It’s been a couple of weeks and BeyondTV is still running strong. I’ve added MediaPortal to the mix. Snapstream has their own media product called Beyond Media, but it’s old, buggy, and not being updated. MediaPortal is free and has tons of functionality. I use it mostly for Movies, Weather, Trailers, and Pictures, but it can also do TV/PVR work if you want.

MediaPortal isn’t perfect, but it isn’t bad either. It’s regularly being updated and developed and has a decent plug-in scene. I’d rather not use a separate application, but even Beyond Media is separate from BeyondTV. It’s still easier than MythTV.

I opted for Snapstream’s Firefly remote. Nice feel, tons of buttons, and RF, not IR. Perfect for when I stick the PC in the basement.

A great help has been LM Gestion’s LM Remote KeyMap. It’s a very nice way to operate a Firefly remote with BeyondTV and really anything else on the PC. Go for the donateware version. I paid about $6US and got access to other user-created profiles as well as an activated Mouse Mode. Mouse Mode is HUGE. Imagine having a mouse in your remote control. It’s not quite the same, but amazingly helpful if you need something quick. Firefly comes with a control program, but it piggy-backs on a Beyond Media Lite application. WAY too much crap to run just for a remote. Remote KeyMap is small, does what you need, and is easy to configure and customize.

Screw MythTV. Screw Linux. Screw half-assed cobbled together software. This weekend I deleted MythTV, formatted the HD and installed Snapsteam’s Beyond TV. I don’t regret it a bit.

There are a lot of happy MythTV users, but I was never one of them. The days getting the system working turned into weeks. Even after the system was stable, it still didn’t work at what I’d consider 100%. I had tears in the video playback if there was too much motion. The system would bog-down if I tried to use both tuners at the same time. Live TV was problematic. Guide information was no longer free and required a subscription to a 3rd party service. That required an update to the MythTV software, and who knows what could go wrong in that procedure. It was all too much and I always had a nagging feeling that any day the whole thing would fail.

It took me less than three hours to go from MythTV to an up and running Beyond TV system. 2/3 of that time involved formatting the hard drive. In around an hour I:

• Installed Win2k
• Updated 75+ Windows components
• Installed Video, Video Capture & Wireless card drivers
• Installed Beyond TV

Best of all, it works. Right away. Without fiddling for hours or modifying .conf files. MythTV was honestly the biggest pain in the ass project I’ve ever tried. And I went the “easier” route by using MythDora.

Beyond TV isn’t perfect, there are a few things MythTV did better, but overall I’m very happy with it and glad I dumped MythTV.

The mythbox will live either behind the TV or eventually in the basement. Running wired ethernet isn’t practical, so I’ll have to use a wireless adapter.

I chose the D-Link WDA-1320. It’s supported by madwifi on Linux and other people didn’t have much trouble getting it to work. Always a plus in Linux.

I had to fart around getting the damn thing to work for a few hours. I consider myself lucky since I read posts about people spending 10+ with other adapters. Most of the time was spent going between the Network and Wireless Assistant panels. Long story short, I edited my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and everything works.

modprobe ath_pci
ifconfig ath0 up
iwconfig ath0 essid “[name OF WIRELESS ROUTER]”
ifconfig netmask [typically 255.255.255.0]
route add default gw [ip OF ROUTER>]

I didn’t even make a new device in the Network panel. All that seemed to do was screw things up. Even changing the settings in the Wireless Assistant caused problems. If I told it to automatically connect to a certain wireless device upon start-up, it would hang and not do it. I could manually connect after I got to the Desktop, but not automatically during start-up. rc.local is called after the start-up scripts are run and it avoids that problem.

Wireless works, but I am a little concerned about moving the box downstairs. I’m getting an ok signal from across the living room, but I don’t know how things will fare in the basement. I suppose I could always make an antenna extension, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

I want to use the MythTV as a headless box, if you don’t count the TV. The best way to do that is using a remote client like VNC. For the Mac, Chicken of the VNC works great. It gives you a remote GUI so it is like having the MythTV box right on my iBook.

It took a little bit to get things set-up and working.

First, read this. It goes through the basics of getting VNC up and going on the MythTV side.

I had some problems with how MythTV displayed in Chicken of the VNC. I found a happy solution in the following xstartup file: xstartup.

Don’t forget to open up the correct ports on your router.

A great thing you can do us run a MythTV frontend client on your Mac. Grab it here: Mac MythTV. You have to set it up like on the MythTV box, but it works the same. Well, kinda. I can watch Live and Recorded programs, but watching videos doesn’t work. It does, but you have to compile the plug-in and I don’t have the tools installed.

