MCman: On using a HTPC in NZ

Genius Remote 300 review

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:52:00 PDT

Well I havn't posted here in a very long time, primarily because due to non-ideal circumstances I find myself living by myself in a part of the country without FreeviewHD (now that I finally have a TV worth watching it on too), and without a dedicated PVR. So I watch analogue TV using my desktop and MP and try to get DVB-S working.

However this did occasion the need for a new remote, and since the MCE USB remote I own doesn't seem avaliable anymoreI bought the Genius Remote 300 ($50 at TasTech). I am sharing my thoughts here in case others are interested as I havn't seen (granted I havn't looked hard) many comparable options to replace the Microsoft version.

The Remote 300 is designed as a Windows Media Center Remote and hence has all the buttons the MS remote does. However the layout is different and in my opinion unintuative. Most of the buttons are small and the logo's on the shortcut's (Live TV, DVD etc) very hard to make out. Rounding out the negatives the remote is lightweight, feels very cheap and has a very rough finish down the side, which is noticable when holding.

However it does far out-perform the MS remote in features. There are 4 different inputs, and for all of them (other than PC) every single button can be programmed. So under TV you can match the buttons of your TV remote, and map a seperate set of buttons (very handy for power and volume) for your amp. This does require extra button presses to allow for this flexibility, to activate a mode firstly press the required mode button up top (which will go ) then the desired function button. So to turn off the TV when you have been controlling the PC requres 2 presses rather than one on the MS remote, which is especially annoying given the small buttons and compact layout means most button presses require looking at the remote.

So I would say this remote is good for the price, and for those who need to control a lot of devices it is cheaper than any comparable programmable remote. However its price is very noticable in use, and I am sure you will get a lot more for a jump to a $100-$150 remote the likes of a Logitech or Harmony. And for those who only have one input (a HTPC) to their TV/sound system, the MCE remote is better.

New wiki for setting up guide data in NZ

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:23:00 PST

So since it is something that causes people trouble, on these forumns and others, i have created a page on HTPCnz for setting up guide data in NZ. It isn't complete yet, hopefully when done it will contain complete instructions for setting up, mapping and updating guides for all the major operating systems and PVR software. If those with some expertise on this, especially with GB-PVR and Windows Media Center could have a look and maybe add some detail that would be great. It could also do with an eye over the Linux instructions, I don't currently have a myth box in front of me so went on memory for the specific steps.

Finally I havn't quite figured out referencing on that site which means two things: I need someone to point out how, and guides I have copied from elsewhere (MP wiki, mythtvnz list, reven) have gone somewhat un-recognised. So if you see your handiwork there, feel free (of course you di, its a wiki!) to add a thank you note to yourself.

Hopefully others can also contribute to this great wiki, currently there is still a lot of knowedge spread around and multiple wiki's trying to collaborate it. I don't have a problem with sites like MythKiwi obviously, but it would be great to have a central resource with all the important stuff that can be linked to for newbies. The next thing I would like to do on that front is put together a page explaining DVB-T/S in NZ and what it means for budding HTPC builders. There is still a lot of confusion around on how this all works. I currently have 8 more days until my last exam (ever, yay for graduating!) then I will have time to do this stuff.

Let me know what else you think needs doing on this front.

Final MythTV report

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:59:00 PDT

Well I have done a lot of work since my last post - end result: running MP1.0 RC3 having tried and failed with a full-time MythTV install.

Turns out the changes made to Myth came from the main devs, not Paul's source. However soon after the changes came in mythttv-fixes he updated his source so now it is built on the latest version of myth, with the loopfilter option in the GUI. So armed with an extra gig of RAM and a new WD 640GB hard drive, I did a complete re-install to Mythbuntu 8.04.1, adding Paul's PPA and setting up FreeviewHD+Prime.

