Firstly, I tried to load the nvidia module:

NVIDIA: Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module. Please check your
system's kernel log for additional error messages.
Failed to load module  "nvidia"

Clearly the correct nvidia driver for this kernel is missing.  If it was working and an update has messed it up for you, then possibly you have had a kernel update and don’t have the correct kernel headers installed.  The kernel headers are needed by dkms to rebuild the nvidia module.  If you’re lucky, you may just be able to install the Linux kernel headers and reboot:

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
$ sudo shutdown -r now

With luck dkms will have rebuilt the nvidia module and all will be well.  If it hasn’t worked, then we need to take more dramatic action.  Let’s start with an nvidia-free zone:

$ sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

Next we should ensure that the nouveau module is blacklisted, so that we do not end up fighting the open source nouveau driver:

$ sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
blacklist nouveau
blacklist vga16fb

Now we can install the latest nvidia modules:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings nvidia-kernel-common

And run the nvidia configurator:

$ sudo nvidia-xconfig

Finally reboot, and in theory the nvidia module should be rebuilt by dkms:

$ sudo shutdown -r now

After the reboot, it may be all working, but we can check that the nvidia module has been loaded:

$ lsmod | grep nvidia
nvidia 10832442 28

If this returns nothing, then it has not worked, if it returns “nvidia” as above, then you should have a working system.

“For some reason it is not saving a bookmark when you stop watching a recorded program in the middle, so that you have to find where you were manually. This worked fine on our old machine, so just need to find out what is wrong. I can research this when I have time.” Read original post.

Well I am delighted to say that this was fixed by an option in the Playing TV settings for saving bookmarks.

• Live TV - Pause Rewind etc
• Programme Guide
• Schedule Recordings
• MythVideo (for ripped DVDs)
• MythWeb (personal webpage for controlling Myth and viewing programme guide)

The best news is that Audio is now working over HDMI; although to be honest, I don’t believe I ever fixed this, so I suspect I just hadn’t tested it properly. All I did was select the Audio over HDMI setting in KDE Control Centre and it just worked.

So what is left to fix?

• System does not shutdown automatically - this is normal behaviour for MythTV, but I prefer to have it shutdown when not in use. This is a neat feature actually, as it will literally completely shutdown with a timer set in the bios to come on for the next schedule. Hopefully I can sort this out soon.
• MythTV Backend needs to be restarted every time the machine is powered up - this is a known issue and may even have been sorted; having been without Internet for the past three weeks, I have no idea where we are. Basically on first boot we just type $ sudo service mythtv-backend restart. Obviously if there is no fix, it would be simple enough to add to the start-up process. Subsequently fixed.
• My card has dual tuners, so can record one thing and watch another, or record two things. I have now read that some channels are on the same “mux” and that you can therefore record multiple programs on a single card. I need to research this further, but sounds exciting.
• For some reason it is not saving a bookmark when you stop watching a recorded program in the middle, so that you have to find where you were manually. This worked fine on our old machine, so just need to find out what is wrong. I can research this when I have time. Subsequently fixed.
• The case fans are a little noisier than they ought to be, so really need replacing for silent alternatives.

And, not MythTV related, but I am still struggling with KDE4, Akonadi and our Contacts in Kontact. I suspect this may be related to the use of MySQL for both MythTV and Akonadi. In the meantime my wife is using Gmail, but obviously would prefer to have Kontact back.

It seems that the HVR-2200 is something of a work-in-progress under Linux. Plenty of people seem to have it working, but it is not simple to configure. See the references at the end for further reading.

I now have this card working under MythTV, but I have not yet managed to get the programme guide updating via EIT (Freeview).

