Knowing that I wanted to get a MythTV box set up someday and disappointed at how much time my parents spend watching commercials, I decided to take a small iWill (2GHz Celly) shoebox I had laying around and turn it into something useful. It was a lot of work, but having done it once, I think I could do it again in a few hours.

As I typed that, I realized it was like the time I set up my first Linux box ten years ago. I learned a lot about the product and some things that I didn't think I would learn about. So it was a good experience, but I'm sure it won't really pay off until I can build more of these puppies.

There are a surprisingly large number of choices to be made when you build a MythTV. If you don't care much what it comes out looking like, it's just the Linux distro you choose and the TV tuner card that you buy. One of the things that was really important to me in this process was that the box was built from RPMs from ATRPMs or typical Fedora repositories. I want to be able to upgrade the box with zero hassle. RPMs have come a long way since I first heard about (and ignored) them, and I'd never build a box again that didn't use either apt or yum as the primary means of installing software. It's gotten to the point that if an SRPM is available, I will download that and do an 'rpmbuild --rebuild' on the source rather than just compile it and install it. This is because RPM can track dependencies, which is a very good thing.

Most of my understanding of this came from the fine folks on irc://irc.freenode.net/#fedora. They are real champions of supporting Fedora, and after doing a bit of research and asking around, I am rather unconcerned that Fedora is going to go the way of RH of the past. In fact, I've upgraded all my hardware to FC3, and my main desktop runs x86_64 FC3. It's really a great platform.

Given that I was already "bought in" to using Fedora, I looked around and found Jarod Wilson's definitive Fedora Myth(TV)ology, a HOWTO on making a FC3 box into a full MythTV console. I'm quite sure I would have given up the project if it weren't for this document, and Jarod is very active in the ivtv community. Since I don't have work right now, I can't send him beer money, so I just keep thinking happy thoughts for him and his family and hope that his wife will know what a great thing he is doing for everyone.

So on to the choice of card. If you have time and like to get your hands dirty to save some money, get a Hauppauge PVR-150, model 1045. It comes with a remote and "IR Blaster", which can program your cable set top box to change the channel on it when Myth needs to tune a digital channel (above 127) for viewing or recording. If you don't have a cable box, you don't need this, but the 150 is also the best priced card in the Hauppauge line, so it's good to have for future needs. I say 'future' because the IR Blaster doesn't yet work with Linux. I don't know when that will happen really, but I presume that it eventually will. A final note on the choice of card, you might have an easier time with the PVR-350 card. It's been around longer. If your time is valuable, the extra cost may be worth it.

While on the subject of Hauppauge, I accidentally tore this particular cable yesterday after getting out of my chair too quick and walking away. I was sad, but called them up today and they were more than happy to send out a replacement cable at no charge. The parts cost on this is probably about a dollar or two in the quantities that they are making them in, but the point is that I would have been helpless but to either solder it back together manually or pay whatever they asked. That they were so kind and fair about it, plus their recent release of the datasheets for the 150 card makes me a true believer in their products.

Okay, so on to the process. Again, Jarod's document is definititve, but there are some points that I got hung up on, so I'll try to eludidate them here. I'm sure these will be worthless in a few short weeks at the rate things are changing, but no matter.

1) Be sure to pick a kernel that is supported by the pacages that you are getting from ATRPMs. Most of the packages do not rely on the exact kernel version, but some, notably the ivtv driver (for video capture) and the lirc (Linux IR Control, for the infrared remote) do matter. The hard way is compiling all these yourself, the easy way is go get a kernel that matches what they have for all these. For instance, I used 2.6.10-1.770_14.rhfc3.at. You could use a different one, but check what the packages are primarily compiled against first. Where you will notice this is on the installs of these two packages. So start out by picking the right kernel, before you get into using Jarod's document. It will make sure that his steps fire off without a hitch.

I would also suggest doing this all on a clean system if you can. Even if you must install it on an existing system, get a spare hard drive and do a dry run of this first. That way, if you have problems on your "dirty" system, you'll be able to better analyze why.

Over the last few weeks, the ivtv drivers have been coming together, and I took a week off knowing that I could "optimize for slack" (as Bob the Despot says). Today, the drivers are ready to rumble, and although some people have cards with tuners that don't work perfectly, if you buy your card from a high-volume discounter, it's likely to be of recent manufacture and easier to get support for.

The hardest thing for me was getting the infrared support in. When using RPMs, you don't really have kernel sources around, and LIRC wants that in order to compile. If atrpms has been updated with files later than 2005-3-10, then you don't have to worry about what I am saying here. But if so, you need to build LIRC from CVS HEAD in order to get support for the 150 remote. The tricky part is... "where are my kernel sources"?

It turns out that you can fake out your kernel sources by making a symlink from /lib/modules//build to /usr/src/linux. When you do the build all works just fine. I literally spent 12 hours banging my head, wondering if LIRC was compiled properly, only to find that it was the wrong source tree, and another collective six hours figuring out how to get the kernel sources set up correctly. The friendly crew at #fedora sold me this $clue, so I hope it can help more people. You may want to set up the LIRC driver from source before using Jarod's HOWTO as well, again so his steps can be executed progressively without interruption.

The next point of note is about kernel versions of drivers. It's very easy to get multiple versions of drivers installed in different places when downloading them from RPMS and using source at the same time. With ivtv, be sure to check the version number in the logs very carefully and make sure it corresponds with what you expect in this department. I also suggest that if you have problems, you do an 'ls -lR /lib/modules/' to make sure that you do not have directory branches with the similarly named files in them. It's very helpful if you understand how to use /etc/modules.conf, modprobe, lsmod, and rmmod when working on this stuff.

Finally, if you are debugging your drivers for the video card, be sure that you shut the system completely down and power off during ivtv driver configuration changes. This does not apply to using ivtvctl, only to when reloading the driver with different options.

Well, i guess that's it. I neglected a very important thank you, but one that deserves a paragraph of it's own in this document, and that is to the crew at irc://irc.freenode.net/#mythtv-users . Those guys are dedicated to MythTV just as much as the crew at #fedora. And I would be wrong to talk about either of these IRC channels without making sure that you have read Eric Raymond's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. You either know this document already or need to read it, especially before you start on this journey, because it is going to require help for you to complete. And if you are able to follow these guidelines, you'll make it easier for everyone to have a beer at the end of the day.

Good Luck!