And what did a find with more prolonged testing than earlier: the machine will hard lock after a period of time (up to 12 hours, at least with me) and watching true HD (with its higher bitrate) is very very borderline on my 5200X2, in fact there is occasional skipping. And forget any sort of background commskip, made TV unwatchable.

So after spending a long time moving files over a dodgy network, changing RAM configurations it reluctantly had to conclude that the install wasn't stable enough. WAF was going to down fast, she wanted to know why we didn't have 'that blue one which worked'!

So I am back to MP, with some changes. The box now has 2GB of RAM, the faster WD hard drive, COreAVC for H.264 and RC3. These changes have meant no skipping during playback for unfathonable reasons (so far), and a generally good experience. Don't know how long CoreAVC will last though, it was installed with the KLite codec pack so unless they have done something illegal it must be a demo. This codec pack is great, gives tonnes of options for all playback, as well enabling containers such as mkv so you can play pretty much anything.

MP it is then, and I am pretty happy with how it has behaved so far (other than a random unmapping of tuners rom channels!). I have made some other changes, I now have two simple custom scripts running using Task Scheduler. One downloads and unzips the freeview-all.gz archive from pvr.geek.nz and puts it where it belongs (simpler I reckon than using mentalinc's downloader), and the other checks every 5mins for a ping to the router, and resets the network if it doesn't find it. Still haven't got 100% confirmation it works, however I will post when I am happy with it.

Of course I havn't finished with this at all, there will be big changes next year when I graduate (yay!) and move to a smaller part of the country with no DVB-T. Likely to go to a DVB-S setup with Myth, should be fun.

It works - 1080i with a 5200X2 in mythtv

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:43:00 PDT

Title says it all really, I can now watch TV3 in MythTV with my 5200 X2. There is a bit more to the story though:

Since my last post I went through, and with the help of a fellow TR member, enabled skiploopfilter and rebuilt from source. It didn't work so I basically left it. Came back to my test install today to have a fiddle with C, and thought why not, update the box and try TV3. And its works! And now in Playback Profiles there is a GUI option to enable skiploopfilter so it looks like Paul Kendall has updated his source (confirming that with him now).

Moral of the story, an affordable MythTV-based FreeviewHD PVR is now a realistic proposition without any changes beyond getting Paul's updates. A 65W 5200 or 5400 will do the trick, find a motherboard with the required (Linux-supported) video and audio outputs and you are good to go.

For me I have 2 more very busy weeks of uni before study leave (my last ever!), so won't be touching anything until then. Hopefully though I can finish watching the stuff recorded in MP and switch to Myth for 'extended testing' :)

Will update.

Freeview|HD in MythTV - still!

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 03:26:00 PDT

I have spent this morning re-installing Mythbuntu onto a partition of my USB drive so this is just a further update on the situation for those who were interested.

Last time I put Mythbuntu onto the entire drive, rendering it useless (Windows can't see a ext3 partition) for data transfer etc. So I had to take it off, and this time I only used up about 18GB. Also used EasyBCD to have the boot manager on the SATA drive and don't have to plug the USB drive in to reboot the machine.

So after all the setup (Nvidia drivers, my version of lircrc, getting Paul's patches) got it all working like before. Unfortunatly TV3 is still the same, so now my mission begins to learn how to edit source code and rebuild mythtv so I can enable skip loop filter. If anyone here can help with that please leave a comment.

I did make one improvement this time around by using a new guide source from nice.net.nz. I have used Reven for ages (and will still use it on Windows) but his grabber is not a xmlTV complaint grabber which means going through the 'mythfilldatabase --file' rigaramole, and I have found that a real hassle with multiple sources and digital TV. The solution is a complaint script, and instructions are given here for how to set this up. This data is from the DVB-S feed and I am told is good data. When I can run mythtv full time I will be able to test that!

Update on MythTV Freeview HD testing

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:04:00 PDT

Over this weekend I have had a chance to properly try out MythTV with Freeview so here is an update on where I am at for now.

