I've decided to re-title this thread. I've begun to create a MythTV box, and I'll most likely be charting my progress in this thread. Of course I'll be asking & answering questions as well.

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I'm considering putting together a MythTV system to record HDTV content. I like my ReplayTVs, but now that I own an HDTV, I'm getting spoiled and want to watch HD content as much as possible. Has anyone created an HD MythTV box yet? Know of any good deals on hardware? Have any suggestions or advice?

I'll probably start off with a single box. If that goes well, then I'd also like to get a couple diskless machines to act as front-ends. Has anyone done that? Does anyone have good suggestions for small, quiet machines that look ok stacked with the A/V gear? I remember when I bought one of those thinner Dell desktops and it was the noisiest machine I had heard in years.

I'm not done building it yet, but I bought an Antec NSK2400 for my case specifically with noise surpression in mind.

I'll let you know how I like it, but I've powered on the fans/drives (no memory yet ) and it's pretty quiet even with the top off. No plan on using MythTV though since I already have Beyond TV and this is going to be on a windows install. But I do have an ATI HDTV Wonder coming so I'll let you know how that works.

I'm hoping to find something thinner. Since the front end would be diskless, all I really need to put in it is a decent graphics card, preferably with DVI output.

It's 3U, so it's not bad, but yes it's not thin.

Hmm. Maybe:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16811163046
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16811163040

Possibly. Anyhow, I'm jumping ahead of myself. First I want to build a standalone HD MythTV box, before I go spending money on small, fancy cases. So if anyone has taken the plunge and done this, please share your experiences, and let me know what kind of hardware you're using.

True enough. But keep in mind components when you do. If you want a thin box, you will possibly need to buy low-profile PCI and Vid cards if you want to transplant them.

I haven't installed MythTV on my HTPC yet, although I've been meaning to. I just haven't had the time. As far as using MCE2005 I've been relatively happy with it, but to be honest I haven't turned it on in 3 months. I stole the RAM & DVD drive from it to repair another system

There are some really good forums that discuss HTPC's and all the software to go along with them. I have some bookmarked and will post some links when I get home later.

Man, that must be one heck of a long drive home.

After reading the link garsh posted about tivo deleting content, I think I'm going to interested in building my own too.

Beyond TV seems to be a really nice program except for the MS windows part. Quite a few plug-ins available.

I want this case:
http://www.origenae.com/product_x15e.htm

Eh, who wants a screen on their pc case?

Reminds me of this:

i don't know about HD, but i downloaded this and am trying to find parts to build one myself

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html

Dang you garsh! Now I have a new project to do.
I can't wait to see the wife's face when I tell her I'm getting rid of the TIVOs.

Interesting article: http://thehtpcrecord.com/index.php?option=...=view&id=26

I had ordered a Dell XPS 410 from Dell Outlet to use as the basis for the PVR. It has a Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB RAM, 250GB HD, DVDRW, and an nVidia GeForce 7300 LE video card.

Before wiping the hard drive, I wanted to hook it up to my TV and make sure that I could get everything working correctly at 1080p over the HDMI connection in windows. I hooked it all up, and it was terrible. The TV stated that it was seeing a 1080p signal, but Windows would only allow me to choose a resolution up to 1024x768. Furthermore, the desktop extended beyond the edges of the TV.

So I went to nVidia's website and downloaded their latest driver. Things were better with that driver. I could now choose 1900x1080. However, I still had the problem with the desktop extending beyond the edges of the TV. I checked to make sure the TV wasn't in one of the "zoom" modes - it wasn't. I hate when you can't even get past the first step of a complicated project.

I saw that the nVidia driver now comes with an nVidia Control Panel application which allows you to do a lot of adjustments. They had one for resizing the desktop. Now here's where things get strange. This "resize desktop" application takes over the display, and presents a screen that has arrows pointing to the 4 corners, and two slider bars in the middle that allow you to stretch & shrink the desktop horizontally & vertically. When this application is started, the arrows point exactly to the four corners of the TV! So why in the world would the desktop extend beyond these corners??? So anyhow, I tried "shrinking" the desktop, but as soon as I left the application, I was back to my too-large desktop - nothing had changed. So if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

I also tried hooking the computer up to my Dell 2405fpw monitor, and it was displaying 1900x1200 on that display with absolutely no issues. My main desktop machine is a Dimension 8400 with an ATI Radeon X850 XT PE card - I may have to try that with the TV too, and if it works, swap video cards between the two machines.

I don't really know how to help, but I think the condition you are describing is called 'overscan'. It might help in a search....

The funny thing is, every post I've seen concerning my TV says that it supports 1080p over HDMI with 1:1 mapping and no overscan.

I was going to ask if your tv had pixel perfect mapping. Maybe you haven't selected it on the TV correctly?

