz = A3= channel4.com
E4 = 64 MHz = A5= e4.channel4.com
RTE2 = 176 MHz = A7= rte-2.rte.ie (This used to be n2.rte.ie)
TV3 = 184 MHz = A9= tv3.ie
RTE 1 = 192 MHz = A11= rte-1.rte.ie
UTV = 200 MHz = A13= utvlive.com
TG4 = 208 MHz = A15= tg4.ie
BBC 1 = 216 MHz = A17= northern-ireland.bbc1.bbc.co.uk
BBC 2 = 224 MHz = A18= ireland.bbc2.bbc.co.uk
Sky One = 232 MHz = A19= sky-one.sky.com
Nickelodeon/Link/Euronews = 248 MHz = A20= nickelodeon.co.uk
MTV = 256 MHz = A21= mtv.co.uk
Sky Sports 1 = 264 MHz = A22= 1.sports.sky.com
Sky Premier = 272 MHz = A23= premier.sky.com
Sky News = 280 MHz = A24= sky-news.sky.com
CNBC / Pay Per View = 408 MHz = A32= europe.cnbc.com
Sky Sports 2 = 304 MHz = A27= 2.sports.sky.com
Sky Sports 3 = 312 MHz = A28= 3.sports.sky.com
Sky Movie Max = 312 MHz = A28= moviemax.sky.com (Note this is the same frequency, bug at NTL site?)
Pay-Per-View = 352 MHz = A31= ??

(Update: If you’re getting “NO DATA” when you visit the listings for a channel in MythWeb, but you know you’ve got it correct in the Channel Editor, you’ve got channels missing for the Video Source you created earlier. Channels like “Channel 4” and “UTV” weren’t being accepted in the terminal window when I was setting up the video source at first. But I just put “channel channel4.com” and “channel utvlive.com” in ~/.mythtv/NTL Basic Cable.xmltv and that fixed it—a rerun of mythfilldatabase and now they’ve got their shows listed properly. I wonder why it wasn’t liking the channels?)

Oh, we don’t get any of the pay channels so I skipped adding those, but they’re here in the interest of completion. And I wonder why SO many broadcast frequencies are unused by NTL?

I ran mythtvsetup and used its Channel Editor to add all of them, setting the values for each (using RTE1 as an example) like this:

• Channel number: 6
• Callsign: RTE1
• Name: RTE-1
• XMLTVID: rte-1.rte.ie
• Frequency ID: A11 (They only one on the 2nd screen that I changed.)

Anyway, MythTV is looking great and even easier to use. I can only guess the KnoppMyth stuff I was using before was just a bit old. No stresses about XMLTV getting the right info, no problems making MythWeather show Dublin including a Weather Channel satellite image, the works. Anyway, I’ll make an effort to share the bits I did that divirge from the instructions I was following (and send them to Jarod Wilson for consideration in his instructions at the same time).

After restarting mythfrondend I’m able to move between channels (with right-arrow and left-arrow on the keyboard) and also jump back in shows (up-arrow and down-arrow). The text at the bottom is still too big even after following some steps to fix them.

And the biggest continuing problem: I’ve got X set up to do 720×576, and I ran “/usr/bin/ivtvctl -f width=720,height=576 “, and still things are missing around the edges. At first login the menu/task bar at the bottom is half-missing. With mythfrontend running I change a channel I see the text at the bottom describing the show, but parts to the left, right, and bottom are off the screen.

What’s the fix? I’ve got a Sony RV-25X5L television which in theory should display things correctly, right?

The other catch: the remote isn’t working yet, though I can run irw and it reports events when I press a button on the (Hauppauge new grey with black back) remote. Unsure why the mythfrontend isn’t getting them yet. The remote worked when I was doing the KnoppMyth approach. More later.

