Gadget Wisdom

As the third part, and for now, the final part, of our multipart series, Better Know a MythTV configuration, we profile the second of our MythTV frontends. This frontend is the older of the two, and is hooked into some home theater equipment for a more immersive experience.

Now, with all of these systems, bear in mind they’ve been designed, redesigned, expanded, etc. But we are, by no means wealthy over here. Some concessions have been made, and parts upgraded and replaced as financial and practical considerations demand it.

The current system was built when HDMI was still at the upper end of hobbyist grade. Now, many computer monitors and amplifiers include HDMI switching. This system was designed originally with component video in mind, at the cusp of our upgrade to HD programming. It is set up for expansion, and likely will be, piece by piece in the future.

As you can see, we’ve continued our modular Ikea furniture theme from the other setup. Originally we did have a more conventional audio rack here, but switched to these two separate pieces. The router, the Silicondust HDHomerun, and the modem are actually stored in the bottom of one of those cabinets, and the glass door hides a tape deck and could hide additional equipment. An IR remote control would actually work through that glass.

Both rooms where you see the frontend setup were designed as possible backend locations. The whole goal of a redesign we implemented over the last two years was to allow us to rearrange the equipment in a variety of ways depending on changing need. For example, we moved a file cart to the right of the setup to show the wire hookups for relocating the backend if needed.

The receiver is located on the right, and is an inexpensive Yamaha that incorporated all the features we wanted at the time. On top of the frontend you can see what looks like an old style radio. It is that and a record player. It adds to the character of the room, in our opinion.

Then we finally get to the frontend itself. The case seen is long since discontinued. The closest current model is the Antec Fusion NSK2480, which is a newer version of what we actually have. Like all of the others, this system also has an Asus motherboard.  There is another CrystalFontz 635 LCD panel in this system, this one in Green. We prefer the blue, which is why we got it for the second panel.

The processor is an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+, which was retired from the backend during a previous upgrade.  Both frontends have 2GB of RAM. RAM is fairly cheap nowadays anyway. The remote is an RF Snapstream Firefly.

The screen here is a 23″ Westinghouse LCD with DVI and Component inputs and a maximum resolution of 1600×1200, mounted on a swing arm. This is one of the pieces we are hoping to expand soon into a larger, higher resolution with HDMI inputs, which will certainly, if nothing else, allow a thinner cable down to the computer.

You can see under the monitor the Left, Right, and Center channel speakers, the right speaker nestled in between Tux the Linux Mascot and the Time Machine, which we recently bought on a whim. The configuration of the room, a long rectangle, is not 100% conducive to a home theater design. To the left of the image is a window, and thus the positioning of the monitor and speakers is the only way to make sure viewing isn’t on top of the monitor, and that optimal viewing and sound is accomplished from either the couch, placed on a long wall, or a chair placed in the center of the speakers.

The rear speakers are not pictured, but are placed in the traditional isosceles trapezoid configuration, oriented according to the limitations of the space, again planned to surround primarily a person seated in a chair in the middle of the room. Under the shelf that holds all the speakers pictured is a through-the-wall air conditioner, which is why the units that hold the equipment are not placed against it. As mentioned, some of the decisions were made due to the configuration of the room. If anyone thinks they might have a better idea, please suggest it, as we’ve yet to figure out a superior layout.

So, that is it for now. We certainly have expansion hopes for the future, including to migrate to a monitor with an HDMI input, and possibly the receiver as well. Someday we’d like to try an Atom-based frontend, for the size of it.

Hopefully, you’ve gotten some ideas for systems of your own. What we’ve learned over the years is to build simply, but build room for expansion and redundancy. Any questions?

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• MythTV Rig: Part 1 – The Backend (gadgetwisdom.com)

As part of the first of our multipart series, Better Know a MythTV configuration, we profile our MythTV Backend.

Our MythTV backend has gone through a lot of changes over the years. The first iteration was in a yellow server case on wheels. We went through a period of overbuilding, and the yellow version of the case was $17, the other colors were all closer to $100. We probably have a picture of that iteration somewhere, and will post it if it is ever found.

The current iteration, pictured left, is an Antec Three Hundred Mid Tower Case. This model is rather unique in that the power supply is at the bottom of the case, as opposed to the top. It was the first tower we ever had with that configuration. As you can see in the picture, there is space for 2 120mm fans in the front, right in front of the hard drive bays, and there is a washable filter in front of them. The top has a 140mm fan. and the back another 120mm fan. We used the quietest fans we could, but it can be heard as a low hum in the room. There is room for a side exhaust fan, which was have not installed.

There have been several generations of interior boards since the beginning. The current is an Asus board. The thing runs 24 hours a day, so we opted for one which, according to reviews, had high quality capacitors and good build quality. The computer runs headless, so we opted for a board with an onboard graphics card. There was no need for a discrete one when it was never used.

