MythTV is truly Mythical

20, Jul, 2009

It’s been a long and cumbersome road, but our MythTV backend is now fully functional. This was no real fault to MythTV. As with anything new, there’s always a learning curve. One thing MythTV is not shy about it is the shear number of configuration possibilities. If I had to fault MythTV on one thing, it’s on a not so impressive configuration GUI. Give me a TEXT (not XML) file to edit, and I’m happy.

The amount of time it took, is purely my fault. With so many options and configurations, I just had to try most of them out. RAID or no RAID, LVM? What pretty much made that choice for me was MythTV’s use of Storage Groups. Thinking ahead in the short term about how many frontends I would possibly connect, and a little math, told me I really did not need the speed benefit of RAID. Standard ATA/100 drives would more than accomplish recording one stream and feeding to 2 clients at the same time with ease. Storage Groups negate the need for LVM. Running out of space? Plug in a disk, and add it to the Storage Group.

MythTV’s Storage Groups are also smart enough to do a bit of load balancing. Should I be reading and writing to one disk already, and a new program begins to record - MythTV will automatically know how busy the one disk is, and decide to record to the next drive in the storage group. Fabulous!!

Of course everything I want to do with MythTV requires a particular version of this and that. Slackware64 -current has QT4 by default. MythTV .21 uses QT3, but, MythTV -trunk (soon to be .22) has a better implementation of Storage Groups, and uses QT4. It was trivial to modify the MythTV SlackBuild from www.slackbulds.org to work with trunk.

Final hardware specs -
Backend
DFI Lanparty UT nf3 250GB Socket 754
AMD Sempron 3000+ (x86_64 + sse3)
1.5GiB DDR RAM
80GiB System Drive
200GiB Storage (TV1)*
200GiB Storage (TV 2)*
On board nvidia Forced deth GigE*
(2)Asus Falcon2 IVTV analog capture cards
Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP

Frontend
Biostar G31-M7 TE Socket 775
Intel PDC 2140 (1.6ghz x 2)
1GiB DDR2 RAM
80GiB System Drive
Realtek 8169 GigE
Nvidia GeForce 9500 PCIe (VDPAU)

The frontend is actually a somewhat temp solution. It’s more or less just a regular computer hooked up to the TV. Big boxy case and all. After a few months of real world testing, I may construct a few more frontends in proper HTPC cases.
* Those parts are what I had laying around. Not really wanting to spend any real money on this project until I am sure things meet my expectations. I may replace, or just add more hard drives to the mix. Honestly depends on how this current setup, and MythTV itself pans out.

So far, The Boss (my girlfriend) is somewhat on the fence about MythTV. She doesn’t hate it, but doesn’t love it either. My favorite part was watching her amasement with MythTV’s commercial autoskip. I’d say that feature alone will move her over. Just need to give it some time.

I’ll add my scripts for updating MythTV from svn, creating the mysql, and other goodies as time permits.

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