The January 2005 of Linux Format magazine included a DVD with a full copy of the Fedora Core 3 Linux distribution on it. (And Ubuntu Linux, which I’m going to check out separately for something else.) Today I figured I’d try using it to take a shot at Jarod Wilson’s great HOWTO on how to use MythTV under Fedora. However, after four different tries, I was never able to do a network install. (The DVD drive is on my desktop system, and I have a CD I burned a while ago with the first CD image.) After the first attempt failed, I worked my way through the candidates…the wireless bridge used to network it, then the wireless access point it talked to, then rule out wireless completely. Nothing. It just stalls during a random download. I go to the other virtual terminal (Ctl-Alt-F2) and I can ping the system involved, or even wget the very file it’s hung downloading before. Hmm.

I’m now using the Distros/FedoraCore/mkiso script to create the four CD images; it did them in less than five minutes. Instead of actually burning anything, I’ll put those on my external drive and see if I’m able to successfully use it via firewire or USB as the “local disk” for the various images used to install it.

The inclusion of mkiso and every little piece you need for a proper install of Core 3 is really cool. Kudos to the folks at Linux Format for another great DVD to avoid wasting broadband bandwidth. 🙂

I succeeded in getting the (better) ivtv framebuffer driver working, but my previous impressions of the mpeg were wrong. Still looking choppy, and to top it all off I wasn’t getting any frequencies to work. Harrumph. This has taken way, way too long. I should stop using such old stuff, depending on my further research to progressively move things slowly forward to more stable and reliable versions.

I found a cool writeup by Jarod Wilson of how to set up MythTV on a system running Fedora. I’ve already got Fedora Core 2 on CD on the shelf in the office, so I think I’ll bail on the KnoppMyth idea for now and give those instructions a run with a fresh install. I’d even been considering doing Win98 + the software bundled with the card to qualify the card as functioning correctly, but then as I was passing the Wasters in the Fourth Great Circle of Hell I pulled myself out and came up with an alternative that I can live with.

Next update will be the initial results of doing everything under Fedora, based initially on Jarod’s notes. Fingers crossed.

Only by reading thru some messages in the forum on SourceForge did I discover that the 0.1.9 version released January 13 2004 isn’t the actual stopping point in development. Over at ivtv.no-ip.com are the real ongoing copies, including 0.2.0-rc3 from December 12th and an alpha-level (I presume) version 0.3.0. WOW. Its install.txt file even concurred with something I’ve read elsewhere: ivtv shouldn’t need any special parameters for its module anymore. It should figure out my system’s PAL nature, among other things.

I put the new 0.2.0-rc3 stuff in place, and a test of

cat /dev/video0 > /tmp/my.mpg

resulted in about 6 seconds of snow when I watched it on another machine. No sound yet either. However, it had consistent snow, no frame loss that I could see. Oh, hope of hopes. I’ll add a channel, give it a try, and report back. Later today I’ll try to write up the details of exactly what I’ve done and how I put the new version in place on top of the KnoppMyth I’m running. But I wanted to at least share this positive news, and the detail that isn’t yet appearing on the SourceForge project page or even on the ivtv parent page. A real shame when you figure there have to be plenty of other people suffering the way I am—including one person who wrote me just this morning.

I tried doing

   chmod u+s /usr/bin/mythbackend /usr/bin/mythfrontend

to see if it would make the display of the show actually work properly. No dice. I wonder now if there’s an issue with the X display properly using the Hauppauge card? I worder if there are hardware options available on the card that my XF86Config should use to make things go more quickly.

Actually, I suspect the first thing I should do is check out the latest ivtv driver. Build it, make it reboot to load it (I’ve not been able to make the module unload, try as I might). One helpful comment from someone suggested that I shouldn’t be forced to do quite the level of custom settings in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv as I have been. The newer driver reportedly does a lot of the work for you, so you don’t have to specify which card, PAL vs NTSC (I’m suspect of the chances of this), etc.