The processor is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+. At the time of purchase, it was the highest speed AMD processor we could get that used 65W of power. Everything else used 95W or above. For our next generation, we are considering going to a higher speed, but low power Intel processor, but we’ll see where the market is when we decide for replacement.

A powerful processor is not inherently necessary for a MythTV backend. If you have a video encoding device that does its own encoding with significant use of the CPU, you could run the thing off of a low-power processor. But if you want to transcode some of your files into a smaller format for long-term storage, it helps to have something that can handle the extra load.

The system has 8GB of RAM, which is overkill, but the RAM was relatively cheap, and easier to install than the processor. Then we get to the hard drives. There are two 500GB drives in a mirroring RAID. So, in the event of failure, the system can go on. Only a small amount of the space is needed for the operating system and the MythTV database. The rest stores important data, our music collection, and any long-term video files.

To store active uncompressed recordings, we are currently taking advantage of MythTV’s storage group function. It distributes the recordings between two Green drives. These drives spin at 5400RPM and are supposed to be more power efficient. One is a WD 1TB and the other a Samsung 1.5TB. Because of the design of MythTV’s storage groups, files can be moved between any of the directories named in the storage group without pausing the server.

This means if one of the drives shows pre-failure, which we recently had, we can move the files to the other drive and take one of them out of commission. We also ensured that the system has an ESATA connector, which would allow us to plug in an external drive and add it to the storage group to keep the system running if we need the extra space.

The computer has two optical drives, and this was originally planned to allow for having one drive used to burn a rewriteable DVD on a time schedule, which would be rotated manually out of the system and placed in backup. That never happened, and at some point in the future, one of them will be replaced by a blu-ray burner, to allow for larger optical backups.

Support for firewire channel changing is what convinced us to dive in fully into MythTV. Originally, the output of the cable box fed into a PVR-150 capture card. Then, firewire recording became more reliable, so the PVR-150 was mostly retired. Finally, when the cable company changed its software and both capture and channel changing became unreliable, we switched to the tried and true infrared channel changing and high-definition capture using the Hauppauge HD-PVR box.

As having only one cable box and HD-PVR would mean we couldn’t resolve any conflicts, we have a Silicondust HDHomerun hooked directly into the cable lines, tuning any unencrypted channels, which are mostly local and public access stations. And, in the event cable goes down entirely, we hooked a line to the old roof antenna, disused for over a decade, and hooked it into an inexpensive card that could tune Over-the-Air digital. Digital Broadcast is often higher quality than the same channel over the cable lines, due to compression, so if you are an HD purest, you probably want to try to supplement your cable with digital broadcast.

The backend, as referenced before, also downloads video programming via MiroBridge and integrates it into the recording menus. This may change as time passes. Speaking of software, our system runs a non-graphical installation of the latest edition of Fedora, currently 12. We periodically update the system after a new release of Fedora has been released long enough for us to feel comfortable upgrading.

We upgrade by making a backup, then moving all the data from the RAID to the recording drives, wiping the RAID drives, installing the new OS, and moving the data back. The whole process takes a few hours, and most of it is waiting for the installation or copy to complete. Most configuration is already setup and just needs to be restored.

Here’s a wider shot of the system. Last year, we redecorated the room in early Ikea. The backend, codenamed Freshpond, sits on a rolling file cabinet called a Mikael. There is a sound baffling like material under it to prevent scratching, which is a cut piece of Ikea drawer liner. One of these days we may switch to a desk blotter or such for aesthetic reasons. There are both pros and cons to having the system off the ground. Next to it, you can see a printer and one of the two MythTV frontends currently operating. Behind that glass door is the HD-PVR and the cable box.

More on the first frontend, seen in the picture, in Part 2.

Like many, we constantly think about refinements to the system to improve it. Sometimes this is new hardware, sometimes consolidating redundant systems, and sometimes software improvements. For example, in addition to the once hourly check for new internet video from the RSS feeds we monitor to import, a separate job also searches for audio podcasts we have told it to monitor and downloads them.

Ultimately, like any hobby, maintaining the system takes on a passion. But for those of you looking to build a system, it really doesn’t take that much day to day effort and the basic setup is simple. More advance concepts…well, you can always ask someone who has done it. Like us, for example. Comments welcome.

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Recently, Geektonic featured a showcase of a MythTV setup. It has inspired us to break out the camera and take some pictures of our own equipment. You’ve already seen some screenshots from our MythTV setup, but coming soon, we’ll be offering some shots and specs on our current equipment setup, as soon as we clean it up.

In the meantime, check out Rothgar’s MythTV setup, courtesy of Geektonic.