Those new to MythTV should visit: http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install mercurial libncurses5-dev unzip

$ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/22xxdrv_27086.zip
$ wget  http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
$ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/firmwares/4019072/NXP7164-2010-03-10.1.fw
$ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/extract.sh
$ sh extract.sh
$ sudo cp *fw /lib/firmware
or
$ sudo cp *fw /lib/firmware/`uname -r`

$ hg clone http://kernellabs.com/hg/saa7164-stable/

$ cd saa7164-stable
$ make CONFIG_DVB_FIREDTV:=n
$ sudo make install
$ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/firmwares/4038864/v4l-saa7164-1.0.3-3.fw 
$ sudo cp v4l-saa7164-1.0.3-3.fw /lib/firmware

$ sudo adduser <userid> video
$ sudo reboot

Create Channel.conf

$ sudo apt-get install dvb-apps
$ scan ./uk-CrystalPalace -o zap > ~/.mythtv/channels.conf

Scan

Now go to Mythbackend-Setup and perform a full scan.

Test

You should now have a working system, unfortunately I found that the programme guide, or EPG, was not updating.

Fixing EPG

(Thanks to “Neon Dusk” from the second Ubuntu forum link in the references below.)

Using channels.conf to get the channel information is OK, but sometimes it doesn’t fill in all the information required.

Make a note of your mysql password from /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt - there should be a field DBPassword

$ mysql -u mythtv -p
<enter mysql password>
use mythconverg;
select * from `dtv_multiplex`;

Copy the resulting output into a text editor, here was mine. Note the networkid is null.

6 rows in set (0.00 sec)

In mythtv-setup -> channel editor -> Edit transport Delete all existing transports (highlight transport then press d)

Go to channel scanner Select Scan Type: Full Scan (Tuned)

Use the values recorded from the sql statement and then do a scan. You’ll need to do this for the 6 muxes.

Hopefully this should find all the channels and if you repeat the sql commands you’ll see the networkid value filled in. This should then allow the EIT EPG to work

My resulting output was as attached:

9 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Test Again

Have a look at your programme guide, give it a few minutes - it isn’t instantaneous.

References

• http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php
• http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=942403
  • http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9351505&postcount=271
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9292366&postcount=3
• http://www.zedlopez.com/strangeloopiness/2010/04/mythtv_on_ubuntu_lucid_gotchas.html
• http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=721
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1167640
• http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_hvr2200mc.html
• http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/hardware/8096-there-status-hvr-2250-linux-driver-2.html#post46347
• http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-2200
• http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/hardware/12229-hvr-2200-not-picking-up-all-channels.html
• http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1410407.html

The tuner card is now working under MythTV to “Watch TV”; however the programme guide is still not updating correctly over EIT. In theory this should happen automatically after a full scan, but for some reason this seems not to be working. It may be that this is because I have simply not left the backend to idle for long enough for an EIT scan to be initiated.

More news when I have it.

I have updated my notes on the following page:

• Hauppauge HVR-2200

• Hauppauge HVR-2200

Wow, this really is a second post in one day!

Following on from the DPI issue, I decided to throw science to the wind and just set DPI to 96x96 rather than 50x50, and the login screen looks better and the font size is improved (slightly larger).

Next, I decided that I ought to check that the TV Tuner was properly detected, but whilst it was detected correctly, it was unsure of the card number, and was unable to download the firmware. This is not entirely surprising as this TV card is fairly recent and (as usual) Hauppauge do not themselves support Linux.

This link provided me with the basis for fixing this issue, but in the event I only needed the following:

$ cd ~
$ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/22xxdrv_27086.zip
$ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
$ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/extract.sh
$ sh extract.sh
$ sudo su
# cp *.fw /lib/firmware/`uname -r`/
# echo "options saa7164 card=4" >> /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf
# exit

Then reboot. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some time to continue setting up the TV card under MythTV; but for now the aerial input is required by our old MythTV system in order to record Doctor Who :).

The DPI problem was fixed very easily by following the instructions on the link I provided in my previous post, I calculated that my Sony Bravia KDL 32S3000 had dimensions of 700mm x 390mm and a native resolution of 1366x768.