Just a matter of time. I’ve got to get this working in the next couple of weeks, or I know the holidays will make me not touch it again until January. That would just be ridiculous. 🙂

Haven’t been able to work on the TV pvr-box much for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully this coming weekend I’ll be able to attack it with furvor. I want to fix sound, and get all of the channels going. A friend sent me their MythTV channels list, in the great form of SQL commands. That means I’ll just have to do a bit of editing, and I can recreate the appropriate databasese in MySQL to let it have everything it should need.

My friend Declan and I messed with it a bit last week and I was able to make a single channel show up properly. Well, that’s not exactly right. The picture is skipping frames a lot. I got an AMD Sempron 2600+ 1.833 GHz CPU for this, which I thought would be plenty for what it’ll be doing. But I’m suddenly suspicious that in my efforts to be frugal, I undercut the ability to make the box work properly.

The rest of the hardware in this is:

• Shuttle SN45GV2 Barebone PC box (I love this thing now and want more of them 🙂 )
• 512Mb of Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM memory
• nVidia-based GeForce2 GTS video card with 64Mb of video RAM
• Maxtor 250GB Internal Hard Drive, 7200 RPM
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 Personal Video Recorder PCI card
• external Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge, version2 (whatever that means)
• random CD-ROM I had lying around in our attic (you don’t want to know the volume of junk up in that attic…

Cross your fingers that nothing will eat up the time on Saturday or Sunday.

On an impulse, this morning I switched the input line into the tv-box. I plugged the tv-box’s input line to instead go into the TV, to see just what the tv-box has been getting. Messy, snowy, though not quite as severe as was appearing on the tv-box. That’s from using the wall plug for NTL basic cable apparently. (I wonder if the tv-box itself is emitting enough distortion to cause it?)

There’s also a coax cable coming from a separate box on the wall for NTL digital cable. That line goes to a small splitter where the guy who installed it made the signal both go to the regular (fly plug it’s called?) plug on the TV, and also to the input on the NTL digital cable box (made by Pace). Fine, I made the tv-box’s cable plug into that little splitter for its input, instead of the wall. Tried the tv-box’s cable now into the TV again, and voila, a nice crisp picture. Hmm.

I put the cable back into the tv-box, so it’s now getting that nice crisp picture as its input. I make the TV show me the S-Video coming from the tv-box. It’s certainly better, though it is still a bit snowy and jerky, and it only shows a channel ‘1’ with no channel title on the bottom of the screen. Something else must be screwed up. I ran mythtv-setup again saying ‘yes’ to the question, “Would you like to clear all program/channel settings before starting configuration?” Then again created a new Video Source named “NTL”, choosing “United Kingdom (Alternative)” for its channels. Down to terminal window for adding channels where ps shows me that it ran

	  tv_grab_uk_rt --config-file '/home/mythtv/.mythtv/NTL.xmltv' --configure

But it’s not the happiest; it gave me the prompt

	  Enter the name of a channel, or '.' to finish selecting channels: BBC1
	  Which channel to add?  (I hit Return here)
	  Died at /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt line 257,  line 4.

Maybe a bug? Fine, I’ll get the latest version of the script to see if it fixes the problem of not listing the channels matching your search string, like the previous KnoppMyth-included version did. I have to first install CVS since KnoppMyth doesn’t include it by default: apt-get install cvs. When it asked about location of the repositories, I left the /var/lib/cvs default and on the next screen, chose ‘ignore’ to not worry about not having any. Also told it to not enable the CVS pserver. Great!

Now we can get the file:

	cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmltv login
		(ignoring the warning about .cvspass not existing yet)
	cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmltv co xmltv
	cd xmltv
	perl grab/uk_rt/tv_grab_uk_rt.PL new-uk /usr/share/xmltv
	as root:
	  mv --backup new-uk /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt
	  chmod 755 /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt

Looking at the diff between the versions, I see that the tv_grab_uk_rt script is now calling ask_choice instead of ask about which channel to add. That was the fix so it now properly lists the matches for ‘BBC1’ or ‘RTE1’.

