Well folks, it is working. Sort of. I call it "proof of concept."

I have to Hauppauge PVR 150s in a Dell Dimension XPS T450 with two 200GB drives. It is running Fedora Core 3 and has max ram (768 MBs). (PIII 450 Mhz)

The problems are myriad.

Firstly, it seems I have to keep having the backend check for the video cards before loading the MythTV backend program. Otherwise it does not seem to find them. Not a big issue and I figure it will be worked out.

Secondly, if I am watching a recording then sometimes I end up with "zero cnt" "timeout" errors which cause my frontend to simply drop the video stream and put me back on the "Watch Recordings" menu. I can then usually re-select the recording and, if I am not able to to watch it all the way through, I can at least see it past where I watched previously. On a long recording it can sometimes take up to 5 tries to finish all the way through. I think this has something to do with either the inability of the processor or RAM to manage the disk throughput or the fact I am usually streaming my video over 54mb Wireless G via my Apple 1.2ghz iBook. (Or mabe the iBook is running too slow?) I imagine I could fast forward to where it dropped me, but that leads to problem thirdly.

Thirdly, my computer is slow. Therefore transcoding and removing commercials causes the video to, every three seconds, "hiccup." Fast forwarding either a recording or live TV also causes this "hiccup." I am fairly certain this is either relevant to RAM (on the Live/Recording fast forwarding) and/or Processor speed. I am looking to do one of two things: By a Processor upgrade for my Dell from (http://www.powerleap.com) that is a 1.2 ghz Celeron processor or buy a Sempron 3000 Motherboard+processor combo deal at Fry's and some memory from 1-800 Memory for cheap and put them in an even older Dell ATX case I have lying around.

I am not sure, but fairly certain, that if I buy the processor upgrade I will have to reinstall, or at least recompile, Linux. So it appears that either way I will be needing to reinstall my Myth backend. Which stinks since I do have some movies already on it. My father sniffs at the processor upgrade solution and says I shouldn't throw money at an old Motherboard (and he is right on some level) but it looks like the new MoBo+CPU+RAM would cost as much as the processor upgrade ($119.00 +$10 shipping = $130).

As soon as I get the backend behaving well I am going to be building a frontend using an Antec Aria mATX case with a Via M10000 mainboard plus a third PVR 150 and a DVD dual layer burner. Total cost looks like about $400 with 1 GB RAM.

Anyone see any problems inherent with my system? Should I upgrade the Dell processor or build another box? Is the VIA + Antec a good, relatively quiet choice? If I watch enough West Wing + StarGate can fantasy become reality? And how much would be enough?

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon

Hello

First, there is quite a bit on ifo available if you search the forum.

Here is the link from Myth for Hardware Requirements

http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythInfo

Your slow machine is a good canidate for a backend or
a file server that only will stream to your front end machine

Get a fast machine to playback the recordings and handle transcoding.
Both of these are processor intensive.

Also good quality hardware is essential if you do not want to have problem with it erratic behavior.

Again do a search in the forums and it will clarify these points for you....

Well RacerX, I appreciate your response.

Before you posted, indeed before I even posted, I read quite a bit on these boards. Many of your posts proved to be helpful.

One thing, however -- perhaps you should read a post before replying with a stock answer?

Firstly, if you had read my initial post you would have noticed that I already know that a PIII450 should not be used as a front-end as I laid out that I was using it as a back-end and will be building a dedicated frontend from scratch as soon as I get the backend kinks worked out. I even mention how I use my Apple iBook as the frontend at the moment.

See the following quotes:


and




Secondly, while I appreciate the sage advice that doing a search of the forums will "help clarify these points for {me}," I find it a bit frustrating that you and some of the more experienced MythTV folks here often fall back on that stock answer when ever someone has an issue.

Specifically in this situation:
1. The points you feel will be clarified are the points you assumed I needed clarified, which as I showed above was an incorrect assumption. I know the PIII 450 should not be a front-end. I know (and anyone who knows a little about the world, much less computers) that "good quality hardware is essential if you do not want to have problem{s} {SIC} with {sic} erratic behavior."

2. The actual points I did have, specifically whether or not I should upgrade my processor or build a new machine and why I get a "zero cnt" "timeout" error and my stream drops, be it low memory or low processor or the 54G Wireless connection the stream is running over, are too specific for the message board. Despite what some of the "ub3r l33t" folks might think, people do search on the message boards sometimes before posting questions.

See the following quotes:


and




3. Lastly, like as I do PHPBB2 (and I use it on more than a few sites I built and maintain), the search engine is not always the most ... useful. So even if you do search, and search a lot, that does not guarantee a hit.

I do want to be clear about one thing: I do appreciate your help and the time you take to post. I do not believe you were trying to be an ass or anything like that, but I did think I should point out some problems many, many people who post to this site and others regarding tech help and questions have with "jumping to conclusions."

