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Screencasts of Installing MythTV Via MythDora 4.0
peterdaly writes "MythDora 4 is a MythTV 'in-a-box' style distribution based on Fedora Core 6. With the help of a RedHat employee and author Jarod Wilson, MythDora 4 has made great strides in hardware compatibility and ease of installation. It is designed to format your hard drive and install everything needed for a fully functional MythTV System. MythPVR.com has created a three-part screencast of the installation process covering MythDora installation, configuration, and MythTV setup. If you have had problem installing MythTV in the past due to hardware compatibility issues, it might be time to give it another chance."
Having recently fled from the barren dependency hell of Fedora, (to Feisty), I am perplexed as to why anyone wanting to install a user friendly Linux distro of any kind would choose Fedora as their base distro. Hardware detection was... OK, but there were innumerable problems with package management, configurations and yes, software availability. I mean, will the box play mp3 files? DVDs? Fedora is not a distro known for these capabilities.
May the Maths Be with you!
I wanna see someone port MythTV's codecs to the PS3's Cell DSPs so I can use it as my PVR direct to my HDMI TV and 7.1 surround.
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make install -not war
Well, to work with a remote you need some sort of an IR receiver. And if the machine needs to control a set-top box of some sort (direct tv for example) you may need an IR emitter as well. Coincidentally, I happen to sell such things: http://iguanaworks.net/products.psp
Yes it's a shameless plug, but when you throw up a softball like this I just have take a swing at it.
My goal with KnoppMyth is to make it easy. Obviously, it wasn't for you. In what ways can we improve KnoppMyth to make it easier?
Regards,
Cecil
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
It would be nice if extras like exporting to DVD-R, webbrowsers, etc were easier to find. And, when found, install. Finding things on the forums is a pain.
Also, last time I tried, changing your zip code/postal code was broken if you put in a Canadian postal code (They go like this X0X 0X0). That was about a year ago though.
And dealing with things like two IR outputs + one IR input using different methods with LIRC would be nice. As it stands I had to compile LIRC by hand with differing module names to deal with this. I'm sure there's plenty of people with multiple Cable/Satellite boxes that have this issue.
Overall, I love Knoppmyth! I'll have to figure out if I want to risk an upgrade to the latest version or not yet.
PPS - A table showing MythTV versions included with each release of Knoppmyth would be nice, so you can easily match up custom installed frontends.
Thanks again!
In terms of finding programs, etc. Those are all accessible via the MythTV menu. But I can see where better documentation came come in handy. A while ago, I started on a much updated pamphlet, but it is disheartening to work on something and people doesn't read it. A lot of the question I get in IRC (freenode.net #knoppmyth), are covered in the pamphlet. If only people would RTFM.... But I digress. More work is due on the pamphlet, I've just been busy with my professional life.
In terms of MythTV related issues... Those are MythTV issues and not KnoppMyth specific. Ironically, one of the areas we try and make it easier for users is in MythWeather. Your zipcode is automatically retrieved from the db and entered for you.
I don't ever recall reading or hearing about issues w/ multiple LIRC. When issues like this occur, if you want to see it fixed in a future release, you should bring it to my attention of the forum or via PM or email. The development team isn't very large. We don't have all the hardware that is out there. Even our testers may not have the hardware you have. So, if you want to see something fixed, the best way to bring it to our attention and provide details. Same thing goes if you fix an issue. Provide details and ask to test.
Thanks for the feedback.
Regards,
Cecil
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
I've run MythTV since 0.14 on Knoppmyth and Fedora -- starting with FC3.
When I started, Knoppmyth was way over my head -- particularly the finishing touches to get everything running properly. It was my first real hands-dirty experience with Linux and I appreciated for all I learned. I did did manage to get an ancient K6-3D system running Knoppmyth -- not well enough to put in my livingroom, but well enough to prove the concept and that it was worth the time and effort to build a new system on more capable hardware.
My second system was a P3 700 built on FC3 following Jarod Wilson's definitive guide, mainly because I felt that following the guide to transform a generic install into a MythTV appliance would teach me a lot about what the Myth components were, how they all fit together, how to make them all fit together in Linux, and what to do when something went wrong. I was right.
I built a third machine (my current master beckend/frontend) on FC4 also following Jarod's guide but this time on a P4 2.5 machine.
