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PostPosted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 7:32 am 
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Joined: Thu Sep 07, 2006 11:20 am
Posts: 389
This latest version of this guide will always be on my web site at:
http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/KnoppMyth_HDPVR.html


I will also try to keep this post up to date. Please post all questions and comments to this posting.

HOWTO: KnoppMyth R5.5 and the Hauppauge HD-PVR

Overview:

This guide details installing the Hauppauge HD-PVR drivers and the SVN trunk version of MythTV using KnoppMyth R5.5 as a starting point. My current test platform is a KRP Dragon v2.0 which uses a DirecTV receiver as the HD source.

Requirements:

* You must have a Hauppauge HD-PVR which has been previously loaded with firmware by installing and testing it in a Windows machine. Go no further until you do this!

* You must have at least a dual core CPU with enough power to handle H.264 decoding. My test platform shows 65% CPU usage during playback (that's more than one whole core). OR you must be using VDPAU with a supported nVidia video card.

* You must have a working KnoppMyth R5.5 installation on the machine you plan on using. Make sure everything works as expected before proceeding. Make a backup of this configuration.

* You must have tolerance for beta type software and the various bugs and broken things which will occur.

Words of Caution:

Read the requirements above! If you don't meet the requirements, don't expect it to work. This is crazy beta stuff, so no warranties. Don't complain about loss of data, broken features/drivers/software, headaches, etc...

What is working?

All the basics work including: LiveTV, recordings, commercial flagging and skipping.

What does not work?

Currently, you can't playback HD-PVR recorded interlaced content (480i or 1080i) without the frontend crashing. This is a known problem and the developers are working on it. Currently, I have my DirecTV box set to output only 720p. My HDHomeRun continues to work fine with any resolution and will deinterlace just fine.

I'm told that lossless transcoding on the HD-PVR recordings does not work. This is something that mythtranscode will need added support for in the future.

I don't have mythstream working. I have not tired to get it working since I don't use it.

The weather stuff seems a little broken (it sort of works in the frontend, but not in mythweb).

There is probably more broken stuff, so let me know what you find.

Prepare Your System:

Since you currently have a working and happy KnoppMyth R5.5 installation, you will need to verify a few things before backing up your working baseline configuration.

Make sure you are using a supported theme and OSD. If not, you will need to switch before updating. Here is the link to the stock themes currently in SVN:

http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/trunk/myththemes
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/browser/trunk/themes

Now it's time to make the backup. Go to the KnoppMyth menu option and choose the backup option and make sure it reports success. Here are some links to making backups under KnoppMyth:

http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.p ... 490#112490
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... storeHowTo

Also, make sure you backup the custom KnoppMyth menus. You will want to copy these back once you have everything working.

Code:
mkdir ~/menus
cp /usr/share/mythtv/*.xml ~/menus

Install Required Packages

To install/build/use the latest MythTV, you will need to install Qt4. To build the HD-PVR driver, you will also need the mercurial source code control tool. So, do the following to become root and use apt-get:

Code:
su -
apt-get update
apt-get install libqt4-core libqt4-dbg libqt4-gui libqt4-qt3support libqt4-sql qt4-qtconfig qt4-doc qt4-designer qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev libqt4-opengl-dev libqt4-opengl libqt4-sql-mysql mercurial

Now you will need to change your qmake command to the Qt4 version.

Code:
rm /usr/bin/qmake
ln -s /usr/bin/qmake-qt4 /usr/bin/qmake

Remove R5.5 MythTV Packages

You should still be root, so stop MythTV and use apt-get to remove the packages.

Code:
killall mythfrontend
/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop
apt-get remove mythtv mythplugins mythtv-themes mythstream

You still need to remove some extra stuff by hand; mainly any left over themes and unsupported stuff (like smolt and mythstream). It may be a good idea to totally wipe out /usr/share/mythtv, but I have not tried that yet.

Code:
rm -rf /usr/share/mythtv/themes
rm -rf /usr/share/mythtv/mythsmolt
rm -rf /usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive
rm -rf /usr/share/mythtv/mythstream
rm -f /usr/lib/mythtv

Build and Install the HD-PVR Driver

As an unprivilaged user (like mythtv), get the source code and build the driver. Then as root, install the driver.

Code:
hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/
cd v4l-dvb
make
su
make install
modprobe hdpvr

You should now see a /dev/videoX device. This should be /dev/video0 if you have no other capture cards in the chassis (which I strongly recommend). If you do not see this device reported, then reference the MythTV HD-PVR wiki page for more info. You can make a test capture, but it will only playback on your Windows machine right now.

The Quick Way (only for Core2Duo processors)

The quick way is to download and install my prebuild packages. These will probably not be the latest SVN version, but you can always build from source and install your own packages later.

Code:
wget -c -r -l 1 -A *.deb -nd http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/downloads/mythtv/
su
dpkg -i myth*.deb


Assuming everything goes well, you are ready to fire up MythTV again. You can either reboot or do the following:

Code:
/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start
killall xinit


Make sure you check your log files located at /var/log/mythtv/ to make sure everything is OK. Also play with the frontend now and go through all the settings to make sure your theme and OSD are correct. The theme rendering has glitches after building the cache and you may need to restart the frontend to get a clean display. Once you are satisfied, proceed to adding the HD-PVR tuner.