When you configure the Mac frontend options, give it a unique name in the Set-Up so it will keep the unique preferences.

I finally settled back to MythDora 4.0. While it was giving me fits, there is more included and just plain better. Not to mention, that I finally got it working.

What was the magic recipe? Umm…not positive. It was a matter of much trial and error. I know I did over 10 complete re-installs of MythDora before finally getting the right combination. The last method involved choosing all of the custom libraries and applications(lmake, video card, wireless networking, KDE, etc.) during the install process. Upgrading the box after the install just caused more problems. I’m not sure how or if I’ll be able to do anything later, but I’m happy that it works for now.

The last tackle was getting the video to work. While testing I need an old CRT working as well as the TV-Out. The CRT always worked fine, but getting the TV-Out looking right and showing the proper output was a chore. Long story short and after much trial and error and help from d00dtv at g-ding.tv it works.

Here is my xorg.conf file: xorg.conf

After using that xorg.conf file, everything seems to work ok. There are still some hic-ups here and there, but no big problems. I guess after a long time, I’m happy. Well, almost.

I have only a basic level of Linux experience. I hacked my Tivo and did some playing with it, but never got very deep into it. Mythtv runs on Linux, so this project has been the most I’ve ever dealt with the OS. I doubt I’ll ever make Linux a desktop environment for a LONG time.

While there are popular builds of Linux (RedHat/Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, etc.), there is no one universal source. They are all branches of the same tree. On Windows or Mac OS, the tree is more like a telephone pole. There are no branches. You want a program or library, you get the Mac or Windows version. Not so on Linux. You need to get the specific build, if some one has already compiled it, or do it yourself. Of course, doing it yourself isn’t a task for weak or newbie-types.

In Windows or Mac OS, if you install a program, update the OS, or do anything to the system, 99% of the time things work and nothing is broken. In the worst case scenario, the new program doesn’t work and you delete it. Again, that’s not the case with Linux. If you install a driver or library, you need to make sure other programs don’t depend on it. If they do, then they too may need to be updated. Of course, if you update a driver or library and a program, driver, or library isn’t written for the newer version, it might break. Thus begins the great track-down and search for compatible versions or updates.

The people who put MythDora together do NOT suggest updating anything. What they provide has been tested to cooperate with everything else and provide a nice happy install. Even updating a single driver can start a chain of events that may effect how well your mythbox works. More than once when trying to get things running, I attempted to get a different nvidia driver and had to stop before it tried to install a new kernel. WTF? I just want a new driver, not a new core of the OS.

Maybe I’m not geeky enough, but the whole thing pissed me off. I spent DAYS working on this. I’ve never spent days, or even hours for that matter, trying to do anything on Windows or a Mac. By the second day, I was asking myself what kind of masochist enjoys this. Really. I like a good challenge and I kept at it until I got it working, but I’d never do it again and I wouldn’t recommend it to an enemy. It’s obvious that Linux has a lot of capabilities, but so what? Unless you write code or dream in command line, it’s a giant pain in the ass. If I knew now how much of a pain it was going to be, I think I would have given a Windows-based system a shot instead. And I HATE Windows.

Getting Mythtv installed and running can be a real hassle. In order to make things easier, people have created install discs that take care of a lot of the manual steps. The two biggest are KnoppMyth and MythDora.

KnoppMyth fits on a CD while MythDora is burned to a DVD. I ended up going with MythDora because it includes a lot of extras that KnoppMyth doesn’t.

In the course of getting my Mythbox up and running, I must have installed MythDora 10 times. At least. There was always a problem at some point that required starting over.

The biggest problems I had were with getting what looked like inverted or weird colors on the frontend of the Mythtv application. The colors were messed up enough that they’d hurt your eyes after a while.

In-between one of the many re-installs, I thought I’d try out KnoppMyth. Others had said it was less of a hassle to get going that MythDora, especially if suffering from the inverted color problem. KnoppMyth was easier to install, but horrible to work with.

I only know enough Linux to be dangerous, but working with KnoppMyth was a nightmare. Whatever the desktop system that is installed is horrible. There were TONS of themes to change the look of the menus, but there were few actual menu items to use. It was kind of annoying that there wasn’t even a link to the Mythtv application, but I could set all kinds of options for the display of windows and menus. KnoppMyth lasted about 20 minutes before I did yet another re-install of MythDora.