By this time I was ready to start adding FE capabilities, but I already knew the process of installation, knew about the components and dependencies, and no longer felt the need for yumming or smarting in kernel modules and so on. I used Knoppmyth to turn my old P3 700 former-backend into a frontend.
This setup worked well through several upgrades -- FC on the backend, Knoppmyth on the frontend with the only caveat being that both machines have to be running the same version of Myth. Upgrade one, you have to upgrade the other.
Even though this was about two years ago, the Knoppmyth install was easy and painless, and I was prepared to deal with irregularities like tweaking xorg.conf. I also really appreciated that the Knoppmyth CD would let you run a frontend off the CD -- allowing you to instantly test hardware without touching the drive.
Last weekend, I finally retired the P3. It's currently on holiday, but will soon return to service as a file server. Instead I built a new frontend on an Athlon 64 4000.
I decided to give Mythdora a whirl since I know it's been under heavy development including the involvement of Jarod. I was really impressed with how smoothly and quickly the installation went, including post-install scripts to handle things like IR hardware and binary nvidia drivers (I know, I know, but the binary driver really works better for Myth than the Free one). I went from having a pile of boxes at 4 pm to a working Mythtv system at 9:30. It might have been quicker but I had to run to the shop when I ran out of beer.
I didn't try a Knoppmyth install on this hardware, but have no doubt that it would have gone just as smoothly. Cecil deserves a lot of respect and credit for the fantastic job he has done with Knoppmyth over the years.
Of course I did have quite a bit of Myth-specific experience behind me and knew from the start to buy hardware that was rock-solid compatible -- like an nforce board, nvidia gfx card, turtle beach sound card, on-board 10/100 LAN, etc.
The point is that by last weekend I was a lot more familiar with Fedora than with Debian, so I was really happy to be able to so painlessly migrate my FE to Fedora. I have no doubt that those more familiar with Debian will be just as happy with what Cecil has done in Knoppix.
And more than anything, lot of credit is owed to the folks behind MythTV -- from Isaac Richards, the original creator, and all the key developers, to folks like Jarod, Cecil, and Dennis for enormous contributions in making Myth more accessible, to all the numerous active and helpful folks on the mailing list. They've made MythTV into a product that truly is a world-beater -- by far the most powerful, most flexible, most extensible, and downright most pleasurable media engine on the planet.
Here's looking to 0.21.
I installed knoppmyth on my first myth box about 2 years ago. At the time it was the distro. of choice for easy, automated installations. It worked well on my "lowrider" (underpowered, ancient) system. The problem that ultimately killed that box was that the automated installation program set up a small (~4gb IIRC) partition for applications by default, and gave the rest to the AV partition. I wanted to install _every_ app. that had to do with multimedia, so this became too restrictive ultimately.
.02 based on my experience.
For my next box (considering the first a proof of concept), I went all out an spec'd an efficient, yet capable machine (I also plan to run Astrisk (voip server) on it, a web server, etc, etc). Unfortunately for me, I bought a bad ram stick that wasn't on the vendors list. Before I figured this out, I installed many distros to try to get the hardware running.
These include:
- Simply Mepis
- Knoppmyth
- DreamLinux
- Mythdora
- Ubuntu 6
After I figured out my ram problem, I now had to choose from among these distros based on my experience installing most of them several times.
- I did not like the knoppmyth custom installer (cumbersome, ambiguous at times), so I ruled that out.
- Mythdora just wasn't for me. I've always used debian-based distros, so that bias was enough to cause me to look elsewhere.
- I remember thinking that Simply Mepis was a great out-of-the-box distro with a slick user I/F, but the community forums were mostly Portuguese (I think, Brazil, IIRC??).
- I don't remember too much about Dream linux.
- In the end, I went with Ubuntu.
Using Ubuntu meant that I had to install a few more packages than with some of the other distros (e.g. mySQL, mythserver, mythfrontend), but there was plenty of community documentation to walk me through all of that. The same is true of all of the applications that I plan to load on it someday (once it was good enough for my wife to use, I kind of moved on to other projects for a while...(ahem, ADD/ADHD, cough).....) The Ubuntu UI is also pretty wife/gf friendly, which can be a key issue in household mythtv acceptance.
My
I was flipping bits on an abacus, newb.