$ xdpyinfo | grep dimensions
$ xdpyinfo | grep "dots per inch"

Converting the millimetres to inches and dividing the resolution by the inches dimensions gave me DPI of 50x50, surprisingly low. I believe this is because the KDL 32S3000 is not a full HD TV but only 1080i. Setting this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf cured the problem with the KDM login manager.

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Monitor0"
    Option   "DPI" "50 x 50"
EndSection

Installed the Nvidia binary driver, which worked fine, except that, as I’ve found on a few installs recently the KDE screen DPI defaults to something absurd, resulting in unreadably small fonts. Easily fixed in KDE, via System Settings (as long as you know your way around!), but haven’t yet found out how to do it in KDM (the login manager). This is not a huge problem, as it is easy enough to type in your password, and anyway on a home theatre PC you probably want it automatically logging in. That said, I am determined to fix this problem when I have some time. Interestingly this was also the case on our existing mythbox, which has completely different hardware, the common thread being the nvidia driver. I suspect the issue may be related to the KDE virtual desktop, and the nvidia driver calculating this back to a reasonable DPI. This link may help, I will give this a go when I have some time.

Anyway, the good news is that, with the binary driver installed, the standard KDE compositing is working beautifully.

As to sound, this is still not working via HDMI, but is working fine through the sound outputs. This seems to be a widespread issue, which I think has been resolved, so it’s just a matter of waiting for the fix to filter downstream. In the meantime, I will continue to work as we do on our existing mythbox, with a 2.1 speaker system plugged into the HTPC.

It switched on okay, but the front LEDs were not working, neither the power nor the disk LED; so it seems that they are not wired up correctly, although I really can’t see how I could have got it wrong.

It booted into a Kubuntu 10.04 USB stick without any problems. The network card was detected correctly and I was able to browse the Internet without any configuration. The Nvidia card was detected correctly, using the open source driver, obviously I will install the Nvidia binary driver. The only strangeness was the lack of sound via the HDMI cable, but looking in the BIOS afterward I noticed an option “Audio via HDMI” which I have enabled, it was set to auto, but maybe that’ll make a difference.

It is difficult to say how quiet it is at present, as any sound it was making was being drowned out by our noisy old mythbox.

I can’t wait to have a decent chunk of time to start the installation.

The Intel Atom A330 ION motherboard had two prongs for the Power LED, but the Lian-Li PC-C37 case had a cable for a three prong connector. The cable on has two wires, so I got around this issue by levering up the plastic catch holding one of the cables and moved it into the middle connector, which then fitted the motherboard fine, just with the now vacant connector overlapping the connectors.

The second problem that I encountered was the question of which way up the PSU should go. Normally an ATX PSU sits at the top of a tower case with the fan downwards, pulling the hot air out of the case. In a desktop (horizontal) PC this is never going to be as effective. With my case, there is no space below the PSU, so that the fan would be drawing air from nowhere and exhausting it out the back of the PC. Not only will this not cool the case, it will also burn the PSU in a very short time. By mounting the PSU upside down, the cool air should be drawn in from outside, via the top vent, cooling the PSU and exhausting out the back. This does mean that the PSU is not helping to cool the case, but at least it is not adding heat into the case.

Unfortunately, mounting the PSU upside down has meant that the power cables are furthest from the motherboard, with the result that the main 24-pin lead does not reach. It seems that extension leads are available, and I’m to have a go at getting one from Maplin in Guildford today.

This lack of PSU fan cooling for the case does mean that we are very reliant on the two case fans. The case does allow for several more case fans if necessary, although the Intel Atom processor shouldn’t be generating too much heat.

Hopefully the following should be a slideshow of the build. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t take many interim photos, so this slideshow is rather a before/after:

These days building PCs is not a black art - the connectors are all labelled - and the motherboards generally have a helpful manual detailing exactly what goes where. Building a PC is primarily a challenge from the perspective of making sure that you buy compatible components and that you design in sufficient cooling.

With luck my next post will be the power-up and install of Kubuntu 10.04 with MythTV!

