Wow, I was putting together my MythTV machine and it was OK until I had to get my remote front-end working. Because of the WAF, I selected a small machine - the Hauppage MediaMVP. What I didn’t recognize was that the documentation for getting it running… umm… stinks. Or at least is severely misleading (http://www.mvpmc.org/ mvpmc-HOWTO-singlehtml.html, not linked so you don’t try and use it. I should have noticed when it used software 13 versions old.). Or is really hard to find. So here’s my trials and tribulations and fixes, for anyone who is doing it.
Add to Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) to get the mvpmc code loaded:
apt-get install atftpd tftp
mkdir /tftpboot
chmod a+rwx /tftpboot
export TFTPBOOT=/tftpboot
cd /tftpboot/
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mvpmc/dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3?modtime=1169 586056&big_mirror=0
ln -s dongle.bin.mvpmc dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3
ln -s dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3 dongle.bin.mvpmc
but then I was shocked to find that while the config files for inetd were created, there was no inetd. So…
apt-get install xinetd tcpd
apt-get install nfs-common nfs-kernel-server
cd /etc
e exports
ls /media/hdb1/mythtv/recordings/
/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start
/etc/init.d/nfs-common start
update-rc.d nfs-kernel-server defaults
and then it wouldn’t read the config file. Time to add the setting to have xinetd use inetd.conf…
e /etc/init.d/xinetd
add in flag: -inetd_compat
I learned that the instructions on mvpmc.org are pretty specific to the first generation of the machine, the H1. However, those aren’t made any more… and once I got into trouble, each piece turned out to be challenges with the version. I’ve got an H3. For that, you need a special service that whispers magic incantations into the ear of the MVP. It also needs a significantly different guide… and after searching and searching (has VLC notes for future) and searching (supersweet detail, enough to choke on and more, which also gave me the link to…) I finally stumbled across on http://mvpmc.wikispaces.com/ and started getting more progress on MythTV setup… well, almost…
e mvpboot.pl
and I then went spelunking into mvpboot.pl and mvprelay.c -
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Net::Interface
apt-get install initrd-tools gcc
dd if=dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3 of=dongle.bin.ver bs=1 count=40 skip=5
So once again I’m thrilled by Debian/Ubuntu and their dependencies… as well as the prompts (when you run a nonexistent program, Ubuntu now suggests packages to install that provide the command you’re trying to use… very cool). But I hate how I rely on them, because I thought once I actually installed GCC that it would work. I finally was googling and found I was still missing one big piece:
apt-get install build-essential
and now all the compilation stuff worked and Perl was happy. Argh!
I then started fighting my drive definitions… I had partitioned my three drives in a marvelous way, redundancy for the OS and big space for the media:
Mirrors on drive 1 and 2:
- 100mb - /boot
- 2gb - swap
- 28gb - /
One big XFS drive (3) for media:
- 400gb - /media
except it appears Ubuntu uses /media for its mount space, and somehow my brain didn’t register that. So when the folder was there, I thought it would have my big space… but no. Fought with fstab a while and eventually got it so the last drive moved to /mediafiles and all started working.
Now the shiny stuff. MVPMC can stream music from a central server, too…
apt-get install slimserver
and it didn’t work that well when I put it in. All I could get was a statement from Live365 that I wasn’t logged in. Shockingly, when I went to the SlimServer instructions and did some basic configuration 
it worked. Who’da thunk it? I also had to chmod 777 to get it to read the media… I’ll clean that up later.
Other MythTV bits:
apt-get install mythweb mythmusic mythvideo mythplugins ogle mplayerapt-get install vlc videolan-doc
Followed the instructions on setting up vlc. It also said I needed mpslave to use aacPlus or Real Audio streams… right now I don’t need that bad enough to do the work. It’s not working yet, so I’ll have to poke it more later.
What remains? Glad you asked…
- For some reason the network connection is running at 10mb Half Duplex. Since it happens with other computers on that drop I think it’s a switch or wire problem.
- mplayer on my mvpmc only shows streaming radio successfully from live365 and the other XML is having parsing errors.
- slimserver is cataloguing AAC files from iTunes but not playing them, even the unencrypted ones
- I have to set up playlists and my local radio stations as m3u links so we can use them also… should be easy, just has to be done…
- I want to get the ReplayTV and Filesystems menu items to not display, which should be doable according to the commandline argument writeup but it somehow isn’t.
- Live TV isn’t running yet (but we almost never watch live TV so I don’t care much)
- Get VLC working
- Clean up the /mediafiles/music chmod 777 hack
- Oh yeah, and getting it working with remote systems so I can drive the other two TVs. I’m going to see if I can get my hands on an AppleTV to get a richer interface for the Myth frontend and still have iTunes playback work for the stereo… that might be better for music playing. Not to mention then it will have HDMI or composite video which would be very good if we upgrade our TVs anytime in our life… sigh.