1. Not everyone who posts a question is a computer newbie.
2. Not everyone who posts a question has failed to search the boards or the Internet for the answer prior to the post.
3. Not every question can be found in the message board, especially regarding specifics.
4. Reading a post can often tell you how knowledgeable, experience and researched a poster might be -- allowing you to tailor your response apropriately.

I write this because of my frustration at the often canned "do a search" replies.

RacerX, you are NOT a culprit of this, but there are a few on this site. You just happened to gloss over my original post.

Once again, thanks for at least the time for the glossing.

More to follow on my solutions to my problems in the next post.

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon
"So I put the big square thing into which part of the Motherboard?"

Well folks, I decided to go out and buy a new processor. And a new Motherboard. And a new set of memory. And a new case. Already had the HDs thankfully.

The local Fry's has an AMD 64 with Via motherboard for $140. 1GB dual channel memory for another $60. 300W ATX case by Antec for $40. DVD DL RW for $50. $300 later I am sitting in my new room in a new house with a screw driver learning the ways of all of those CPU pioneers who came before me.

Yeeehaaaaw! Ride-em transistors! Git along little cpu-cycles!

So I get the system all put together, took the two Maxtor 200GB drives plus an SATA 120GB drive I had lying around in another CPU and got out the Fedora Core 3 CDs and began the install process.

Well, after two installation and two instances of file system errors ("unable to mount file system, run fsck" kind of messages) I thought, hmmm... Wait a second. I have the 32-bit Linux installation -- maybe that is the problem?

So I have the 64-bit installation being downloaded right now.

Then, at work, I began thinking about my problem -- "Wait a second, people can run 32-bit Linux on an AMD 64 ... it is just not optimized. Why the issues?"

Well, I think possibly a few things could be it:
1. My HDs are getting too hot. They are right next to each other, so maybe spacing them apart a bit?
2. SATA could be an issue. (Although I did unplug the SATA drive and installed the system all again. No dice. I then later realized the drive causing problems was one of the Maxtor IDEs.)
3. I should put my HDs on the primary IDE slot (IDE1) and the DVD/CD on IDE2. I should also use brand new cables instead of older ones which have been folded and twisted and the like.

OR

4. Holy crap, one of my nifty drives has died. Damn. I liked that HD space.

So the plans of the day, after I get home, are as follows:

1. Try to install FC4 64Bit. (FC3 64Bit apparently has a faulty X-Windows problem and it won't detect my monitor .. I could install in text mode, but I thought I'd try FC4.)
2. If the drives don't behave, switch drives from IDE2 to IDE1.
3. Still don't behave, switch cables for fresh ones.
4. Still don't behave, spread them out to reduce heat buildup.
5. Still don't behave, cry.

AND, most exciting of all:

6. Build my new Frontend using a Via EPIA M10000 mainboard and an Antec Aria case! Yeehaw!

Of course, the Frontend already has its own issues.

The question? To use either the front USB ports or the nifty 6-way Flash card reader? Both use a USB slot, and the VIA board only has one USB connector. Dang. I'll probably go with the USB over the Flash reader so I can use gamepads for MythGame.

And it is off to the CPU range for me, well, after work (I work with computers, but its less like the CPU range and more like the CPU urban jungle of Winhell ..... WHY DO THE USERS KEEP GETTING SPYWARE AHHHH!!!!!).

I'ma gonna go and wrassle up some clock cycles ... yeeehaw!

(Still thinking of upgrading that Dell .... maybe make a second backend. Hmmmm...... I need to stop spending money.)

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon
"So if I screw this in here and ... oh ... smoke. Not good."

you may want to look at the mailing list. I haven't been following it lately, but I thought there were some problems compiling 64bit mythtv.

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Xsecrets

Thanks, I will give that a look.

I think the problem I have so far is not Myth related but Linux and/or Hard Drive related, though.

I have heard SATA drives are not that great with Myth. Have not found the reasons why yet, though.

Still -- I'm having fun messing around with the innards of the machine. Even now I can't wait to get home to try and figure out what is going on ....

I think my fascination right now is simply an excuse for me to not do the required summer reading for when I go back to school.

Ah well.

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon
"Git along little clock-cycle..."

It's not that sata drives are not great with myth, just not great with knoppmyth just yet.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Well.....

64 Bit linux is installed.

It does not recognize the builtin video card and therefore is using an old, old Matrox video card with approx 2mbs of Video memory on it. Kind of funny.

It also is having some serious issues with YUM and upgrading.

I am through trying to get it to work. I am going to be installing 32bit Linux when I get home from work. Screw it. I'm tired. (Stayed up till 3 last night.)

I figured out the hard drive issues:

You can't create and LVM across two IDE drives and an SATA drive. At least not over 400GBs. If I created two LVMs, one for video and one for "movies" (on the SATA drive) it worked like a champ.