Firstly I did a major hardware swap, moving my Antec PSU, 3800 and Nvidia 8600GT to my main box in return for a cheap X-Power PSU and 5200 X2. The X2 provides more grunt for software decoding H.264, enough to work in Windows but not myth as will be seen.

So with Mythubuntu 8.04.1 + latest upgrades, including from Paul Kendall's repository, I monitered the CPU usage over SSH whilst testing out the channels. I got around 40%-70% CPU overall, obviously the SD channels where lighter on the CPU than HD with TV3 causing the max load.

However despite not maxing out the CPU TV3 was unwatchable, freezing for half a second every 1-2 secs. This is a problem a few others with similar CPU's on the mythnz mailing list have and the solution is changing the 'skiploopfilter' settings, I think forcing myth to drop frames rather than lag. However what is required to make this change is beyond my current Linux/GNU abilities so I am putting this project aside for the moment. What also contributed to that decision is reports from others about frequent frontend crashes, something I don't want on a HTPC that gets regular use.

So now I am re-installing Mediaportal (the change in graphics cards did something weird to the Windows install) and will work on getting Mythbuntu installed onto my old IDE drive so I can have my USB drive back.

When I am prepared to figure out rebuilding patches etc, or Paul sets up a GUI to make these changes (as he indicated he may) I will revisit this. Until, MP it is. It may not be perfectly stable, or make every recording I schedule (NCIS 2 weeks ago came back with just the xml file, no .ts at all!), but the codecs work better for obvious reasons.

I am glad just to have something that works, support is very limited for these MPEG 4 codecs and will be for a while yet.

Succesful trial run of FreeviewHD in MythTV!

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:15:00 PDT

I have noted earlier in this blog that Mythtv does not work with FreeviewHD due to lack of audio support. Well thanks to work of Paul Kendall (see his site here) and others it is now possible to use Mythtv as a HTPC delivering FreeviewHD. There are a couple of caveats to that of course; a powerfull CPU is required as there is no hardware H.264 accelration, and you have to be prepared to do a little bit of extra work in setting the machine up (not much different with fiddling with codecs with MP or GBPVR though).

So to test it all out with my machine I downloaded the latest version of Mythbuntu (8.04.1) and installed it onto my external hard drive. There are then a few step I had to go through before I could run myth-backend setup:

1) After restarting from the CD to the hard drive, I added the following line to the bottom of /etc/sources.list (open terminal, type 'sudo nano /etc/sources.list'):

                      deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/paul-kcbbs/ubuntu hardy main

Then run: 
'sudo apt-get update'
'sudo apt-get upgrade'

That will require confirmation and run for a while, after which the machine will be up-to-date with Paul's patches installed.

2) I have a Nova T 500, and according to it's wiki page it requires a cold reboot to be detected. Before this is done though, add the folowing to /etc/modprobe.d/options:

#enable LNA
options dvb-usb-dib0700 force_lna_activation=1
#disable 2nd tuner suspend
options usbcore autosuspend=-1 

Now you are ready to run mythbackend setup and configure the tuners, sources etc. Also a guide will need to be setup somehow, I havn't got around to that yet.

With the configuration basically as above, I scanned in the digital channels to test out performance. With my 2.4GHz single core I could watch just TV1 and TV2, it would start skipping on fast moving scenes. TV3 was a no go.


From here, I plan on swap the CPU and graphics card out and put in my 5200+ X2. With a little bit more tweaking to get dual core being helpful (thanks to the mythtvnz list) hopefully I can get all the channels working. If I can do that, and get a guide loaded for all channels on my test setup I will do a reinstal and move everything over to Mythbuntu :) 
Uni holidays are next week so this will be on the backburner with a very busy last week, will post again when I test things further.

The current setup - Mediaportal

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:18:00 PDT

I think I have gone on about MythTV enough, what about the other major open source media center application, which has many of the features of myth and the added bonus of being Windows-based and hence a lot more familiar territory for most people?

