Our prospective MythTV box is more or less ready for the software. The shop that was investigating the source of my problem had called to say that they had got to the bottom of it, so off I went in our new car (which still has fewer than 100 km on the clock) to collect it.
It turns out that some kind of short-circuit was the issue. They took everything out, put it back in and then the system worked. I had pulled out virtually everything, but had left the motherboard in place. I can’t imagine what could have been causing a short-circuit, but I have to hand it to them: they found the problem and I didn’t. The bloke who had actually investigated the problem wasn’t present today, so I couldn’t ask whether he had managed to trace the exact location of the problem.
Anyway, I said I’d talk about the hardware a little bit once I’d got the system built, so here we go. Let’s start with a list of all the parts.
The outer case was one of the most expensive parts for this DIY PVR adventure; in fact, the most expensive component (with the hard drive a close second). It’s a black OrigenAE X11 box. It comes with a VFD on the front, with its own user guide. The VFD will be used to display time, channel and programme information. It also has an IR unit, so that the box can accept commands from a remote control. All of this is supposedly compatible with Linux. We’ll see. The box also features front-panel USB and audio inputs, which could prove handy later on.
The motherboard I chose is an Asus P5P800 SE, a Socket 775 board with on-board Gigabit LAN and sound. It can take 2 Serial ATA devices, plus the usual IDE ones. It appealed to me because it was quite cheap, had lots of PCI slots, no PCI-E slots (which I don’t need), plus AGP for the video card. I read that Linux doesn’t yet play well with some PCI-E video cards, so I decided to go with tried and trusted technology. This box doesn’t need cutting-edge hardware, anyway. This motherboard is also lacking Firewire support, which would have been nice, since the X11 case has a front-panel Firewire port.
For the CPU, I had originally chosen an Intel Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz unit. Unfortunately, this went out of stock at the on-line shop from which I was purchasing all of the parts, so I then chose the more expensive 2.8 Ghz model. Finally, I noticed that the 3 Ghz model was only €20 more and had an extra megabyte of Level 2 cache, so I changed the order again. This is the one I finally bought.
Because this system will live in the living-room, it needs to be as quiet as possible. For this reason, I purchased an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro heatsink/fan unit to replace the standard Intel one. The fan’s mounting system is particularly nice and should help to reduce a lot of the noise.
The power supply is a Tagan TG480-U15. There’s no point skimping on this part and it doesn’t use any more electricty if the parts it’s powering require less than its full capacity, so I went for a 480 watt unit. It’s a nice-looking unit, as PSUs go.
A gigabyte of Kingston RAM will provide volatile memory.
The hard drive had to be beefy, because this PVR will be seeing a lot of work. Speed was important, as was capacity. I opted for a 500 Gb Seagate Barracuda. It’s a 7200 RPM drive with an 8.2 ms seek time. I’m not sure how silently it will run, so we’ll have to see.
For playing DVDs and archiving to DVD, I chose a Plextor PX-755SA rewriter. It can handle DVD±RW, including the dual layer variants and is a SATA device, rather than IDE.
The video card is an ASUS N6800XT/TD, a 128 Mb 8x AGP card with an NVIDIA chipset.
The TV tuner card is a MythTV stalwart, the Hauppauge PVR-350, complete with IR unit and remote-control. I chose this, rather than the double tuner PVR-500, because UPC’s digital TV offering allows only one single tuner set-top box per household. True, I could connect a second tuner to the analogue cable TV, but I’m going to wait and see how this works out for now. Even if I did that, the PVR-500 has only a single signal input, which it then splits internally. That would make it impossible to connect plain old analogue cable and digital cable to a single card, anyway. I’ll need another DVR-350 if I want to take that route.
Naturally, this box needs to be networked in order to pick up its programme guide, amongst other things. After careful consideration, I finally picked the Netgear WG311, primarily because it works with the MadWifi driver, with which I have had good results.
Last but not least, the MythTV box will need to be able to change channels on the digital TV set-top box when it needs to record a programme starting on another channel. Many set-top boxes have an old-fashioned RS232 interface for this, but UPC’s Thomson-made box of tricks doesn’t. What to do? After some scouting around, my best bet seemed to be Mike over at irblaster.info. He makes IR transmitters that yoiu can connect at one end to the serial port of your PC, whilst at the other of the cable is an IR emitter. Basically, you drape the cable from behind over the front of the set-top box and then send IR signals down it. Essentially, you’re glueing a remote-control to the receiving eye of the set-top box. It’s a dirty hack and will be the least elegant part of the whole set-up, but at least it will work. This is the only piece of hardware purchased from outside The Netherlands. I paid by Paypal and the device arrived within just a few days: very prompt service, indeed.
