History / Status

• On Hold
• PLEASE NOTE: this howto isn't complete. I haven't bought the video capture hardware yet.

1. Introduction

I have finally decided to build a PVR. After some research I settled on MythTV.

2. Overview

My goal is a dedicated backend and two front ends. I will build a prototype to get my feet wet and to guage hardware requirements. I am starting with Knoppix MythTV. My front ends will be diskless. They will boot over their own dedicated network. The network diagram will be as follows.

(house network)------(backend)-----(diskless frontend)

                        \----(diskless frontend)

Knoppix didn't do what I wanted. So read below for my diskess setup.

3. Software

k12ltsp 4.4.1 MythTV

4. Hardware

This is an overview of my hardware. Please see MythTVHardware for my hardware hacking.

Final backend Celeron 600Mhz 384Meg RAM 120gig hard drive dvd rom ATI onboard video onboard sound (won't be needed on the backend) PVR-500 dual capture with hardware mpeg-2 encoder (may add another) entel enet onboard asound enet with built in 4 port switch

final frontend Celeron 500Mhz 256Meg RAM DVD ROM onboard sound onboard video onboard intel enet

5. Installing the backend

Boot the Fedora Core 4 CD

For the MythTV data we want to use the JFS filesystem. Also fedora core 4 has a problem with ext3 during install. At the linux prompt enter the following.

> linux ext3 jfs

On the Installation Type screen choose LTSP. Next we will manually partition the hard drive. Create the following partitions.

/boot 100M ext3 / 15G ext3 swap 768M /MythTV remaining space jfs

On the network screen configure eth0 for dhcp. Manually set the hostname to mythtv.localdomain. On the firewall screen disable the firewall and disable SELinux. Now its time to take a break while the installer goes.

When the installer is done reboot the computer. Login as root. First thing we want to do upgrade the system. Type the folowoing:

> yum -y upgrade

Now take a break till its done. Reboot the system and login. Now lets install the window manager we are going to use. I chose WindowMaker. Type in he following.

> yum -y install WindowMaker

This would be a good time to boot a diskless client. We want to make sure that everything works. I found that the bios on the clients was old and buggy. As soon as I upgraded the bios PXE booting worked as advertised.

Now we need to add a couple 3rd party repositories. Type the following.

> cd /etc/yum.repos.d > wget http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/atrpms.repo > wget http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/freshrpms.repo

Bring everything up to date.

> yum -y upgrade > yum -y upgrade

Sit back and wait for it to finish. And now for the big install.

> yum -y install mythtv-suite

I plan on doing my admin of the system through the web. So lets install webmin.

> yum -y install webmin

The default configuration for eth1 is dhcp. if you want to access your myth backend from your network than now is the time to setup a static address on eth1. The configuration change can be done through webmin. Once that is done reboot the system. Once the machine reboots boot a diskless client to be sure everything is still working.

Now we need to install video capture card drivers. First we'll install the ivtv drivers. Type the following

> yum install ivtv-firmware > yum install ivtv-kmdl-$KVER > yum install ivtv