I have run Mediaportal 1.0 for a couple of months now, it's currently at RC2 and has been pretty good. You may have noticed my HTPC system isn't exactly top of the line, a single core and 1GB of RAM means Vista doesn't run very smoothly. MP can be sluggish, I think the remote lag has been fixed, but often loading a channel and setting up a recording can be slow. The worst problems come when recording 2+ shows, especially if some are HD, and watching another at the same time. The show I'm watching will skip or pause, I don't think the hard drive is fully up to the task.

Now plenty of people of these forums already run Mediaportal but there also seem to be plenty running GB-PVR and MCE and to be honest I'm often not sure why. One obvious point is the use of Popcorn hours as a frontend for a GB-PVR server; they look like a sweet quiet, reliable client, but what you are missing out on is full support for all of Freeview HD's audio formats (and hence can watch all the channels), and support for recording multiple channels of a single digital frequency. This is something I do all the time, and to test out my system I once got it recording 5 shows at once, including the HD channels, and it worked fine. I'm sure it could do more, even an HD stream is only around 1.2MB/s, but I got bored. On top of that of course you have support for multiple sources (digital and analogue) and can hence have Prime and FreeviewHD on one system. Again, can't see why you would want to go for Vista MCE instead. Yes it is more stable but I fail to see why so many people have posted at The Green Button complaining about the delays, and possible cancellation, of H.264 support when there is a viable alternative avaliable right now.

This brings me to my point about Mediaportal, its flexibility and feature support, which come from its ability to lean on other software for support. MP doesn't have built-in H.264 decoding, it uses an external codec such as PowerCinema. MP doesn't need drivers for all the TV cards it supports, it uses the provided Windows drivers. And I don't know the technical details but MP also leans on various other parts of the operating system, such as Aero for video performance. This of course gives it a huge advantage over MythTV, which requires all these critical supporting components to be written by volunteers and included in the operating system. Hence, I use it :)

Finally I thought I might add to this blog with what I have been watching. I recently managed to add to my standard fare of The Daily Show and CSI/SVU etc with Friday Night Lights, 8.30pm Friday C4. Set in the heart of Texas; it is about football, God, cheerleaders and football. Very interesting insight into what these small towns revolve around, namely Friday night college football. You thought we take rugby seriously here, we have nothing on the Americans!

So what is this MythTV anyway?

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:45:00 PDT

OK so I have already talked here about why I prefer mythtv to MediaPortal, it’s not an exhaustive list but I think it makes a pretty compelling argument for Mythtv. However what makes an even stronger compelling argument for MP is its support for NZ's DVB-T broadcasts, and hence I use it. The latest from the mythtvnz mailing list is that Freeview HD is now working well in myth with the patches from pkendall, so hopefully it is just a case of getting the updates to ffmpeg etc into the main mythtv 'trunk' (is that what it called?) and we will be away!

Anyway I should get to the point of this post. I want to list a couple tips I picked up for improving mythtv here, as I alluded to earlier, myth does require more work than MP or GBPVR but it’s worth it:

1) Adding FM radio. I have no idea why this isn't included by default, it can't be hard and all other major HTPC programs have it. To get it in myth requires a bit of a hack, the setup instructions are here. As they note on the wiki page, it is a hack but looks like a plug-in in the end. It doesn't perform like a plug-in (in terms of sharing the card with recording etc) but it is good enough. Also this page gives an idea to the sort of changes to the menu structure that could be made if so desired.

2) By default myth only allows one job (such as commflagging, or a user job such as a special transcode) at a time. Assuming you are running a somewhat modern processor you can get away with a lot more, especially if you have a dual core. Under the 'general' settings in mythbackend setup, change the max number jobs to say 3 or 4. Also set mythcommflag to begin at the start of the show rather than wait until it has finished.

