MythDroid - an app for Android owners

All owners of Android and MyhtTV box should know about this fine project that let's you remote control your MythTV through WiFi. It supports music playback, browsing the TV guide and the starting/controlling playback of recorded stuff. With lcdd it can even send some feedback to you Android device so mythdroid can display playback time/music title.

How much power?

I recently got the possibility to check the power consumption of my HTPC (things haven't changed much since the setting up, installation of the hardware). So the machine's idle power consumption is around 45w. It goes up to around 80-90W when there's a havier use of the system. It's around the consumption of an older laptop. Not bad from a PC with good computing and video capacity! :)

Sign of Life

Just for your information, the machine is still up and kicking very well. No problems surged since the installation of it. It even took nicely the distro-upgrades for ubuntu.

MythTV

Was a long and hard thing to set it up yet it worthed every frustration and fallbacks. When you're on top and running it you'll be glad you didn't give up, I'm sure! :-) It may become a part of your everyday life - if you really have little time for watching TV and you want to be in control of it all (what and when) mythTV is one of the best open source solution around.
First of all the sucky part is to configure the stations and next to calibrate recording options. After that you'll have to look for some sort of source for TV program. Here in Hungary the only way to get one is to use XMLTV. Luckily MythTV supports it perfectly! Definitely you have to read the howtos and manuals found at mythtv.org and read the step-by-step guide to be sure that you don't miss any possible advantage of MythTV. Just setting up the grabber cards and channels and TV program source is just not that easy as it is all related to very specific things as recording hardware, input source type, program source type and all that things. Plus it involves mysql database too. Luckily ubuntu has a package called mythbuntu installable which helps a lot with its mythtv control center application.
I also recommend to check out MythTV plugins in your distro. It has very nice music jukebox functionality - MythMusic. Some others are MythWeather, MythNews, MythVideo and so on.

Well in my box I have placed the already mentioned analogue TV card and later I've also added one older TV grabber card of mine which works with the bttv kernel module (it has a brooktree chip on it). Well,well, I had to find out that with such card it's a different method that is needed to get audio recorded. I had to use an audio jack-jack cable to connect TV tuner's audio output to the soundcard's line-in and also upon starting mythtv I have to run an unmute script for the bttv v4l2 device. For that you will need v4lctl tool installed, ubuntu contains a package for it. So if you're stuck with an old analogue card presenting problems in audio recording you may have to do this thing too.It's a luck that I have a TV provider that uses good old analogue signal - that way I could split up the signal with simple coaxial splitter T elements inserted to the cable jungle behind the PC. :P If you have digital signal it's a bit harder for sure. So currently I can watch TV on my normal TV, and record 2 shows at the same time on the HTPC in the background. The CPU is capable to handle it alright, recording in MPEG4 stream, good quality - one hour of recording about 2Gigabytes.

Now, now, let's add some screenshots for you to see how it looks - if you don't already know it. And what's best in it? It doesn't run on Windows! :P

Television, television, television

"The digital life of the digital man cannot be complete without a properly set television tuner and a remote control to switch the things that must be switched."
It is the same case when talking about HTPCs. So we need to buy hardware again, oh dear!? Yeah, and buying for Linux you'll have to look for some pieces of information firstly. The question is: which hardware has the best price/Linux (kernel & sw) support/time to set up/error ratio in the world. Generally this is not necessarily about what vendor to choose but rather the choice of the chip the hw manufacturer uses. Many cards may look different, yet if the chip is the same they hopefully will work well with the linux drivers for the given chipset. But in the case of IR enabled tv tuner that's not enough. The kernel module that handles the chip may not have all the PCI card identifiers enlisted in itself. So you may run into difficulties using the IR part for example. So it's a good idea to read about the chip's kernel module's supported model list. For example the kernel module's source code may help very well - looking for some PCI model constants. All in all I made an acceptable choice going with a Phillips chip based Asus hybrid TV tuner card My Cinema-P7131 Hybrid which eats analogue and digital (not HD) signal too. I need IR control, analogue signal tuning and some later option for digital input. (Of course if you will be tuning HDTV content this is unusable.) saa7134 is the magic module to make it work. (A lot of PCI tv tuner cards works with that one.)

modprobe saa7134, apt-get install tvtime, tvtime, scan for channels! tick-tack-tick-tack... Me content, watching some bullcr@p on TV. :-) Wait, we have an IR control, let me try it...okay, that was a harder thing. I'll go into details later...

CPU heat

Running the system means heavy loads not so rarely on the HTPC. So I considered it of high importance to test out thoroughly the CPU's temperature / system load relation - especially because by default I didn't put any kind of ventilation into it. The occasion come quickly: not much time passed using the system when I felt the necessity to build my custom kernel to be able to have the latest patches and bugfixes of the kernel tree.

I was compiling the latest kernel available at kernel.org and soon it turned out that unventilated CPU's temperature can climb up slowly to a top that's not really healthy on the long run - ~60+ Celsius degrees core temperature. The maximum recommended operating temperature of a dual core AMD is 65 Celsius degrees. I had to put the process into background with Ctrl+Z and let the system rest for some minutes and then use 'fg' command to get it back running. With this method I managed to compile it without risking the CPU's health.

Next day I decided to look for a final solution for the heat misery. The decision was to buy 2 case fans of 12 cm diameter and think out where to put them in the rig. I went for a cheap but silent solution called GlacialTech Silent Blade 120 Case fan Black. I thought I will have to fix them onto the case. But in the end remembering the review of the Thermaltake Sonic Tower I just tried to merge the passive cooler and the fan. (I put away the second case fan.) It was easy, the passive cooler had the screws and the metal part already in the package. A thin screwdriver helped to complete the operation smoothly. Gave it the 12 volt power cable and power on! Let's see what it does! Wow, it was just superb! The CPU temp started at 25-27 degrees and pumping the unit with heavy load could only make it climb around 40-45 degrees in the core of the processor. Yes, that's what I was in need of... One 950RPM ventilator with a 15 cm high passive CPU cooler tower + passively cooled motherboard + fanless PSU... the most silent and safely cooled PC I've ever put together. :-)

Shaping the Vanilla

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon up and running! Whoa! :-) I've put the thermal applet to the gnome panel and traced the temperature. It seemed OK, starting at ~28 and raising to around 40 Celsius degrees with normal/low load on the system. I said, great, let's start to shape things into a Linux multimedia desktop and server.

Let's take into account the goals now:

• Test hardware/kernel relation further - especially CPU temperature under bigger load
• Install the TV-card with the IR control with the kernel drivers
  
• Install/configure ssh server accessible from other boxes
  
• Install/configure the apache web server
• Install/configure mythtv - the big deal
  
• Configure NFS - network file system for my linux based systems
  
• Configure Samba - to access files from Windows based machines
  

The third and fourth task was an easy one running apt-get install where necessary and edit the configuration files in /etc to my taste and this doesn't really need a focus in this blog. I'll go into details about the other points here later...