That might be it. I see in the manual that there is a "Display Area" setting somewhere in the TV's menu system. I'll have to take a look at that when I get home.

I hope that's it.

How do y'all plan to record HD content?
I see if you get a HD tuner with QAM support you can get the clear HD channels off the cable.
Is it possible sent the output from a cable box to a video capture card?

That's my plan. I'm probably going to end up buying two of these cards for $125 each. These cards were specifically designed for Linux & MythTV, so they should be very well supported. But I'm going to make sure I get everything else working first before I spend another $250 on these.
Yes. But then you'll need to setup something like an IR-blaster to allow your MythTV box to change the channels. And you won't be able to watch one channel while recording another. But I think this is the only way to record encrypted channels.

Thanks. I don't have a cable box now. I just don't want to invest in this and it become useless in a couple of years.
Does MythTV allow channel mapping and is there a limit on tuners?

The only limit on tuners is if your computer has enough processing power, I/O bandwidth, and available PCI slots to handle them. But even then, you can have multiple computers, and they can all access shows recorded on each other when networked together.

Yes, MythTV does appear to allow channel mapping.

Well, that was it! Everything looks good now.

Next step: blow away the windows partition and install Linux. I think I'm going to use Fedora Core 6. This site should help explain how to install MythTV on top of Fedora. It's written for Fedora Core 5, but it shouldn't be too different.

My next stumbling block: the sound controller doesn't appear to be supported correctly under linux.

Fedora reports it as being:

• Intel 82801H (ICH8 family) HD Audio Controller
• PCM Device: STAC92xx

Looking at the two chips on the motherboard:

• NH82801HH
  L6300028
  SL9ML
• SIGMATEL
  STAC 9227X5
  T4BE-CA2
  U80147

I went to the ALSA website (ALSA = Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) to look up hardware compatibility with Intel sound controllers, and it doesn't list the ICH8 family.

This is somewhat of a minor problem - I could always just throw an old sound card in there that I have lying around, just to get some sound. But the built-in sound controller supports 5.1 surround sound, so I'd like to get it working. If anyone can find evidence that this is being worked on, please let me know.

I did not see it either.
Someone has it tho...
http://www.opensound.com/
Announcing support for SiS 966, VIAA 8237A, NVidia, ATI and Intel ICH7/ICH8 based High Definition Audio controllers

Thanks for the link!
I guess I'll just use OSS until ALSA gets support for my chipset.

Don't you have to pay for OSS?

Read a little further down:

I don't think I would want to be upgrading every 6 months.

I told the wife I was going to get rid of the TIVOs.
She didn't take that very well.

I'm betting that ALSA will support the ICH8 within 6 months.

Quick update:

Somehow I broke my X configuration, but I found a backup file (that was automatically saved) that worked, so I'm back in business. Hooked the computer back up to the TV for the first time since installing Linux, and it worked! I'm using the proprietary Nvidia driver.

I also managed to get sound working using OSS. All I did so far was install the OSS rpm & run the test program. But I got sound during the test.

Now I'm trying to configure the TV capture card. The MythTV on Fedora website that I linked above (which has now been updated for Fedora Core 6, I might add) recommended running xawtv as a test program, and that's giving me some issues. I'll have to look into them a little bit. It looks like it could just be an issue with how xawtv itself was compiled.

Anyhow, I'm making progress. I just have to get the video capture card working, then get the remote sensor working, then I can start running mythtv itself.

I have my infrared receiver working now. But I'm having trouble getting the video capture card working. It's an old Avermedia AverTV card. When I try to run xawtv, I get:
Any idea what either of these warning messages mean?

Well, after researching this for a week and seeing Narc's and Garsh's adventures, I think I'm going to go the MCE route.
I'm far from from knowing my way around Linux and it looks like it would kick my butt.

I think I have narrowed my cases down to these two:
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/product/Chas...t/vc4001sns.asp
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/product/Chas...h/vc8001bns.asp

A friend of mine told me that I should just use Knoppmyth instead of trying to install MythTV over Fedora. He tried installing over Fedora and gave up. He said with Knoppmyth, he had everything installed & working in 20 minutes.

I'm going to try just a little bit longer with Fedora, but if I don't get it working soon then I'll just give Knoppmyth a try.

Here's ExtremeTech's custom Linux distro with MythTV and article about building a Linux HTPC:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1814896,00.asp

Two very nice looking cases. Huge though...

Looks like it's just 1/2 inch bigger than my Harman/Karmon AVR330.

what are the pros/cons of a linux based PVR vs. a Windows based PVR?

As far as I can tell there are a lot of driver issues with linux based PVR's?