3) Make sure you enable plugins such as mythmusic, mythvideo and mythweb. If you are using Mythbuntu the Mythbuntu Control Center is the easiest way to change these settings. Mythweb in particular is great, and if you can successfully enable access through your router you can check out your computers status, and create recordings even when you are way from home.

That’s all can think of for now, but there are plenty of other settings worth investigating by hunting through the menus. There are some other good features that I never managed to fully implement, such as http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Mythwelcome and automatic sleep/wakeup.

Next I will spill my thoughts on Media Portal, and the improvements made now we are at RC2.

Short note on power consumption

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 02:27:00 PDT

I have always intended on keeping track of the power consumption of various iterations of the media center, and to this end I bought one of those $20 warehouse power meters a few months back. Here are some plower figures, I will eventually update the sidebar info with this.

The original media center, with 1 TV card and on-board graphics idled around 50W, and used about 60W under load (which was generally less than 50% CPU, it didn't have much of a workout with a hardware MPEG2 encoder TV card). I think it maxed around 80W.

The current iteration, with the 2 cards and the 8600GT now averages at 88W (average from 94 hours running), this is all-inclusive and incorporates restarts. The peak value is 140W, that is a startup load though, it uses about 100W playing back TV. Idles somewhere around 80W.

The machine runs 24/7 currently as it has all our shared music, plus file syncing between desktop and laptop and daily backups. Plus I don't have the time to setup complete wakeup/sleep off remote and scheduled recordings.

Hopefully I will eventually be able to swap in my 5200 X2 65W from my desktop and go back to onboard graphics w/ software decoding. This hould work as my desktop, with this CPU, can currently play back HD performing as an MP client. If this works then it will cut power back a lot, should be less than the original setup. I will come back to this topic when changes are made.

Of MythTV and Women

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:47:00 PDT

Now that demostrates the dangers on saved passwords on a computer your significant other can access! I will leave the postposterity, or at least temporary posterity . I was going to make a post here about my experience with mythtv but first a bit on WAF.

As I'm sure anyone who has run a Media-Center as the primary TV watching device in a household has noticed the importance of Women Acceptance Factor, the need for your significant other to be able to use the device and for it to work reliably. Having had a difficult start with my media-center (it spent a lot of the time originally operating without a case, before going through multiple re-installs to get a stable, working system) I definitely understand it! And this is where I come to myth, I have personally found it better on the WAF than MediaPortal. Yes, it took longer to get setup as I had to figure out getting a working remote and guide (after initially wasting time with xmlTVNZ 2.5), and as I was working on the setup Mythbuntu 8.04/mythtv0.21 was released and I really had to move up with all the new features.

Coming back to my point abouts myth's reliability, here are some reasons why I prefer MythTV to MediaPortal:

- Advanced scheduler, which has more features and better conflict resolution than MP and doesn't create random manual recordings
- Mythweb, a well written easily activated web app for remote control of the myth box (guide, recordings, status etc)
- I often find MP starts to 'lag' badly in menu's remote commands take 3-4 seconds to work. Myth doesn't do this.
- Myth's Recorded TV screen is much better than MP's, I don't have to switch to 'Icons' to see the EPG, I have a choose of seeing all shows or folders with each show rather than MP's annoying folders
- Ability to SSH into the box to make changes, not to mention he general flexibility of Linux
- Built-in MythCommFlag (commercial skipping program), which works on digital TV

Thats the main stuff, I will add more as I think of it. Now of course it also has it disadvantages, general driver support (for sound, graphics, TV cards etc) being a major, but I will get into that later when I talk about MediaPortal. However as soon as our DVB-T is fully supported in myth is will be going back for the reasons above. What suprises me the most is the apparent lack of uses/knowledge in this, a geek, forumn. An example is the comment I saw recently stating that MediaPortal is the only PVR software which supports multi-rec (multiple channels on the same mux off one tuner), mythtv has from the most recent release. In fact I can't understand why people use other software such as VMC or GBPVR knowing they are missing out on this, unless there recording habits are fairly limited (which I can understand, there isn't often THAT much decent TV on at once).