I also have my Antec Aria case sitting in an opened box and my Via Nehemiah board languising in a corner, all ready to be installed.

Should be an interesting day. If I don't have any distractions.

The question will be whether or not I can install all of this by the end of the day.

I still won't be able to test the Myth setup -- no cable in my room yet. (Cable line needs termination in my room ... least its there.)

Should be fun.

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon
"The digital range is tiring ..... I'm going back to the 32-bit city."

Actually there is something about this in the directions. You need to specify different options to work with bigger drives. From the Wiki:

Note however that in this example they just bumped things up to the next power of two, if you want to go over 512gb you would need to double the extent size again. From the vgcreate man page:

tjc ---

That is very interesting. I will have to do some more research on this.

What I have are three hard drives:

1 SATA 120 GB Western Digitial HD

2 IDE 200GB Maxtor HDs

What I have been doing is the following:
Manually partitioning my drive with Disk Druid at installation.

I tried to create the /boot, /, and swap partitions on each of the drives while creating a logical volume with all remaining space.

My /boot was 100mb.
My / was 18gigs
My swap was 2 gigs
My LVG was approx 499 Gigs

This resulted, each time, in one of the IDE drives having an error with its filesystem and a message that the boot failed and I needed to run "fsck."

What has worked was this:

SATA 120GB Drive:
/boot @ 100 mbs
/ @ 22 GBs
swap @ 2 GBs
Physical Volume @ all remaining space

IDE 200GB Drives:
Physical Volume @ all remaining space

LVM:
LVG "VGforMyth" at 64mb chunks
VG "Video" (/video) @ all space on 200GB IDE drives
VG "Movies" (/movies) @ all remaining space on 120GB SATA

This seems to work.

Interestingly enough, if I use a "/" partition of only 20GBs instead of 22, this all goes to pot.

I am not sure what kind of command-line commands are passed from the GUI Disk Druid to partition and create these Logical Groups.

Regardless -- I now have an up-and-running FC3 32-bit Linux install.

Following Wilsonet.com's guide, I ran the apt-get and will be running through some more work later tonight.

I have not load-tested this or seen how well it handles large files. It is worth noting that my LVM on the old Dell I am replacing had all but 20GBs of those 2 200GB drives used for the /video partition.

I believe the culprit is the SATA in some form or fashion. I am not sure why, yet, but I am sure that is it.

On a side-note, I am thoroughly disapointed I could not get FC3-64 bit working. Ah well.

I am also beginning to configure the VIA EPIA M10000 machine I will be using as the FE.

Should be more fun!

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon

I finally have viable and real installs of both Fedora Core 3 and the MythTV-suite on my AMD64+Via board and VIA EPIA M10000 mainboard machines.

I had two different problems on each system, but I believe both were newbie related. (Me being the newb to Linux.)

On the AMD I would run apt-get update && ap-get distro-upgrade and it would upgrade all of this stuff.

Well ... it would also somehow uninstall apt-get, corrupt YUM and make it where I could not install RPMs because of a segmentation fault. Oops.

On the EPIA M10000 board I would run apt-get and it would work fine. I would then apt-get MythTV fine. I would then run into problems getting the ivtv drivers.

The problem was in my apt-get and yum configurations.

I decided to stick with YUM for both machines for upgrading/installing and follow the guidelines on the aptrpms website (all links can be found at www.wilsonet.com -> MythTV link).

Low and behold my /etc/yum.conf was the likely culprit. I updated this file with the proper distro sources and installed some PGP keys (had to do this twice because of A NOKEY error, check out the Unofficial Fedora guide for how to do this) and then ran "yum update".

Hurrah! Both systems worked.

From there I was able to do all of the updating as needed.

One thing I noticed -- yum seems to install updates as well as rebuilding the Distro list of available updates when you run either yum upgrade or yum update.

There is a point where you can choose (y/n) in order to install, I would choose no when I had to install the ivtv drivers from at-testing instead of at-stable.


Then I would run the yum install ivtv-XXX command.

Seems to be working. Thanks for all the help here.

Now I have to termiante a cable line in my room and test all three cards out with a splitter.

Could be fun.

But for next week.

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon

I'm glad you have it all working. Did you notice, tho, that this is the KNOPPMYTH forum? It's focused on the KnoppMyth distro, which you don't seem to be using at all.

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Actually, Liv2Cod, what I did do was go to the following URL:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/

What I noticed at this site was a list of 14 different forums in 4 different categories.

Those categories are listed as follows:
1. Linux
2. Hardware Recommendations
3. KnoppMyth
4. Off-Topic

Using my amazing powers for interpreting the English language (the language these boards seems to use primarily), I decided that the appropriate place to post general Linux and MythTV experiences would be under the "Linux" category and not the "KnoppMyth" Category.

