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PostPosted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 1:58 pm 
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Joined: Fri Jun 11, 2004 10:09 am
Posts: 5
This definitely belongs in Tier 2 in my opinion. There are some key things that need to be done to get this working. However, it appears that once they are done this setup will work very nicely without much effort.

Hardware:

Shuttle SN41G2 (NVidia nforce2 chipset)
Athlon XP 2400+ 333 FSB, 512K cache, OEM
256MB RAM (32 shared with Video)
Maxtor (120Gb, 7200 rpm, 8Mb cache)
khypermedia CD-RW drive
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350

Steps & Gotchas:

- First problem was an issue with burning the ISO. This has never happened to me before but as stated elsewhere in this forum burning at a slow speed (4x for me) made the ISO work. The MD5 checksums were always correct.

- BIOS update: (Taken from another thread on Shuttle XPC/PVR 250) "Make sure you flash the BIOS to the latest version (FN41S025) from Shuttle's website. Their BIOS change notes are nearly useless and don't indicate any of the problems this fixes. These include hard freezes under heavy disk activity, freezing when both the disk and PVR-250 are busy, locking up randomly, ... It's also important to follow their directions to "load optimized defaults" after flashing, since this changes some important defaults related to this issue. I wasted WEEKS trying to track down this instability. 8-("

- IDE drives using cable select. After I got KnoppMyth working for TV the CD ROM which I used to install from was inaccessable. I would see messages that the /dev/cdrom was not a block device. Changing the IDE cables to cable select and only having one device on the primary IDE made it work. I had to read this forum and then the LINUX: CD-ROM HOWTO guide to figure that one out.

- For some reason environment variable QTDIR was not set and my path did not have '/usr/lib/qts/bin' in it. I added them both. Not sure if this made a difference but I was getting errors about QT.

- Setup an account with ZAP2IT. For some reason I didn't see that right off and it took me a little while to know I needed to do that. I knew I needed an account somewhere but... I am blind I guess :-)

- Run 'mythfilldatabase' to populate the program guide.

- Run 'nvidia.sh' to install the nvidia drivers for the onboard video and TV-OUT. For some reason I thought R4V4 would not need this step

- Make a backup of XF86Config-4

- Copy XF86Config-4.nvidia-tvout.sample to XF86Config-4.

- Edit XF86Config-4. Change option for overscan to .7 from .8. The output was too large for the TV and was clipping. It still is just a bit in the GUI. I will fix that elsewhere I believe. GUI config?

Option "TVOverScan" "0.7"

That was all I had to do and now it works well. Here are some things I did because of the way I like to use it.

- Downloaded PUTTY to SSH to box. This saved a lot of hassle going to the TV and sitting on the floor. Painful! Don't remember if I had to comment anything out to allow SSH to the box. I am sure I did not if I used 'mythtv' user account.

- apt-get install tcsh

- Started webmin

- Setup SAMBA via webmin to share 'myth' folder in with my Windows machines. Was easy using webmin.

- apt-get install mozilla. I don't remember if that was the exact package name. Google search it. :-)

Also, during all of this debugging I restarted the backend from time to time.

'/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend restart

Also, used this command to restart display manager for testing X11 settings:

'etc/init.d/gdm restart'

In all, IMHO KnoppMyth is far superior to BeyondTV (SnapStream). I love all the extras like the Music, Weather, Graphics viewer, etc. Now I guess I just need to poke a hole in my router to allow remote Program recordings like Snapstream allowed. In Snapstream/BeyondTV I believe your PVR would periodically check online for any new programs to record so it is more secure. I am sure someone has something better out there, I just need to do more research.

I still want to figure out what these crazy *.nuv file formats are for the video caputre. I am used to having MPEGs that are easy to edit and store on DVDs and CDs. I hope this isn't going to be a problem. That is the main reason I wanted network connectivity.

Cheers,

Zaphod


Last edited by zaphodtx on Wed Jun 23, 2004 7:10 am, edited 1 time in total.


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 2:32 pm 
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Joined: Fri Apr 02, 2004 10:08 am
Posts: 1637
Location: Virginia, USA
Quote:
Now I guess I just need to poke a hole in my router to allow remote Program recordings like Snapstream allowed.


MythWeb can handle this: just set your router to forward port 80 to your MythTV box. There are also some HOWTOs here on securing access to MythWeb via .htaccess.

Quote:
I still want to figure out what these crazy *.nuv file formats are for the video caputre. I am used to having MPEGs that are easy to edit and store on DVDs and CDs.


This had me confused for the longest time too. Since you're using a PVR-x50, the .nuv files are really just .mpg files. You could copy them, then rename them, and they'd actually work, but the easiest way is to go into /myth/pretty/ and you'll see the results of a script that puts friendly-named symbolic links to the .nuv files.


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 4:52 pm 
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Joined: Fri Jun 11, 2004 10:09 am
Posts: 5
Quote:
This had me confused for the longest time too. Since you're using a PVR-x50, the .nuv files are really just .mpg files. You could copy them, then rename them, and they'd actually work, but the easiest way is to go into /myth/pretty/ and you'll see the results of a script that puts friendly-named symbolic links to the .nuv files.


That is great news. Thanks for the information. Wonder why they are stored with the .nuv extension? Do I need to run a script for the pretty conversion to take place?


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 5:31 pm 
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Joined: Fri Apr 02, 2004 10:08 am
Posts: 1637
Location: Virginia, USA
I think the .nuv extension is more or less like .avi on Windows or .mov on Mac (in other words, it specifies it's a movie but it can use any number of different codecs), but I could be wrong there.

As for the script, it's set up by default under root's cron jobs, and runs at 5 and 35 minutes each hour. So no need to do it yourself.


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