Zac Bowling’s Blog

Still waiting on my laptop to come back from Alienware. Going crazy. Got desperate and ordered all the parts to build a fairly cheap PVR using MythTV (~$600 from Newegg.com).

Specs:

• CPU: Intel p4 3.0Ghz
• Ram: GEIL DDR 400 (PC 3200) - 1GB (2 x 512M)
• HD: Maxtor 200GB 7200 RPM SATA (Recieved a Seagate but same spec oddly, oh well )
• Barebone System (Case/Motherboard/Powersupply): JetWay MiniQ 868AV
• DVD: ASUS IDE DVD-Rom
• Video Out/TV Out ATI Radeon/A.I.W. 9600 (AGP)
• TV In: LifeView FlyVideo 2000FM (NTSC /w Philips Tunner installed)

After installing Ubuntu (had a live CD from Hoary and ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ to Breezy), I installed all the relevant drivers. ATI Radeon was an AIW and I wanted to use GATOS for the driver but unfortunately, GATOS can’t do video capture in my version of X. Not to mention GATOS tv out seemed to be out of sync with my TV. Installed the ATI binary drivers and they worked (no tv in though in AIW ).

Thankfully I planned ahead and got the FlyVideo out. It was a $40 TV card (not great but it seems that all the super low end and the super high ends cards seem to be supported but very few mid range TV cards will even work in V4L, but I’m guessing that’s because of the time and effort it takes to work on these cards and the limited number of real vendors of the chipsets).

Took some work to get the little saa7130/4’s chipset to work under Linux. Tuners are a big issue in configuring on since the vendor changes tuners all the time with the FlyVideo’s. Had to write a shell script to rmmod the kernel module, modprobe it in with a different set of parameters, run a test to see if I had a signal, and then loop if it failed to detect. After an hour I figured out I had the 39th or 42nd tuner (can’t figure out which but both seem to work) in the list of tuners know in the kernel module.

Tvtime works no problem from the apt in Ubuntu. I tried the packages for MythTV but they seemed not to work for me. I tried to use the last stable of MythTV but it was broken as well. I then tried the latest SVN version of MythTV. Success!

Just for kicks I tried Freevo but it was a pain to setup. I’ll stick with MythTV for now. I’m also looking into ways I can make a basic PVR in Mono using remoting for a backend/frontend communication system. I just wish I had a bunch more time to tinker on this. Works for now but I hope to get back to it.