The Linux Category has such forums with the following names and descriptions:
1. General - General discussion about Linux.

2. Installation - Installing and configuration of addition software not included in KnoppMyth.

3. MythTV - General discussion about MythTV.

The closest thing I could find to this in the KnoppMyth category was the following forum:
1. Installation - KnoppMyth related installation problems or questions. This mean if you have a problem or question related to installing KnoppMyth. Threads not related to the installation of KnoppMyth WILL be deleted.


Using the descriptions of each forum and the names of the individual forums and the categories within which they resided I came to the conclusion that the description of the Installation forum under the KnoppMyth category, which explicitly says "{t}hreads not related to the installation of KnoppMyth WILL be deleted", seems to indicate general questions and comments (sometimes called discussions) about Linux and MythTV would best be located under the MythTV forum in the Linux Category, whose description states "{g}eneral discussion about MythTV".

Proceeding from this line of logic and reasoning, I then made the amazing leap of logic that I was, indeed, posting in the apropriate forum.

Considering I had 1. general linux installation questions and 2. general MythTV installation questions I thought it best to post in the forum which was set aside for General MythTV discussion.

So, in summation Liv3Cod, yes I did notice the obvious question you asked.

On a related question, I was wondering if you noticed the sky was blue today?

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon

For those posters on these message boards which seem take the inital hostile and unhelpful tact towards newer posters regarding anything Linux and/or MythTV, or simply respond with canned answers without fully reading through posts, two situations experienced in this thread, I thought it might be nice to edify them with a description of my experiences with KnoppMyth and write some about how I do use that distro.

Firstly, KnoppMyth, for me, works best as a LiveCD for a MythTV frontend. It has allowed me to test out and compare the operating speed of various x86 machines (including my primary Windoze machine, a nice speedy Dell).

I have also been able to use it to allow the rest of my family to peak in on my project as they wish by simply putting in the CD and rebooting their computer and following a basic set of instructions I wrote for them.

A couple of things I wish KnoppMyth would allow, though, are not there. I do understand their omission, but I thought I might throw in my wishes.

1. Firstly, WiFi access. I do not know how feasible this is, but it would be nice. That way my friends and family with laptops with WiFi enabled could see how cool the capabilities of MythTV on that platform truly are. (I have been using a Mac iBook 1.2ghz as my FE for testing, the mobility is real, real cool.)

2. Speaking of the Mac, no Mac support. I also understand this -- I am not even sure if there is a Knoppix Live CD for Mac, likely not, plus the lack of Mac Linux drivers and ... list goes on and on, plus there is a Myth FE available for the Mac anyhow.


In trying to install a KnoppMyth system I did run into a few problems. Firstly, as I have detailed here I have a fairly complex system. As KnoppMyth mentions on its own website, it is meant for a simple, easier install.

In trying to Install KnoppMyth on my AMD64 with a VIA K8M800(sp) Mobo with one SATA 120GB drive and two IDE 200GB drives I ran into some partioning hurdles plus some other matters.

I decided it was not worth it, plus I wanted to make this new machine a more general server as well (it should have the horsepower to become such).

Then in trying to configure my front end I ran into another problem -- the basic "fire-and-forget" installation script only worked with the HD on hda. My CD drive is on hda and my HD is on hdb. I then attempted to do it manually but, alas, it was not as customizable as I wanted (partition wise). So instead of spending time on a manual install without the flexibility I'd want if I had to spend time on something, I went with FC3 on the frontend.

Part of the problem is that this frontend also has a capture card and I wanted to be able to do some funky filesystem stuff on it if need be. I was not sure what I would need to do in order to do such if I installed KnoppMyth so I decided it was not worth the hassle at this point.

Lastly -- as you can see I need the Linux experience. I am still getting my training wheels, so it was better to go through the whole thing and learn a bit more than I would have with KnoppMyth.

Now, I am excited about building another viabox or some other FE and putting KnoppMyth on it.

And whenever the friends I make in law school come over with their laptops I'll say "here, plug into my network and boot from this CD ... you'll love this!"

Hopefully I'll get a few more MythTV converts that way.

Open use of technology and information is what I love, and anything that promotes it I will support any way I can.

Sincerely,
Pacer the Loon

You might take a look at your own approach to people.

You throw a lot of barbs at people and are the first to start calling names. If you don't get a response you like, you dump all over the person who posts it.



Your approach to people is not conducive to your goals. However...



...you are perfectly suited for your career choice.

By the way, it IS a KnoppMyth forum -- that's why it says "The home of KnoppMyth" at the top of every page. That's why Cecil and Dale, the inventors of KnoppMyth, set up and maintain this forum. Yes, you can post general Myth issues here, obviously. But don't get all huffy (again) when people fail to rush in and help you (to your satisfaction) with problems on other distros.

Frankly, if you get any reponses at all consider it a gift.

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