Just a reminder of what I was wanting for our HTPC:

• Low power
• Silent
• Powerful enough to run KDE fully
• DVI and HDMI interfaces
• Decent on-board sound
• Plenty of USB slots
• Needs to visually go with our HiFi amp and Blu-Ray player
• Powerful enough graphics to support 1080p (or 720p if not possible)

The Case: Lian Li PC-C37

I started, perversely, with the case. Normally you would start with the cpu/mb, but I knew that, in order to get spouse approval, it had to look right. You can spend from £20 to £1000 on cases, and I dare say more. I wanted something that looked like a black HiFi separate, both in dimensions and styling. I would have thought that there would have been a considerable choice, but there really wasn’t, the only one I found was the Lian-Li PC-C37. It would seem to be a well made quality case, for about £100. I would have liked to have spent a little less, but really there was no choice whatsover.

Motherboard/CPU: Asrock A330ION

The Lian-Li PC-C37 takes both Mini-ITX and Micro-ATX motherboards. Well that’s just fine, given that my aim was a low power, silent and powerful PC, really the Intel Atom was the only choice and they invariably come in Mini-ITX motherboards. Well there is a vast array of Intel Atom motherboards on the market but, oddly enough, almost all of them had problems. Most of them only had 4 usb ports, which would be okay, just. Almost none of them had DVI, let alone HDMI. One motherboard stood out from the rest, the Asrock A330ION. Yes it’s the old Atom 330, but it allowed the faster DDR3 RAM, and the specification of the motherboard was fantastic, including:

• 2 x DDR3 DIMM slots (up to 4GB)
• Integrated NVIDIA® GeForce 9 Series
• DVI and HDMI
• 7.1 channel HD Audio
• Gigabit LAN
• 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot
• 4 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors + 2 e-SATA
• 4 rear USB plus support for upto 4 front USB

That feature set is almost unbelievable, (4+2 SATA!! 4+4 USB!! DDR3!!!) by the time I had read the specification, I barely cared about the price.

I also bought 2gb of compatible DDR3 RAM.

DVB-T Tuner

Well, as I said in my last post, we need to have DVB-T, and of course I have my Hauppauge Nova-T500 PCI card. Ah, but I have just bought a motherboard that only has PCI-Express; so a new card is required. I do hope my wife isn’t reading this. Anyway, I like Hauppauge products, and the HVR-2200 is the obvious PCI-Express low profile dual DVB-T tuner card. No decision to make really, other than should I pay twice the amount for the HVR-4400, which has satellite capability, err no, have to draw the line somewhere ;).

Hard Drives

Well, we’re making a lower power device, so we need low-power drives. Two were recommended to me, the Seagate Barracuda LP Series and the Western Digital Caviar Green Series. Starting to get rather concerned about the money I have been spending, I decided to opt for a relatively low capacity of 500gb, but to go for two drives, so that I could configure a RAID1 array. For those that don’t know, a RAID1 array means that you have the same data on both drives, so that if you lose one drive, you don’t lose your data. In short, your data is mirrored to the two drives. This doesn’t replace backups, but it certainly saves a headache if you lose one of your drives.

It was suggested to me that I should use a NAS for storage, but I don’t particularly want two machines on almost permanently. I already have an Icybox NAS, which I have stopped using after it ate two drives; so I don’t trust it and I don’t particularly want it. We’ll probably configure our HTPC to behave as a NAS as well as an HTPC.

• Western Digital 500GB Caviar Green 32MB SATA 69T6

Conclusion

All the hardware is now ordered, with the exception of the PSU, as I have one in my stores somewhere, hopefully it will be compatible! More tomorrow, when hopefully I will be starting the build.

Those that say that Linux is free if your time is free have never spent evening after evening setting up XPMCE.

In 2008 we upgraded to Mythbuntu 8.10. My wife was easy to persuade, simply because she could not see how Linux could possibly be worse than Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition. And so it proved, it wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was just good enough that we never regretted the change.

