[mythtv-users] Epia ME6000 Box up and running (long, but might be worth it)

[Torsten Schenkel]

Hi all,

thank you all for the support and Isaac and the other developers for the
great job you all did.

I finally got my Box up and running, unplugged mouse and keyboard at
high noon and moved it to the living room. At 1pm my wife was watching
her favorite show and paused it to smoke a cigarette. I guess that was
the moment that made up for me neglecting her quite a bit for the last
week's evenings. At 3 her sister and her husband came for a visit and we
could brag a little, set another of our favorites we were watching at
the moment to record and listen to music and show some photos on the
mythbox. I love it and I'm sure my wife will do, too :-)

Well, now for the technical stuff, just in case anybody is interested:

Hardware:

1. VIA Epia ME6000 fanless mainboard, integrated graphics with CLE266
hardware mpeg2 decoding and tv-out.

2. 512MB DDR266 RAM, no swap

3. Hauppauge PVR250, mpeg2 hardware encoding tuner card.

4. Toshiba DVD-ROM, which will run really quit with hdparm -E 2

5. Samsung 160GB 5krpm HDD, hdparm -M 128 will make that really quiet
5GB partition for system -- Yes I', generous ;-) -- rest for storage
all ext3

6. Zalman 300W power supply < 20dB while running mythtv

7. Coolermaster ATX-620-BX1 casing (fits perfectly into the HIFI rack,
micro-ATX, lots of space for the Epia, two 5 1/4 slots, 4 3 1/2 slots)

So the whole system isn't really fanless, but the slow speed fan in the
PSU is nearly inaudible. I was thinking of getting a fanless PSU, but I
think I will refrain from it when thinking about summer's temperatures
in our under the roof maisonette.


Software:

1. Redhat9.0, it was a real pain to leave Debian and I skipped
installation twice to try debian, but there are no binary drivers 
available for the CLE266 but for SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake. I don't know
Mandrake, have used RedHat and SuSE and know SuSE's a bitch.

2. MythTV CVS from saturday night.

3. CLEXF40032 binary drivers for VIA CLE266 with H/W decoding support.

4. Ivtv decoder-alpha snapshot saturday night

5. Lirc 0.7pre2 

6. Xine 0.9.22 with xine-lib-1-rc1 (no H/W mpeg2 support)

7. As I live in germany and there is no mythfilldatabase support
anymore, I use Lars Heers xmlprg_de.pl script and xawtv channel import.

8. All other prerequisites are rh9


Remarks on the installation:

1. RH9 install is a piece of cake and covered in the mythtv docs.

2. When using the binary CLE266 drivers you are stuck with the stock
2.4.20-8 kernel that's installed by redhat install. It's completely
modular so there is no problem with that, but compiling your own modules
might be a pain in the ass. So I want to give some hints:

	- Link /usr/src/linux to /usr/src/kernel-2.4.20-8

	- Copy the config of your running kernel to 	/usr/src/linux/.config
	(/usr/src/linux/configs/kernel-2.4.20-i586.config)

	- Edit the Makefile: remove "custom" from EXTRAVERSION in line 4

	- make oldconfig

	- make dep
	
With these setting the modules for ivtv and lirc should compile OK and
won't have "unresolved" problems. The devil alone knows why redhat puts
this "custom" entry in the Makefile.

3. When compiling the lirc modules I had a problem:
make -r -f tmp_include_depends all
make[3]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.20-8'
touch: creating
`/usr/src/build/231485-i386/install/usr/src/linux-2.4.20-8/fs/jfs/jfs_debug.h':
No such file or directory

Editing /usr/src/linux/tmp_include_depends all and changing every
/usr/src/build/231485-i386/install/usr/src/linux-2.4.20-8 to
/usr/src/linux fixed this for me. 

Maybe you need to do a 'make distclean' and after you copy back you
.config a 'make oldconfig && make dep', I edited the tmp_include_depends
and it worked for me.

4. X setup: The via driver wouldn't accept any modeline I gave, maybe my
monitor was to old to give the right sync timings. It took me quite some
nerve to find that 
Option      "NoDDCValue"
in XF86Config did the trick so it accepted higher resolutions.
Option      "TVVScan" "over"
might also be worth a try, if your picture is too small and distorted.

5. I added a user 'tv' that's auto-logged-in and has plain fvwm as
window manager (why should I bother with all the KDE architecture
overhead) that autostarts lircd, irexec and mythbackend and frontend
with sudo and logs output. (I use irexec to be able to kill and restart
mythfrontend and mythbackend on pressing the GO or ON/OFF button,
respectively)


That's all I remember right now, if anybody is interested in configfiles
or further details on the setup, you're welcome.


Overall this box is really usable, despite the low CPU power:

CPU usage:

1. Recording 5%

2. Live-TV ~ 5% backend, 25% frontend

3. Playing back recorded: ~25% frontend

4. Playing back 640x480 DivX ~60% frontend (no H/W decoding)

5. Playing back VCD (Xine, no H/W decoding) ~30% frontend

6. Playing back DVD (Xine, no H/W decoding) ~70% frontend


With playing back DVD and DivX there is some stuttering at the start of
playback, maybe buffer fills or startup processes exiting, after that
quite smooth. DVD slightly stutters, DivX smooth.


With LiveTV and WatchingRecorded I have slight stutters occasionaly and
rebuffering pauses about once a minute. I don't think that's caused by
too slow hardware, since CPU usage is at ~30% and DivX plays smoothly. I
guess it's a driver issue, hopefully resolved soon.

What does rebuffering pause mean in detail? Maybe one can increase RAM
buffers to avoid it?



And now to the problems I still have:

1. The prebuffering pause mentioned above, it's much better after the
last CVS update, but still there. Maybe I'll wait for 0.12.

2. In the EPG while viewing LiveTV the preview video (showing the
channel you where watching) is more missing than showing, reading
'Loading preview video ...'. While testing I could force the video to
show up by changing workspaces to and fro, so it seems to be related to
xv (xine has a similar problem, video won't show until you move the
window a little bit). So this also doesn't seem a mythtv problem to me.

3. I need a 720x576 PAL modeline that works with the CLE266. I'm running
at 800x600 and the picture's slightly too large. Not noticable in the TV
picture, but in the UI. Not to the point to be unusable, but window
decorations are cut off at the borders, OK maybe i'm anal about that,
but I guess a suitable 720x576 would boost picture quality as well (it
is really nice right now, after I put on de-interlace)




OK, that's all for now. I'm matress bound. Hope this mail will help
someone.

Torsten over and out