Build MythTV from SVN (by script)

I have written a script to which will get/update the code, configure, make and build/install the packages. This is what I'm currently using to make my builds. You should run this script as root.

Code:
su -
wget -c http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/downloads/patches.tar.gz
tar xvzf patches.tar.gz

wget -c http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/downloads/get_mythtv.sh
chmod 755 get_mythtv.sh

wget -c http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/downloads/compile_mythtv.sh
chmod 755 compile_mythtv.sh

./get_mythtv.sh
./compile_mythtv.sh

Add the HD-PVR Tuner

This procedure is currently in flux. The best place for the latest info is the MythTV wiki page.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_HD-PVR

References:

The Hauppauge HD-PVR page on the MythTV wiki: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_HD-PVR

Building MythTV from SVN on the KnoppMyth wiki (out of date): http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... hTVFromSVN

The DirecTV serial interface script: http://www.pdp8.net/directv/directv.shtml or my modified version http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/downloads/directv.pl

My posts to the KnoppMyth forum during my struggle: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=18558


Last edited by nharris on Tue Jun 16, 2009 10:34 am, edited 6 times in total.


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 6:54 am 
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Posts: 389
Currently, there is a lot of development going on with HD-PVR support in the MythTV trunk. Unfortunately, I have been having backend crashes with the latest for a while now. If you are trying this out, I suggest you stick with either my July builds or check out from SVN with a July 30ish date.

New features include a dedicated HD-PVR capture board type, recording profiles with settings for high/medium/low resolutions (480/720/1080), interlaced video support (this does not seem to work for me yet) and support for changing resolutions for each recording (I'm waiting for the backend to be stable before trying this out).

I'll report back when I have a new "stable" build.

By the way, is anyone using this beside me? Please post.


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 7:10 am 
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I seems like the backend crashing has been solved. After testing for a day or so, I'll put up the new packages. The latest has a lot to offer and there has also been substantial fixes and enhancements in the driver. I'm still running in 720p all the time. But once I'm sure things are stable I will experiment with 480p too.

As a side note, my HD-PVR recodings are about half the size of my HDHomeRun recordings and the quality appears the same (to my eyes at least).


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 7:46 am 
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Posts: 389
My system is very stable now. I have posted my packages dated 20080815. These are builds from trunk with an additional patch from the hdpvr myth developer which fixes my backend crash and a backend deadlock issue. All my testing is still at 720p fixed.

http://www.psicat.com/Nathan/downloads/mythtv/

Records are all VBR unless you set the max bit rate to be less than the average bit rate (which will trigger CBR mode). VBR is the reason my recordings are so small and why mythcommflag is a lot faster now. I can't tell a quality difference on my 27" LCD TV, but a bigger screen might show something.


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PostPosted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 3:59 pm 
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Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Your hard work and persistence will pay off for all of us who follow in your footsteps... eventually. I can see adding a couple of HD-PVR boxes to my own system to capture channels such as Discovery HD.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 6:29 am 
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Liv2Cod wrote:
Your hard work and persistence will pay off for all of us who follow in your footsteps... eventually. I can see adding a couple of HD-PVR boxes to my own system to capture channels such as Discovery HD.
It will be nice to have some company. It's lonely here. :wink:

More exciting news... there is an ffmpeg sync in the works which should bring mythtv closer to the latest ffmpeg trunk. I'll be trying it out this week. Also, Hauppauge is rumored to be releasing new hdpvr firmware this week. Hopefully, this firmware will fix some of the subtle bugs in the transport stream and add AC3 support. Plus my second hdpvr is on the way... dual tuner goodness to help stress my system.


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PostPosted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 7:55 am 
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Posts: 1532
Location: California
This is a great stuff! -- thank you for all the effort you've put into this. I have two questions:

1. I have a 3.0ghz Pentium D930. This is a dual core processor, no hyper threading. Any idea if that CPU is fast enough to handle the playback? Is there some place I can download a sample x.264 recording to see how my machine does?

2. Once the firmware is loaded on the windows system, will the device retain the firmware even across power cycles of the machine? My machine is typically off 16 hours/day -- when it powers up, will the firmware still be in the device?

Thanks!

Marc


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PostPosted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 8:27 am 
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Hi Marc,

marc.aronson wrote:
This is a great stuff! -- thank you for all the effort you've put into this. I have two questions:

1. I have a 3.0ghz Pentium D930. This is a dual core processor, no hyper threading. Any idea if that CPU is fast enough to handle the playback? Is there some place I can download a sample x.264 recording to see how my machine does?


Unfortunately, I would guess that your CPU will not be able to handle the decode at this time. There is work being done to multithread the decode so it can be spread across multiple cores. However, I'm still not sure if your CPU could keep up.

I recently put an nVidia 8600GT in an older Pentium 4 computer at work. It can now decode the hdpvr streams under Windows with the driver acceleration (only 10% CPU or so). My myth box has a 7xxx series card which does not support MPEG4 acceleration, so I have not tried XvMC to see if there is any support there.