Back into the Channel Editor we go, now add RTE1 again (since we didn’t get past creating the Video Source), added RTE1 using A11 for both the Channel Name and Frequency ID, but on the third screen asking for the frequency in Hz I left that blank, as well as not modifying the subsequent screen. Then re-ran mythfilldatabase. Much more quiet now (a few messages about wide characters for perl’s IO/Handle.pm line 147, but nothing else). For whatever reason, it’s still invoking

	  /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt --days 1 --offset 0
                --config-file /home/mythtv/.mythtv/NTL.xmltv --output /tmp/mythuZ2Jfu

which has me curious since one of the sites yesterday had a comment about making it understand that it’s getting a full two weeks of information in the radiotimes.com output now. Perhaps I need to rebuild mythfilldatabase to make it understand that? Yeesh.

After a while it’s made it to October 21 in getting the program information, but it’s also still giving the

	Duplicate entry '1000-2004-11-03 22:15:00-678-' for key 1

error. Oh well, more tonight maybe.

Heh, this is a blog catagory turning into a ChangeLog.

After some crazy effort, I can now visit the URL

	http://p/program_listing.php

and it correctly lists the shows on tonight on both RTE1 and TV3, the two channels I’ve added. It turns out all attempts to use ‘tv_grab_uk_rt’ as included in the KnoppMyth R4V4 that I installed are going to fail. I came upon notes both on the MythTV Users list and the XMLTV site. It turns out radiotimes.com, the site used by the perl script to get airing information, started to block the User-Agent that the script was using to identifying itself. But they were really cool—instead, the’ve put the information for the next two weeks available in raw XML format.

So I had to download the newer XML 0.5.35 from the XMLTV SourceForge page. I built it by doing

	  tar jxf xmltv-0.5.35.tar.bz2
	  make Makefile.PL
	  make
	  make test          (this does tons of them)
	  make install

Following the examples on those mailing list sites, I ran

	tv_grab_uk_rt --configure

and then invoked

	tv_grab_uk_rt

That seemed to be getting useful information finally, so I invoked my old friend

	mythfilldatabase

but it gave me errors of the form

	Updating icons for sourceid: 1
	Unknown xmltv channel identifier: rte-1.rte.ie
	Skipping channel.
	Unknown xmltv channel identifier: tv3.ie
	Skipping channel.

How odd. Some more reading, and I discovered my mistake—if you look at the channels.dat file that radiotimes.com gives the script, you can see that they’ve changed the format from what it used to offer. Instead of just “231:RTE-1” it now says

	rte-1.rte.ie:231:RTE-1

In the mythtv-setup Channel Editor, I’d thought I was so clever figuring out that I had to put 231 in the ‘XMLTV ID’ field for RTE1. Those identifier errors above helped me realize that it was searching based on the first field in that file, so now the ‘XMLTV ID’ should be the server name, like rte-1.rte.ie for RTE1. Fine, I fixed both RTE1 and TV3.

Some more swimming with Google and I found a discussion talking about exactly this problem. I went into the Channel Editor, and for both RTE1 and TV3 I changed the “Channel Number” and “Frequency ID” entries to be A11 for RTE1 and A9 for TV3 (based on what was in the pal-ireland file I mentioned earlier). The fundamental change being made with this was that my channel number of “1” for RTE1 and “3” for TV3 seem really wrong after reading all of these sites, including this most recent discussion page.

Having the frequency entry in both fields may be correct, but there’s no obvious change yet. I just tried looking at either channel, and they’re both snowy and hard to see. Though I’ll admit the RTE1 channel has more color and movement on it compared to the grey/white mess that was there before. TV3 looks the same as it did.

Wonder what I’m missing? That’s all right—the fact that it’s getting the show information is a big positive step for only a little amount of effort today.