I must confess that picking out the hardware wasn’t much fun. A lot of research was required to avoid buying parts that would not (properly) function under Linux, would not work with each other, would not generate an excessive amount of noise, etc. Then there was the physical hassle of building the system, followed by the grief and delay when the whole combo refused to play ball. I’m just not a hardware guy at the end of the day. Give me a box with working hardware, but no operating system, and let me work my software magic on it.
Anyway, we’re more or less at that stage now. I say more or less, because I had to send the broken TV tuner card back to be exchanged. I don’t yet have the replacement and it’s a pretty essential part, so I’m stuck for a few more days.
Furthermore, Fedora Core 5 will be released on 15th March and it would be nice if that could go straight onto the system without needing to upgrade from FC4 or FC5 test3. What’s a few more days? That’ll give me time to replace the TV card, anyway.
Sounds all good, I’ll be interested in seeing it all work in April! Too bad about the lousy interface with the digital cable system; when will computer makers and cable providers get their act together? I guess never as the cable companies just want you to pay them for on-demand services when they are able to offer them.
I don’t think drive speed is all that important; video bitrates are extremely low compared to what drives can do and the only time it will make a difference is with big file transfers over GB ethernet. I personally wish someone would sell me a 5400 or even 4200RPM 500GB disk so it saves on juice, produces less heat and, most of all, be quieter.
9 days until Fedora 5, eh? Guess it’ll be about time to finally update my Fedora Core 2 box! I could even switch to using the 64 bit version then now that I upgraded the CPU.
The drive speed would become relevant if I added a second tuner and then wanted to watch a recording whilst recording two new ones. That’s a lot of seeking.
The cable providers are also promising HDTV some time this year. The bit rates there are much higher, of course, so with an eye to the future, a reasonably fast drive is a good thing to have.
I won’t be doing any high-speed transfers, because I have no Ethernet jack near the TV; one of the few spots in the house where it just so happens there isn’t one. That’s why I need the 802.11g card.
If I had wired Ethernet at this location, I’d make the box that I’m building now a MythTV front-end, which would then do Gigabit Ethernet to a MythTV back-end in the cellar. Then, I could stream programming to anywhere in the house.
As for silent drives, there are some large 5400 RPM drives around, but I didn’t really look into them, because Seagate makes pretty quiet drives, anyway.
Even HD content is only about 11mbps, but you could be right on the seaking bit, which all depends on how big chunks of data MythTV would read/write at a time. I have no real numbers, so better safe than sorry, I guess!
Even more interesting would be haveing a couple of digital tuners and recording multiple streams simultaniously, which in theory you can do if all “channels” you want to record are part of the same multiplex. (usually about 8, but less for HD) Now that’s a lot of data and a lot of TV watching to catch up on it all! 😀
I bought some 120GB Seagates almost two years ago. “Ultra quiet”, “fluid bearing”. Well, they started out great, but now all the fluid must have evaporated from those bearings as they became the loudest SOBs I have ever heard. I am seriously thinking of replacing them and just installing FC5 on new pair of 250GB SATA drives. (I like my RAID-1)
If (when?) yours turn out to do the same, you may yet have to cable up the Myth box, put in a quiet laptop drive (or even flash) for the OS and move the big storage somewhere else.
Just trying to manage your expectations! 🙁
HDTV is 1.485 Gbit per second, so to be able to write two of those streams, plus read a third, would require quite a fast hard drive (or preferably a striped set-up).
I’m not 100% sure which file-system I’ll use, either, but I suspect XFS. ext3 is probably too slow. Then there’s the question of whether or not to put LVM on top. At the moment, I’m inclined to do so, even though I don’t envisage adding another drive (500 Mb ought to be enough) and, besides, my motherboard is now out of SATA connections, so I’d have to resort to plain IDE.
Multiple digital tuners would be nice, or even just a single box with a double tuner, but UPC (the local cable provider) fails to recognise the need for such advanced products. Whereas a single tuner box with no ability to record a channel other than the one being watched would be laughed out of the American market, UPC can quite happily market such a thing here, knowing that the expectations and acceptance level of the Dutch consumer are so abysmally low that he will basically accept anything.