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• So You’re Thinking of Trying MythTV (gadgetwisdom.com)

Earlier today, on the MythTV Users list, contributor Robert McNamara announced that he and Doug Vaughan(who wrote JAMU and the TVDB grabber) are working on a new plugin for MythT called MythNetVision.

MythTV has had Internet video plugins before. MythStream was one of the earliest. We never could quite get it to work consistently, and it hasn’t been rewritten for MythUI, and those won’t work under MythTV 0.22. None of these have ever been included as part of the official MythTV package, which this has the potential to be.

From their description, it would have the following features:

• Easy to Extend with Scripts so New Sites can be added. Adding a site would be as simple as parsing an API or site and formatting each item as an RSS article in the output of the script. Parsing happens in the background as long as the frontend is open to keep information current.
• Support both media which is web-only (by spawning a browser directly to the playback link) and downloadable (by threading off a download and playing in the internal player as soon as enough data is buffered). Also supports external players.
• Like other MythTV plugins, completely themeable.
• Compliant with the Terms of Service of the websites it uses and shipped with a number of popular sites already supported. Scripts would only be distributed that were totally compliant, but other scripts could be added separately, outside of the distribution.
• Two parts: An internet video search and an internet video browser.  Plans to include a “tree view” for a site by dumping the video
  RSS feeds for the site into a grabber config file (adding Revision3 as a fully browseable site would be as simple as dropping the RSS feeds
  in the grabber config).
• All existing grabbers return full screen, autoplay results when they are available and the API allows. When not possible, the best possible result is played.
• Downloadable media will be integrated into recordings.

There is a screencast video that can be viewed here. They hope to release by MythTV 0.23, but possibly sooner.

McNamara used the following sites as Examples of sites that should be very easily (and legally) implemented: Comedy Central, The Escapist Magazine, Revision3, Recent Apple Movie Trailers, BBC iPlayer. They’ve already included Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, MTV Video, and TMDB Trailers.

All of them are very interesting. The Escapist just recently unveiled its app in Boxee at the Boxee Beta unveil, for example.

Speaking of Boxee…it has shifted its focus from media stored on a local drive to online content. MythTV has to do the same. It is a DVR software, and should remain so. But with more and more online content becoming available, it needs to address it, and offer ways for that content to become a part of the interface.

MythNetVideo’s design seems to accommodate for that. It launches external programs, or imports video, whichever it can. MythTV doens’t need to be all-encompassing, it can hand off control to other programs. But having that option allows it to be easily extensible, and that is what it needs.

We’ve been writing a lot about the new features of the latest release of MythTV, which has now been fully released. Assuming we, or the myriad of other enthusiasts have convinced you to try MythTV as the core of your HTPC(Home Theater PC) system, what should you think about?

Go HD – Don’t Even Bother with SD

In this modern world, even though SD is cheaper, why limit yourself? High Definition TV is the wave of the future, so you should plan for it, even if you aren’t yet ready for it.

You don’t even need a powerful computer anymore to do playback. Just a good graphics card. Under Linux, the best supported cards are the Nvidia line of graphics cards. The 8000 and 9000 series support VDPAU, the latest in offloading video playback from the CPU to the GPU. With one of these graphics processors, you can even use an inexpensive low-power processor like the Atom(common in Netbooks) to run your system.

Now, that is playback. As for recordings, hard drives are fairly straightforward. Get enough space. GBs are cheap now. Beyond that, you need a recording device.

Even with Over-The-Air broadcasts, you can get HD programming using a tuner card. After that, if you have cable or satellite, you can get some channels unencrypted on the cable line, usually local stations as well. Beyond that, you can take the output from the cable or satelite box and pipe it into computer for recording. If you are lucky, you can get channels over a firewire cable from the box(cable only), if not, you can use the HD-PVR 1212 to capture from the analog outputs.

After that, all you need is a remote to control it, and a TV or computer monitor to output it to, and you have the basics of a MythTV setup. Easy, huh?

More to come…

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• The HD-PVR and MythTV (gadgetwisdom.com)

The MythTV wiki defines MiroBridge as a script which “enables Miro to emulate a MythTV recording device.” However, we feel this is rather inaccurate.

MiroBridge doesn’t appear as a recording device. It does create a channel, defaultly assigned to 999, to assign the Miro recordings to, but it is more an importer of Miro downloaded programs. You configure Miro with your desired online programs, and then set up a cron job to have MiroBridge run.

Miro is an Internet television application that downloads videos from RSS-based channels, manages them, and plays them. It does incorporate a Bittorrent client, but torrent features are disabled in MiroBridge for legal reasons.

MiroBridge will let Miro download new episodes, then it will symlink the downloaded episodes into the MythTV recordings directory and import the details of the program as a Recording. It can also move the episodes to MythVideo.