Last night I spent some time wrestling with trying to tune in a channel but no luck. MythTV has a ‘FrequencyID’ part of the channel page under mythtv-setup, but I’ve not yet verified what it’s supposed to be. I tried putting in the frequency for RTE1 that is shown on the NTL Frequency List. That didn’t quite do it. With a little digging, I then discovered /usr/share/xawtv/ and next tried “ptune.pl -f pal-ireland A6“. Almost! It showed a snowy picture of what I later found to be TV3 with a football match (soccer). But it was really hard to see, and more interestingly it was moving in bursts. Like the system couldn’t keep up with it and was dropping frames. Hmm.

Running MythTV by hand as the mythtv user, I saw:

2004-10-19 19:15:07 Running as SUID root would allow some threads to run with realtime priority, improving video smoothness.
***
* Your system is not capable of displaying the
* full framerate at 720x576 resolution.  Frames
* will be skipped in order to keep the audio and
* video in sync.

That’s what makes me suspect both about what’s in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv but also if I’m missing a bit in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

I’m digging around for the efforts of others, including a helpful HowTo about using KnoppMyth with a PAL signal. With some instructions on installing with the Hauppauge PVR-350, I found that by running tveeprom I’m able to get this in /var/log/messages (or dmesg):

Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: Hauppauge: model=48135, rev=J324, serial#=2760998
Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: tuner=Philips FM1246 (idx=24, type=1)
Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: tuner fmt=PAL(I) (eeprom=0x10, v4l2=0x00000010)
Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: audio_processor=CS5331 (type=9)

Ok, that tells me the tuner type.

I also discovered the /etc/init.d/set_ivtv_params script. It will set the various parts of the video device for me if I put the correct values into /etc/sysconfig/ivtv/cfg-0. So that now has the right values of

	IVTV_TUNER='1'
	IVTV_TYPE='PAL'

That choice is backed up by the header /usr/local/lib/ivtv/driver/tuner.h which lists the different tuners, with my choice being

        #define TUNER_PHILIPS_PAL_I 1

That matches the PAL_I sticker on the replacement PVR-350 card that I got the other day. A step closer?

Well, I think so; with some grepping, I discovered /usr/local/lib/ivtv/utils/videodev2.h, which would seem to suggest I honor the value of V4L2_TUNER_ANALOG_TV which is 2. Hmm. Well, for the moment in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv I’ll try out

	options tuner type=2 pal=1

but that seems to contradict the suspected value for IVTV_TUNER. Gahh. Time to read more sources I think. There’s lots of good stuff under /usr/local/lib/ivtv.

I’ve put copies of each of these files online so others can see them, and I’ll be keeping them in sync with what’s really being used:

• /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
• /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv
• /etc/sysconfig/ivtv/cfg-0
• /etc/init.d/set_ivtv_params

(Any suggestions on how to better offer these are welcome.)

Now /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv contains

	alias char-major-81 videodev
	alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
	alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
	alias char-major-81-1 bttv
	alias /dev/v4l ivtv
	options ivtv debug=1 ivtv_pal=1
	options tuner type=2 pal=1
	options saa7127 enable_output=1 output_select=1 pal=1
	options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
	add below ivtv msp3400 saa7115 saa7127 tuner
	add above ivtv lirc_dev lirc_i2c ivtv-fb

Anything look really wrong?

I think when I’m all done and have this actually working, I’m going to create my own HowTo combining the efforts of the others, but also including links to example files for everything. And then pitch to have those included in some future release of mythtv. If everybody wants lots of people to be able to use and enjoy this cool stuff, there are still a few things past the great KnoppMyth packaging that have to happen. At least, for anybody who’s not in the US. Wouldn’t it be cool if KnoopMyth let you choose (or even click on) where you live, and have it auto-configure most of the stuff that really doesn’t need to be done manually? And no command-line mythfilldatabase invocation?