I tried knoppmyth, but get kind of scared away because they specifically say it's not designer for security and I'm too much of a linux n00b to know how to secure it. I also think ubuntu's prettier

so if you want to try that route check out this guide, I followed the instructions and got up and running without incident, though I couldn't get the nvidia drivers to work. of course, the hard drive I used was bad so now I have to get a new one and start over

see my last post - ubuntu was simple, out of the box support for most major devices (I have a hauppage pvr-150). if you have a more obscure card, it very well might have driver issues. I debated windows vs linux for a while, but went with linux because a) it's free, and I figured I might was well learn more about linux and not wuss out. windows would definitely be easier I think, but I also wanted to try mythtv.

I decided to give Knoppmyth a try, but ran into a problem. Apparently, they didn't compile SATA support into the kernel that the installation boots with. And the XPS 410 has a SATA DVD drive. So it basically says that it cannot find the filesystem pretty early during installation.

I'll have to see if the motherboard has an IDE connector, and maybe temporarily hook up an IDE optical drive to see if it will install.

Just a little update.

I purchased a pcHDTV off of ebay, and I was able to successfully get that working under mythtv. It is so much easier to get an HD video card working than an analog card. The picture looked kind of crappy at first - during any motion, every-other line seemed to be "off", resulting in jaggedness in the picture. So I turned on the "de-interlace" option, and now everything looks pretty good. I haven't tried messing with any of the other filtering options yet.

Sound is working with the OSS driver. The ossxmix program (for controlling volume levels of inputs & outputs) is a terrible, terrible interface, but I was able to figure out some of it. I bumped the main speaker outputs to maximum, so that the sound level matches the tv tuner. I'll control the volume via the TV.

Interesting note - in a lot of these "setting up mythtv" guides, they tell you to try a bunch of other, simpler programs to see if things are working, such as xawtv, xine, etc. I have not been able to get a single one of those programs working! Very strange. But MythTV itself is pretty much working ok.

So, I have picture & sound in MythTV. I still need to get a remote control working, but I don't think that will be too hard. For now I'm just using a keyboard.

My current big stumbling block is getting the channel guide setup correctly. The channel numbers in the Armstrong Digital Cable listing do not match the channel numbers that my QAM tuner picks up. I can't find any documents describing how to adjust things to match up. I have a bunch of channels with complete guide information, but I can't tune to them. I have a bunch of channels that tune in just fine, but there is no guide information available for them. I tried just hacking the "channel" table in the "mythconverg" database by hand, but I screwed it up and nothing is currently working, so I'll have to redo all of that. So, has anyone come across documentation describing how to match up channels with the guide information, even if by hand?

I don't know what kind if IR receiver you have, but Logitec has updated their software to include a lot of HTPC cases for their remotes.

I managed to get the channel guide information sorted out. I basically had to go into the database and manually fix everything. Took a while, but everything worked perfectly when I was finished.

I started working on getting the IR reciever working, but then I got sidelined by some sort of corruption. I need to figure out if it's a bad hard drive or bad memory. Then I'll probably have to reinstall everything from scratch, since the Linux kernel on the drive appears to be corrupted now.

For IR receivers, I have a few choices. The pcHDTV card has a reciever, but software hasn't been written to support it yet, other than one patch by some anonymous person on some wiki site. My Avermedia (analog) card also came with a receiver. And lastly, I have a Microsoft Media Center receiver and remote that I could use. I would prefer to use the pcHDTV receiver, but that involves patching & recompling a lot of software, so I'll probably try the Microsoft receiver.

Crap. Ran memtest86+, and it's spitting out a ton of errors.
Time to give Dell tech support a call.

Success!

Remote control setup
Using the Microsoft Media Center receiver is a very good choice. The support is very good. They're readily available on ebay. I've heard others mention that it has excellent range compared to other PC IR receivers. And the best part is that my Logitech Harmony remote already has support for a "Microsoft Media Center PC", so I just told it that I had one of those, and it automatically programmed all the settings. I wasn't really looking forward to having it learn all the different commands of some strange remote, so this was a pleasant surprise.

So, I have all of the basics working now. Next up on the TODO list:

• Have mythtv startup automatically when the computer boots up.
• Program the "power" button to restart mythtv.
  You never actually want to power a PVR off, but I have heard that mythtv can hang periodically, and others have suggested this "quick fix". Hopefully it won't crash as often as my ReplayTV's have crashed.
• Setup some add-ons.
  I want my Myth box to also be my dvd player. And my cd player. And be an mp3 jukebox. There are add-ons for all of this and more. I'm hoping to eventually replace 3 components (replaytv, dvd player, cd player) with this one machine. But first I need to make sure it's going to work for me and test it out longer.
• Build a nice "front-end" machine.
  I may be able to fit my Dell XPS 410 into the AV cabinet, but it doesn't really look like it belongs. So I'd like to get a nice, quiet, good-looking PC to be the front-end machine.