Anyway I think I have pretty much made my point. I like both MythTV and MediaPortal, they are both free and open source to begin with, I just prefer myth more (or would if it supported DVB-T, the driver/codec issue again). Some of it also comes from the base OS's, Linux has much to offer over Windows for this application but then I don't have to spend weeks trying to get surround sound working in Windows! I would love to hear what others hear think on his, plus my most popular post so far was done by my partner so comment and lets get this blog back on track

Update: As of a few hours after this post my point was again proven, the remote stopped responding. Twice. The receiver flashed but nothing, could mouse through menu's. Both times pulled and plugged back in and eventually away again.

This is why you shouldn't have automatic login on your computer and then leave bored girls alone in the house!

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:14:00 PDT

Hi MCman!

Hope you like your new colour scheme!

Regards,

Jem

The Media Center

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 06:39:00 PDT

I will start off here with some details on the media center itself. I built this machine at the start of the year, the core components (CPU/MB/HDD) were all new with some old RAM I had, plus the Hauppauge PVR150 I had been using with Vista Media Center and an old PSU. The original spec specs:

Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz single core)
1 GB RAM
Nvidia 6100 graphics on cheap ASUS motherboard
320 GB Seagate
PVR150
DVD-ROM Drive
MCE USB2 Remote
Mythbuntu 8.04 (mythtv 0.21)

All this this was put into the wooden case I built myself, which you can see in the pics below:

A disclaimer: I am not responsible for MC's colour scheme and name! I let my significant other loose on it with spraypaint and this was the result. I do actually like it though, its a bit different and surely unique.

As I noted above this machine was orginally running mythtv however the observant would have noticed that is MediaPortal is the first picture. Unfortunalty I didn't take any pictures during the build or with the original setup so this is how it is now. I will get to why I am running MediaPortal (and my thoughts on it) in a later post.

As far as the construction goes I will post some interior pics when I next take the machine out, which I thankfully havn't had to do in a while as it is a pain. This is due to my less than secure construction and the fact that the internals are all mounted upside down (i.e. attached to the roof of the machine) on the internals of an old machine I ripped up. Due to bending and cutting of the backpane I can't screw in the TV cards, and also my attempts to properly attach the bottom of the case (which is fully removable for access to the components) have failed so the top of the case is simply sitting on the bottom. So not at all ideal but it works as long as I don't try move it. I will go into more detail on the construction when I have interior pictures.

For cooling, I have an 120mm fan @ 5V at the rear behind the DVD-ROM and hard drive (which are in the drive cage begind the fold down door) and an internal 80mm fan @5V located just behind the front panel on the right, pushing air over the cards and out the rear. The CPU fan is the standard AMD fare, this is the noisiest part of the system at the moment and I will eventually replace it with something quiet. As the drive cage is mounted on foam there are no vibration noises, but the Seagate seeks fairly loadly and can be heard over the fans at times. The machine runs 24/7 and the temps have been pretty low when I have looked, it is however cold in Christchurch in the winter so it will be a different story when i move back up North in the summer. Hopefully I can do something about the cooling then too.

Next up, my experiences with mythtv.

Welcome

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:32:00 PDT

Well I had been looking for a place to put down what I have learnt setting up my media center this year so here goes! I'm a final year mech eng student at University of Canterbury who is interested in AV and computers, hence the natural progression into an HTPC. I started out with a mythbuntu build and have since moved to MediaPortal for the DVB-T support; I will put down what I have learnt from both here.

More to come later, I will start with pointing out the resources I have used to get what I have. I am by no means a computer expert, and have very little linux knowledge, so I can only stand on the shoulder of giants. In no particular order: the mythbuntu forumns, mythtv.org & mythtv.co.nz, Geekzone, the MP forums and cranznz's setup guide for MP.