Conventional wisdom is that, if you have a working MythTV system, then you should leave it well alone; but I decided that I wanted to move to KDE from the standard XFCE. It was only after the installation was well under-way that I realised that this meant KDE 4.1, which was an unusable version. Kicking myself for such stupidity, I quickly upgraded to 9.04 and 9.10. Both upgrades went almost flawlessly, and the system has been pretty good ever since.

Unfortunately we’ve come to hate the Evesham emedia station that runs our MythTV. I stupidly bought four PCs from Evesham and have always regretted it. Evesham have a good reputation, but my experience is that the hardware is very poor indeed. Specifically it has always been very noisy and suffered from overheating. In addition we have issues with USB support on this PC in Ubuntu. Something to do with OHCI, UCHI etc, I forget what exactly. It’s also ugly as sin. In short it was not a good buy and we have always regretted it.

If you’re interested you can read a review on this god-awful PC. Having read this very positive review, I can only assume that Evesham reduced the component quality significantly by the time I bought this machine.

So we’ve decided to replace our media centre. I have considered XBMC and Boxee, but with such a poor Internet connection, we really do still need to get our TV via our aerial. And that means MythTV, as far as I know.

I considered buying an Acer Revo, but a huge prejudice against Acer put me off this decision (oh god, not Acer, not ever). I did not consider for a second buying a dedicated XP MCE machine and putting MythTV onto it - we’ve experienced what can go wrong first hand - and I wanted 100% control over the components.

So what are we looking for in our new media centre (or Home Theatre PC as the jargon now has it!)?

• Low power
• Silent
• Powerful enough to run KDE fully
• DVI and HDMI interfaces
• Decent on-board sound
• Plenty of USB slots
• Needs to visually go with our HiFi amp and Blu-Ray player
• Powerful enough graphics to support 1080p (or 720p if not possible)

In my next post I will run through the hardware I’ve chosen.

If, like me, you have your laptop permanently on whilst you watch TV, then MythWeb is going to be a shock, a delightful shock. Imagine, from the comfort of your sofa, with your laptop on your lap:

• What’s on TV? Open your browser and you have a beautifully formatted programme guide - far better than an on-TV guide.
• Want to record something? Simply click on it, choose your options and submit.
• Nothing on TV? View your Recorded Programmes.
• Want to know what you’ve got set to record? Upcoming Recordings.
• On holiday and you realise you forgot to record the new series of Doctor Who? Log-into MythWeb remotely and record.
• At work and you want to show your colleagues the funny bit in Big Bang Theory? No problem log into MythWeb and download, or play the episode in Flash.

And there’s more: weather, ripped video, music, and more. If you’re anything like me, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it, and quite simply it has now spoiled me for ANY other PVR system.

The other win is the commercial skipping, enabling a one button press to skip adverts.

Please see my later post on MythWeb.

Anyway, decided to replace it with Mythbuntu, because (1) it’s Debian based, (2) it should provide a quicker install than Debian.

My first impressions are that, if Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, Mythbuntu is Linux for human beings who have evolved into a higher form of intelligence.

The problem is that it’s trying to do so much, that the essential options are obscured by the trivial; they really should triage the options into essential (need this to get a working television), important (you need this, but not necessarily immediately), and the rest.

Also, it simply isn’t intuitive enough, for example I now understand that you have to install the capture cards, then the video sources (bizarrely this is the channel/guide information - or at least I think so) and then, after four hours of hair tearing I finally realised that you also have to configure the next option on the list “Input connections” which effectively links the tuners to the channel/guide information. If they must call the channel/guide information “Video sources”, then they could at least have the decency to call the “Input connections” option something like “Connect Capture Cards to Video Sources”, which I would have immediately understood (at least once I had worked out what the heck Video Sources were).

All very frustrating, and I really have been made to feel like an innocent newbie all over again. Horrible.

But I can see that, once I’m over this hump, it will do just about everything I could possibly ever want, and a great deal more besides. And it looks good, which is important in a living room computer.

And most importantly, we are a Microsoft-free house - hurrah!