There are sample files for the hdpvr available on the web. Google should find something. Here is one link:

http://blog.arogan.com/2008/06/hauppaug ... -1212.html

marc.aronson wrote:
2. Once the firmware is loaded on the windows system, will the device retain the firmware even across power cycles of the machine? My machine is typically off 16 hours/day -- when it powers up, will the firmware still be in the device?

Yes, the firmware is flashed on the device. You only need a Windows machine to update or initially program the hdpvr with the firmware. Once it is loaded, you can power cycle with no problems. I don't think the linux driver developers are even thinking of the firmware update right now. It's probably something that will be added after everything else is working perfectly.


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PostPosted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 5:40 pm 
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Posts: 389
Some news on the noise issue:

The HD-PVR case is totally sealed, so I have removed the top and unplugged the fan. The new(er) version has a heat sink on the ambrella chip and a tiny worthless 5V fan in the case (which I guess is supposed to move the air around in the enclosure, but just makes noise). The original version, which has widely reported overheating problems, did not have the heatsink or fan. I have taken temperature measurements (Fluke IR meter) of the ambrella chip and it is running 50-52 C after 30 minutes or so of operation. So, I don't see the need for active cooling as long as you have a fairly ventilated area. Now my HD-PVR is totally silent.

EDIT: To remove the top, remove the four soft pads on the feet on the bottom of the unit. They are just sticky pads over the screws and they peel off using a screwdriver to pry under the edge. Then all you need to do is remove the four screws and the top will separate from the bottom. Using a small screwdriver, I separated the clear plastic from the rest of the top (and left it off). I unplugged the fan and have also removed the four "bling" LEDs (just unplug from the connector in the center of the board).

Here's a link to someone else who has done a fancier mod and a better job documenting than I have. He has the original version without the heatsink and the fan (so you will not see them in the pictures).

http://blog.arogan.com/2008/06/hauppaug ... -1212.html


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:52 am 
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Hi there!

I want to thank you for the work you did on this to get your HD-PVR working. It really helped me in getting mine up and running!

I can now watch the channel my set top box is on but two things I haven't found information on and thats how to use the IR blaster to change the channels. I assume I need a channel changing script but I haven't found anything yet that describes how to set it up or use it. Also, what about the remote that comes with the HD-PVR?

The quality is great - I'm running an AMD Dual-core at 2.6Ghz, nForce chipset with an Nvidia on-board video with dvi to hdmi. No problems with the video at 720p (hard set as per the recommendations).

Thx
Norm


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 11:54 am 
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Norm258 wrote:
I want to thank you for the work you did on this to get your HD-PVR working. It really helped me in getting mine up and running!

Your are welcome... I'm glad to hear someone else is using the hdpvr under KnoppMyth and that my instructions actually work. :wink:

Please let me know if you found any errors or omissions.

Norm258 wrote:
I can now watch the channel my set top box is on but two things I haven't found information on and thats how to use the IR blaster to change the channels. I assume I need a channel changing script but I haven't found anything yet that describes how to set it up or use it. Also, what about the remote that comes with the HD-PVR?

There is currently work being done to support the hdpvr blaster but from the talk I hear it's not working yet. Also, you will need the latest LIRC too (which is no walk in the park to get running). I have absolutely no idea about the remote.

I am using a StreamZap for my remote and serial control to my DirecTV receiver. At this time, I would suggest using another type of remote (MCE or StreamZap are both good) and blaster (either the MCE blaster or serial). Sorry I can't help you out more in this department.

http://www.irblaster.info/
http://mythic.tv/index.php?cPath=21_31& ... 7bcdb7c1d4

Norm258 wrote:
The quality is great - I'm running an AMD Dual-core at 2.6Ghz, nForce chipset with an Nvidia on-board video with dvi to hdmi. No problems with the video at 720p (hard set as per the recommendations).

Glad to hear it is working for you. I also found the good quality to be a pleasant surprise.


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 1:29 pm 
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Your instructions were great -- nice and straight forward.

I was using firewire prior to this so I think I will plug that back in and use it and a channel change script. That should work just fine.

I was just curious about the IR stuff on it but I have a HTPC keyboard that I use as my 'remote' so doesn't matter too much - other then for play factor. If I get it working, I'll post my findings.

Norm


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 1:35 pm 
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Norm, did you compile mythtv or use my packages?


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PostPosted: Fri Sep 12, 2008 6:39 am 
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I used your packages. Was an easier road to follow.

I was able to use a channel changer with my Explorer 4250HD and firewire so thats all working now too.

Generally things are stable. I've had a few instances of the front end crashing and after restarting mythfrontend not having any sound. Doing a reboot solves the problem. I haven't isolated the reason why yet.

It was consuming large quantities of CPU but changing to the 'slim' profile made a real difference and seems to work nice and smoothly.

Norm


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PostPosted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 2:26 pm 
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I just posted new packages if anyone is interested. Compile date is 9/14/2008. They are running well for me so far.

Still no new firmware from Hauppauge. Basically nothing new to report at this time.


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