[Wylug-discuss] Re: [Wylug-help] Tearing my hair out re LIRC on Debian/Ubuntu

[Dave Fisher]

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 02:04:06AM +0100, Neil Pilgrim wrote:
> Dave Fisher wrote:
> [...]
> >I've got a half-working installation of MythTV running on an Ubuntu box
> >at home (which is 50 more percentage points of functionality than I had
> >on stock Debian) and I want to use a remote control with it.
> 
> Oooh, tell us more :) 

On this occasion, there's not a lot to tell.  I just installed the
latest Ubuntu debs (possibly from 'universe') and the Myth front and
backends 'just worked'.  I had already gone through the pain of getting
the ivtv drivers and software to work with my Hauppage PVR-350
capture/encoder card on a previous occasion.

> I've considered trying mythtv on an eden mini-itx 
> with a PVR-x50 card...what's your setup? 

It's a bog standard GBP 200 Dell (Dimension 2400?) pentium pro with very
little memory.  I have previously had MythTV working on a mini-itx
board, but the 533MHz processor wasn't really up to doing anything
interesting with video and the need to compile and/or install all sorts
of esoteric kernel modules was a pain in the proverbials.

I'd expect newer VIA drivers, processors and chipsets, especially those
with more cycles, to be a lot easier and more useful.  

> Which half doesn't work? 

Just the operational configuration ;-), i.e. I can control and
manipulate all the features of the PVR-350 card, but I haven't got the
programme guide working with the Radio Times xml feed for UK schedules
and frequencies.

Unfortunately, almost all of Myth's recording and scheduling features are
built around selection from the programme guide, so I can't do much with
it at present.  

On previous occasions I've been able to manually download the xml feed
and force Myth to use it, by a combination of command line magic and a
couple of downloaded perl scripts.

I'm sure that I can work my way through the same pile of web forum and
mailing list messages that got it working in the first place, but I
really resent having to spend so much time on it.

It kind of defeats the purpose of using MythTV since I can use the same
command line magic and cron to schedule recordings manually and every
single Myth user in the UK must have pretty much identical programme
guide configs.  

If/when I do get the thing set up again, I'll definitely document the
steps and publish my configs.  I just wish someone else had done it for
me ;-)

> Oh, 
> and have you tried knoppmyth? :) 

Yep.  Worked beautifully, if I were building a dedicated media centre,
but was not much use as a general purpose PC with multimedia
capabilities.  

I think it ran on a 2.4 kernel, was difficult to update from Woody (or
pre-Woody) status without breaking the Myth setup, and ran a hideously
old fashioned (lesstif/fvwm based) X configuration.  

I really don't have time to go back and relearn the stuff I learnt ten
years ago and then promptly forgot when half-usable linux desktops came
along.

> (and what made debian so bad for mythtv?)

It's more a case of what made the current Ubuntu debs better, i.e. the
fact that their default configs were able to work with my PVR and
analogue capture cards straight out the box.

It's entirely possible that the current Debian unstable debs are pretty
much identical.  I haven't tried them, because I'm trying (insofar as it
is possible) to avoid mixing and matching debs from lots of different
repositories, distros and releases.

> [snip lots]
> 
> I guess you've googled till you're blue in the face, but this link seems 
> to have a nice list of instructions, and its fairly recent, so if you're 
> not on the ubuntu lists/forums, it might be worth joining :) 
> http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-20952.html

Sadly, that was one of the starting points for this current foray in the
world of pain that is Linux multimedia configuration.

Talking of which, MythTV swears blind that another process has control
of /dev/dsp so I can't use it to listen to the audio channels on live
TV.  

I can see no such process running other than the esd daemon which I've
configured to release the dsp whenever a client application ceases to
need it.

This is clearly not a Myth-specific problem, since my realplayer client
seems to have the same difficulty accessing the dsp, but I'm having
difficulty isolating the underlying cause of it.  Just about every other
sound application seems to be fine and I can't find any obvious
explanation in terms of usernames/groups/permissions, etc.

Does anyone know of anything 'special' about the way these two
applications access the dsp?

Dave