The lack of internal facilities would be forgivable if UPC were prepared to hand over multiple set-top boxes, even against a nominal charge, but they’re not. If you want to record a channel other than the one being watched, you have to record it from the analogue signal. And that, of course, assumes that the channel you want to record is not one of the ones only available on digital cable. Want to watch BBC3 and record BBC4? “Tough shit. Fuck off,” is UPC’s implicit response.
The only way to do this stuff properly and relatively hassle-free is to opt for DVB-S (satellite). That way, you get all of the free-to-air stuff with no need for a set-top decoder and can have as many incoming signals as the dish has coaxial lines.
Given UPC’s digital cable, though, one is cast back to the pre-VCR period. A VCR gave us the ability to watch one channel whilst recording another, but 25 years later, we find we have to sacrifice that ability if we want to watch and record two different digital channels.
So, my expectations are pretty realistic, I think. I’m not going to have as the same viewing and recording flexibility that I had in the States with TiVo, but I am going to have a larger hard drive and a more powerful user interface and back-end.
This is all just an experiment, anyway. I’ve never even seen a MythTV box in action.
If I were doing this to the extreme, I’d have the living room box be a MythTV front-end only, and stream programs over Gigabit Ethernet from a massive MythTV back-end in the basement. I could even have the front-end boot disclessly, as one acquaintance of mine is doing.
If this is all a screaming success, I can imagine I might do all of this again at some point in the future, only then I would try to set up a state-of-the-art solution. I’m not inclined to try at the moment, however, because UPC remains the weak link. The fact they didn’t even put a serial interface on the back of their box to allow it to be controlled by another device just shows how unaware they are of applications beyond the basic need to plug the thing in and watch TV. And why would they help, anyway? I’m sure they have their own PVR offering in the pipeline, which will doubtless have a tiny hard drive, a substandard GUI and further lamentable oversights.
How noisy the hard drive will be remains an unknown, however. Hopefully, the new one will arrive in the next 24 hours and I’ll have an answer to that.
That’s right, it’s rediculous. And it would make economic sense for them too. Sky has always been selling second boxes for £10/month more, simply because there is money in that, but what’s even more, people with more boxes tend to view more telly and the bigger the audience sky provides, the more the advertisers pay!
I am not sure what the situation is these days on Dutch cable systems, but it used to be that the stations had to pay for access, rather than the rest of the world, where cable companies pay the stations. If it is still the same, it is in their best interest to sell you as much as possible, something they are simply refusing to do!
I do have to correct you on the HD bitrate, though. The rate you describe is the uncompressed rate but obviously, the signal arrives in MPEG2 compression through your cable. The bitrate of the stream is less than 20mbit. (expect half that on a cable system, really. Normal digital channels are usually 3-4mbit) So if you have a digital tuner card, you just record the MPEG stream directly. (like cable/sat Tivo boxes do)
Mind you, there is no way they can have a good selection of analog, normal digital AND HD channels on their system at the same time. So don’t hold your breath; they have to provide the analog channels by law and the only way to go all HD is replacing all the boxes as I doubt the current ones would be able to downscale. So it’s either replace them all or just abuse their monopoly and keep supplying their customers with the least they can get away with…
UPC’s digital channels definitely aren’t streamed at 3 to 4 Mbit. From the picture, it’s clear that some channels are under 2 Mbit. KPN’s DVB-T offering reportedly suffers from the same issue of quality.
Thanks for the HDTV bit-rate information.
There should be laws against that kind of bitrate abuse… At least the rate of DVB-T here is still quite good, most seem to be 4mbit, and we aren’t even paying for it! (but the channel line-up is rather limitted)
The bitrates on satelite (Sky) are absurd these days, but I guess most people don’t see it or don’t care and keep buying subscriptions like hot cakes.
I have been told off by people for showing them what the problem is as before they didn’t notice and now it annoys them. Yey! \0/
I just spoke to my brother about your UPC second box problem and I think I know the cause of it. UPC in Capelle aan den IJssel used to do it. In fact, one of my brother’s colleagues there had two boxes, legal and paid for, provided by UPC. But a while back they switched to the new Irdeto system and now it can’t handle it anymore. And it’s not a technical problem, he was told the new customer admin system that goes with it simply can’t handle 2 boxes at one address. What an idiots.
Yes, I think they really are guilty of false advertising as far as the picture quality is concerned. Haarscherp or razor-sharp, it is not, but, as with Sky, people lap it up and expect no better.
The second set-top box story is interesting and entirely believable. It’s too stupid not to be true.