My hardware setup

Just realised I never posted this crucial information :)

When setting up a media PC for your living room the amount of noise it generates and power consumption is crucial, myself I know next to nothing about setting up a quiet green PC - but the experts at Silent PC Review certainly do and have written a number of extremely helpful articles and reviews on the subject, also the feedback on the forums is prompt and helpful.

I eventually purchased the following from Umart.

Component	Product
M/B	Asus M2N-VM-DVI F7050
CPU	AMD64 5200
RAM	2GB Kingston 800Mhz
Case	Antec NSK2480
HD1	WD 500GB Green Power
DVD	Pioneer DVR-115DBK

Reasonably priced. The NSK case was excellent to work with, spacious inside with lots of handy clips etc. The built in PSU was quite good until it failed :( but I replaced it with a Corsair vx450w which was even quieter. Will post pictures when I get around to it uploading them.

Noise was very low - inaudible until everything in the living room was switched off, then you could here a faint noise from the stock CPU fan. Apparently the CPU can be cooled passively with a Ninja Scythe heatsink but they are hard to source in Australia. Not worried for now. You can't hear a thing when anything is playing on the TV - the fridge in the kitchen is louder.

Power consumption is good - 50W at idle, 60W when playing HD. Once I figure out the power control options for idle that should drop even more.

It also looks quite good - like a standard media component, matches well with our existing equipment.

Note:Never bother hooking up the HDD activity LED - its wildly annoying.

Getting 5.1 Surround sound to work

Ok, this one took a bit of research. My Mobo, like many, has a Intel HD sound chip - a ALC662 to be exact. It supports 6 channel output via SPDIF or three analogue jacks.

The inital mythbuntu install didn't support any of this, stereo sound worked fine but no joy with the extra channels. alsamixer didn't display the Front/Center etc channels. This thread revealed the solution to the problem.

We need to explicitly add the intel hda module. Add the line:

options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch

to file

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

than restart your PC.


The new channels will probably be muted. Also at the far right of alsamixer (it scrolls) there is a "channels" setting, it needs to be changed from 2 to 6. then use alsactrl store to save the changes.

Testing of the channels is easy with this call:

speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c 6 -t wav

This gets 6 channel support working with alsa, but we still need to activate it in Myth. Just got into

MythFrontend|Utilites/Setup|Setup|General - Audio Page

Set the the Audio output device to ALSA:surround51

The Mixer control may need to be set to "Master" or "PCM" - whichever works.

Note : This is all for analogue output, SPDIF is another kettle of fish ...

MePo - Widescreen theme for Myth

MePo-wide

A great widescreen theme for Myth. Lean, clean and a nice colour design. Ron Frazier has some patches for it and a custom OSD which is better looking than the MePo one. He also has a custom Menu theme with a much more logical layout than the standard MythTV one. Common functions such as LiveTV, Recordings, Music, Video and DVD are all on the front menu.

Note : Ron's OSD ui.xml will need to be edited to remove some macro's which are utilised by custom patches he has added to myth itself - they are not present in a standard install.

Shepherd - Australian EPG Grabber

Shepherd

Simply the best EPG web page scraper in Australia. Written with MythTV integration in mind, it grabs multiples sources and intelligently integrates them plus performs IMDB lookups. Also supports the HDTV channels and flags plus can set your MythTV channel logos (range of themes available). Actively maintained and auto updates itself.

This is actually one of the reasons I went with MythTV - Shepherd only runs on Linux (Perl) and I'd hate to do without it. Very easy to install and configure under Mythbuntu.

Never less, here are some alternatives.

• OzTivo
  
  • You register for the channels you want to monitor and it provides a url for downloading the XMLTV data. Content is user uploaded and can be spotty. HD support is minimal. Up to yourself to pull the data down and integrate it with your PVR guide.
    
• epgstream.net
  • Registration required. Provides a neat .NET app that allows you to select the channels you need in a nice gui interface. the same App can download the XMLTV data in console mode. After that you have to configure your PVR software to import the data.
    Haven't tried but it should run on Linux using mono.
    

Both are reasonably good and usable, but don't have the depth of coverage and quality that Shepherd provides.

Panasonic Modelines

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Modeline_Database#Panasonic_TH-50PX600A.2C_TH-50PX60A.2C_TH-50PX70A

Ubuntu V4L-DVB Packages!

http://martinpitt.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/packaged-dvb-t-drivers-for-ubuntu-804/

Auto synced with the latest ubuntu kernels.

Seemed to work fine on a test pc. Haven't used in anger yet.

First Post

Ok,

like so many any PVR hobbyists this is to document the progress of my attempts to set up a usable media centre. As can be guessed from the title I've settled on MythTV, but I did trial a number of worthy contenders before making the choice and I should mention their pro's and cons and why I choose myth.

But to be honest, mainly I'm posting this is so I have some where to reference my settings, customisations, hacks etc so I don't forget them - in the event of needing to repeat this process.