This is an amazing addition to MythTV. Scripts to do this have existed before. We used MythNetTV, which takes RSS feeds for Podcasts and imports them into MythTV. It has never been an official part of MythTV though. MiroBridge is now becoming official, and relies on Miro, which is a popular piece of software in its own right, and well maintained.

If you think about it, with cable becoming more expensive, a MythTV box with a broadcast based system, adding in internet produced programming. If you don’t have cable, at the very least, in the news department, the websites of various cable networks offer limited versions of their programming as RSS feeds you can incorporate in.

Youtube can be distributed as an MP4-based RSS feed as well, using some secondary sites, and thus incorporated in as well. Essentially, there is nothing you can’t do if you can find RSS-distributed video.

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• Video under MythTV (gadgetwisdom.com)
• MythTV 0.22 Final to Be Released Next Week (gadgetwisdom.com)

We’ve spent a lot of time, of late, talking about the excitement of the latest version of MythTV. But it is an exciting topic. Video under MythTV is especially important. On the DVR side of things, MythTV has significant attraction. But as a media center application for the playback of video files, the competing software packages change, to software like XBMC and Boxee.

In version 0.22, MythTV unveiled MythUI, which is a complete rewrite of the Myth user interface. New themes were released and several old ones modified. Last night, we did a series of screenshots to show off some of the theme magic available.

Terra(The New Default Theme)

If you enlarge the image, you will notice that JAMU has added the episode metadata, including description, to these episodes of St. Elsewhere. There is discussion of adding additional options for screenshots for MythVideo(the feature is there for Recordings). If you look at the above image, every episode is using a stock poster.

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Graphite

Graphite is being shown off as another new theme for MythTV 0.22 which shows off several of the new features you can enjoy, namely posters and fanart in the Watch Recordings menus. If you note the picture below, you’ll see the ABC show Castle, has a poster, and each episode has an autogenerated screenshot.

The next two images show the background art available in this theme for shows. All of the art shown was imported by the JAMU script.

Here is the popup, with the extra art and metadata, for a movie we brought in, and a TV episode. It offers a lot of information, which can be used to sort videos by year, genre, season(if TV show), etc.

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Here is an alternate display of a directory of movies under the Metallurgy theme, also a theme newly included into MythTV 0.22. As you can see, the automated process didn’t bring in posters for everything. This can be corrected manually, by entering in additional information to better identify the item.

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All in all, MythTV offers an exciting new and themeable interface that brings it on par with XBMC and Boxee, products that are not in the same category as MythTV, but perform some of the same functions. MythTV still has a ways to go in some areas, however, but it has come a long way.

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• Video under MythTV (gadgetwisdom.com)
• MythTV 0.22 Release Candidate 1 (gadgetwisdom.com)

MythTV itself is a Digital Video Recorder which records off of various television sources. To make it a complete media center, it also needs playback of video files and DVDs.

MythVideo is a plugin that handles all of your video needs. In 0.22, it is dramatically expanded with support for new metadata information, TV Series handling, Fanart, Banners, Screenshots, and a host of new browsing features.

The biggest change is that MythVideo now supports storage groups. The feature is still in a preview phase, but it means videos can be watched with zero configuration on the frontend. Under the older system. each frontend had its own video directory settings. Thus, if you wanted to share files from a central server, you needed to set up an NFS share.

We’ve been using the new system, which unfortunately doesn’t work for DVD isos, but otherwise works flawlessly. External players, such as mplayer or xine for unsupported file types also does not work. Both are planned for 0.23.

Metadata can be very important to media file storage. As of 0.22, MythVideo uses TheMovieDB as its primary movie grabber. It also includes support for TV series handling with fields for season, episode, and subtitle, and support for TheTVDB to fill in the information. To determine if an item is a movie or a TV program, it parses the filename.

In additional to searching within the interface, MythTV now includes JAMU. We’ve done some basic testing on JAMU, which stands for Just Another Metadata Updater. JAMU provides for mass updating and regular maintenance of associated graphics and text meta data. It can even reorganize the directory structure based on the metadata.

Check back soon, when we will be providing some screenshots off of our MythTV Frontend of it in action. We just need to organize our MythVideo directories so we can best demonstrate these features.

As you may know, MythTV 0.22 has gotten to  release candidates, but now, the team has announced the final version, barring any new critical issues, will be released next week.

Since the initial release candidate two weeks ago, more than 50 updates were submitted.

We’re not sure whether we like the new default theme in actual use, but it doesn’t show of the possibilities the new MythUI offers, and is visually appealing. Our biggest issue was that highlighted items on the new theme have a light box around them which does not contrast significantly.

We’ll be continuing to cover MythTV and the 0.22 release, discussing some of the tricks, tips, and issues we’ve come across.