Difference between revisions of "User:Mrsdonovan"

Revision as of 01:19, 9 October 2007

I've been using MythTV since 0.18 and most of my contributions have been to the wiki in regards to modules I've worked with, like Firewire and Mythgame. Although not directly related, I built and maintain the Windows installer for Avidemux2 which is useful for archiving shows.

Setup

A - MythTV Master backend/ Frontend /Asterisk server

• 3Ghz HT Intel with 2GB of dual channel RAM
• 1GB ethernet jack connected to a 10/100/1000Mbps Dlink 8 port router
• HD capable Geforce FX 5200 video card.
• RAID 1+0 with four harddrives, three SATAs, one IDE, roughly about 500GB of space.
• ASUS P4P800-E-Deluxe
• Haupauge PVR-150
• Haupauge PVR-250 with remote
• Digium Wildcard TDM400P with three S100-M FXS expansion cards
• Asterisk @ Home
• Two Motorola DCT2524 cable tuners controlled by two IR blasters connected to a serial card. (Custom built lirc_serial kernel module, ledxmit_serial)
• Linux Fedora Core 6
• 19" LCD

B - MythTV HD Frontend / Asterisk

• ASUS Pundit P1-AH2 (black)
• AMD X2 3800+ Dual Core
• 1GB of RAM
• Onboard NVIDIA Geforce 6150
• Linux FC6
• Digium Wildcard TDM400P with three FXS expansion cards
• Asterisk @ Home
• MythGame with MAME emulation and a wireless Logitech Rumblepad 2
• Samsung LT-P266W 26" HDtv flat-panel LCD

C - MythTV HD Slave Backend / Frontend

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• Akai LCT2701TD.jpg

• AMD Sempron 3400+ with Thermaltake Blue Orb CPU Cooler
• ASRock motherboard with onboard Geforce 6100
• 1GB of RAM
• Via Firewire card connected to a DCT6214 (Yes, it is a PVR, I know..)
• 500GB Harddrive for recordings, 250GB HD for OS and video backup (rsync'd each night)
• MythGame with MAME emulation and a wireless Logitech Rumblepad 2
• Fedora Core 7
• Akai LCT2701TD - 27" LCD with DVD player (not used)

D - MythTV Frontend

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• Sony universal RM-V302.jpg
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• 2.4Ghz Celeron
• 80GB HD
• 768MB of RAM
• Asus Pundit (The SIS version)
• Linux FC6
• Sony Trinitron 32" Flat Screen CRT
• Goes into standby after 3 hours using sleepd
• Generic Sony Pre-programmed remote with ira-3 serial receiver.

Notes

• The link between the MythTV Frontend (B, D) and the master backend (A) is over an 5.8Ghz 802.11a wireless bridge using dual-band bridges from Trendnet (TEW-510apb) and 9dbi gain antennas. Amazingly, the 720p High Def shows work smoothly over the link although the 1080p still needs more bandwidth. The link is affected by thick ice on the roof and at odd times, really heavy rain.
• All the machines have access to a shared video/pictures/music/ROM 230GB LVM partition on the main server (A) and almost over a terabyte of space for recordings.
• We currently use link2voip.com as our DID and outbound provider for Asterisk with great ping times of 10 to 15ms.
• We use most of the default plugins including MythGame, pictures, videos, and MythPhone. We don't use MythPhone for communication, just for displaying caller-ID display because each is setup as a SIP extension for certain Asterisk servers (of which we have two on our network)

A few tips

• Asterisk @ Home included PHPMyadmin which is useful for optimizing the database(s) which saves space and makes them run faster.
• Compared to the PVR-150 and PVR-250s, the firewire is a bitch to get working smoothly. It is mostly because of problems between the client machine's USB implementation, the firewire card and the linux drivers.
• Concerning Asterisk, I tried ADSI, the ability to program phones with custom scripts, but some phones just didn't work because they are "locked" by their manufacturer. The comedian mail app for ADSI works, but it's clunky and slow and it was much simpler just to autologin and play the messages.

Setup Notes

Notes for my own setup:

Setting up distinctive ringing for ring groups.
1. Via A@H or FreePBX, create two ZAP extensions for each ZAP channel,

a. The lower number one, i.e. ext 201 uses a "dial" command "ZAP/1r2", where 1 is the ZAP daughter card in slot 1 and "r2" stands for ring type 2 (or r3 or r4). This extension will ring the phone using the distinctive single/long ring. b. The second ZAP extension, i.e 211, uses just "ZAP/1" as the dial command and will ring the same ZAP phone with a regular US ring tone.

2. Then set it up such that internal callers go to ring group 200 which rings all the distinctive ZAP extensions, i.e. x201, etc. When external callers call, their separate ring group calls x211, etc. with regular ring commands.

The great thing is that the modifications are done through A@H and don't need custom modification of any script.

• Code for sending caller ID from Asterisk to MythTV Frontends. Requires XYAC.
  

exten => s,1,System(/bin/echo -n -e "@CALL${ARG1} ~${ARG2}" | nc -w 1 127.0.0.1 10629)

• To auto login mail box "sXXX" into extensions.conf -> app-messagecenter instead of "default"

The Plus and Minus of MythTV

• Note this was a comment added to an article comparing TIVO 3 and MythTV.

I've been a MythTV user for a couple years now and there are a number of things the article missed or glossed over ("+" means a feature and "-" a problem).

(+) Plugins - MythTV has lots of plugins that let you do everything from surf the web, view local weather information, play old style ROM arcade games, watch recordings over the LAN on a windows machine, view a slide show of pictures, to watching XviD encoded videos, all of which we use. The video collection has been of great utility with kids. The usefulness of the plugins was a big reason I chose MythTV and have stayed with it. (Actually TIVO was never considered because of the subscription costs)

(-) Setup and Maintenance - It should not be underestimated how much time it can take getting MythTV to work and then maintaining it. As a MythTV user you will have to know the Linux command line, how to download and install drivers and fix things when they inevitably don't work. If you haven't installed a PCI card before, and don't like googling stuff to figure out why it doesn't work, then MythTV is not for you. MythTV will probably not save money over a commercial system either because I've found that the money I would have spent on a subscription went into hardware upgrades.

(+) The flip side to the cost and time commitment is that MythTV has immense flexibility, for example, in the size and redundancy of storage capability, the type of peripherals and the split arrangement between backend, slave backend and frontends. Take our ever growing video collection (most ripped from DVDs, fyi), where any new videos are backed up onto a separate machine each night (rsync'd). Try doing that with a TIVO.

(+) The machines are also full blown general purpose computers that can do other things. For example, once you have sunk the money into the MythTV hardware, you can use the same machines for VoIP (via Asterisk) which really saves us money, about $100CND a month. The pay back period for the extra hardware to do VoIP was less then a year, and gets cheaper as time goes on. We use dedicated Digium TDM-400 cards that cost ~$500CND about a year ago. Again, our long distance costs are pennies per minute, each phone is a separate extension, we can make multiple outgoing or incoming calls, late-night callers are prompted by a menu first before the phones ring, we can control our own caller-ID, etc.

(-) DRM can still be a problem with MythTV, for example, some of our HD channels, which we get from the tuner over a firewire cable, have the "5C" flag set. The end result is that those channels and some HD broadcasts are not transmitted over the firewire and MythTV records nothing. For HD tuners using firewire and 5C flagged channels, there is no current work around (as of Feb. 21st, 2007). But I'm sure that will change.