I'm new to slackware and I am going to try install 13 but I would like to know how well MythTv will run on slackware 13. There are so many parts to MythTv that I thought there might be issues with depedencies not being up to date, etc.

If you have it running on 13 were there any issues to work through?

We have a single backend with 4 tuners, a file/web server, and 3 frontends connected to TVs. Any PC can access the MythTV content either through their own MythTV frontend, the MythTV webserver, or XBMC's upnp service. All Slackware64. Slackware itself posed no real problem, MythTV did have a slight learning curve on the configuration though. Once it was setup properly, the backend/frontends all run non stop for 60days, at which time I shut them down and clean out the dust bunnies. Just 2 days ago I upgraded all systems from .22-svn to .23-fixes without a hitch.

I'm using 2 PVR-150's, and an HVR-1600 for 3 SD feeds, and a single ATSC feed. Powered by a Sempron 3000+ (1.8GHZ) and 1.5GiB ram. Each tuner has it's own 500GiB hard drive. The server has a ton of storage, and houses our video and music library, along with running MythWeb.

The front ends are dual core Celerons with 1GiB ram, and either Nvidia 9400GT or 9500GT for VDPAU. The frontends all run fluxbox, and either wireless keyboards or an ATI remote wonder II. The remote wonder II does not need lirc, a kernel module is already present. I created a keybinding to load my custom xset keys and launch mythfrontend.

Everything is wired with Cat5e cables connected to gigabit switches.

The only issue I was hit with at the OS level, was forgetting to enable NTP. MythTV will crash if there is a time difference between backend and frontend.

4 members found this post helpful.

I am new to mythtv too, so glad to hear it's working so well on slackware. I do wonder what the dust bunnies are though.

I don't know what the difference is between a myth FE and BE.
My guess is that the FE is where you choose what to output to the device
that's connected to it, proj, flat panel, etc. And the BE is for recording, decoding,encoding,transcoding,ripping,etc.

I wanted to use PS3 to view content. I really should look into myth some more. At least I know slackware is well suited for the OS.
FWIW I am planning on recording TV via HDhomerun using myth then playing back via PS3. I may run myth FE and BE on the same host.

Also what GigE switches are you using?

After 60 days of fans constantly spinning they tend to pick up impurities from the air, and deposit a dust like substance on the components.
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...q=dust+bunnies
A backend is the MythTV server. Responsible for scheduling, recording, serving content, commericial flagging ....
A frontend is responsible for content playback.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User_Manu...ration_Backend
First paragraph under Introduction.
DLink, 2 DGS-2205, a one DGS-2208 paired to a Linksys WRT54G with tofu firmware (we have more PCs than just the 5 listed here for MythTV only).

Ha, I thought you were talking about digital dust bunnies or something. Thanks for the switch info.

Hey disturbed1, thanks for all that detail in a single post - I'm about to embark on a mythtv safari, for the first time, and you've helped already....

cheers,

We've been using MythTV full time for a little over a year now. I've played with it on off for a few years before that. Once .22-svn began to stabilize the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) went through the roof. The boss (my Girlfriend ) gave the green light for a trial run. Since then we've turned in our Cable CO leased DVRs and could not be happier.

MythTV has many features which we do not use. Either because they are not upto par (Myth Music), do not work 100% (Myth Archive), or just don't personally have the need (Myth Game, Myth WebBrowser). The portions we do use, TV recording, scheduling, commercial flagging, and MythVideo, do work 99.99% of the time.

Now if only Netflix would enable Linux streaming so I can stop doing questionable things , and be in HTPC heaven.

If it's useful:

MythTV for Slackware 13.0

Although I don't use it myself because XBMC provides all that I need as I do not currently need tuner input or DVR.

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I'd highly recommend XBMC over MythTV if you do not need to record television. If XBMC interfaced with MythTV a little better, it (XBMC) would be the only application on our frontends. XBMC does interface with MythTV in 2 ways, either through MythTV's upnp server (requires djmount on the frontends) or XMBC's hidden mythtv:// protocol. The mythtv:// protocol is not close to feature complete, and currently only offers the bare essentials.

zordrak, a bit has changed since .21. A full port to qt4, rewritten libmythui, and plenty more enhancements.

Hi,

I have been using MythTv for a few years now and it does present challenges with Slackware. Being an early Slackware user (pre Linux kernel 1.0 on floppy over modem), I am used to building everything from source code and use Bash scripts to document workarounds.

Tracking down every dependency and making sure all error issues are resolved is daunting to say the least, but I do find it more satisfying than a simplistic package that disables most everything to get an install to not fail.

One I get everything to work to my satisfaction, perhaps I can post the tree of dependencies I used to get a "clean" build. One thing I do during the process is tar up my builds, boot from DVD, move my entire disk to a single directory, setup from scratch, and do an install on the clean tree to catch problems that I didn't document or forgot that I did manually. I guess I should do a distro, but that is for another day (yeah, right).

There is a build in SlackBuilds.org that I would try out first. There are a few prerequisites documented there. CPAN is your friend. Also, think about SchedulesDirect for listings (well worth it!) and where to get programming. Locally, I am blessed to have Comcast with a firewire that works for nearly everything (sans HBO et. al., no biggie).

Think of this as a way to get to know how to resolve GPL software issues, learn about the dependent packages, and get comfortable with Linux more closely. Remember, this is a hobby and not a business.

Good luck,

Brett

Mythtv on Slackware is great. Eventually. I use it on a couple of machines across a 4-machine myth installation.

But if you've never run Mythtv before (like the original poster on this thread) Slack is not the place to start with it. Mythtv is a mess of kludged-together apps, utilities, and protocols. Some of which, at any stage of Mythtv development, don't work quite right (or at all) no matter what the platform. I'd used Slackware off and on since the mid '90s. But I'd never seen anything like Mythtv, and if I hadn't worked with it on a couple of the dedicated distros for a few months (Knoppmyth and Mythbuntu), I doubt I'd ever have gotten the various parts working together properly in Slack. Some dependency and ffmpeg glitches in mytharchive took me 10 months to get rid of.

The end result was stable and near-perfect. But my goodness it was time-investment, even when I knew exactly what I was aiming for.

And this was a smoothly-working and fairly "mature" (for Mythtv) version: 0.21. I'm not ready yet to start this process over again across a whole network with the newer and flakier iterations of Mythtv.

Huh, maybe I should give it another whirl. I've tried Myth 0.22 both on Slack as well as Mythbuntu and Mythdora, all without success. It just kept breaking, needing strange permissions, updated drivers (especially the Myth* distros)--what a mess! I haven't tried XBMC, though I'm thinking about it.

OTOH, I don't watch much TV anymore, and the above helped me lose even more interest in it.

One question, though: Disturbed, how do you find the time to watch that much TV?!?

Did the kinks get worked out of Myth? I was running a release candidate 2 for Myth 0.22 on Slackware 13.0 but grew frustrated with various things. Mainly the web plug-in was largely incompatible out of the box and it was frustrating to have myth think there was a channel where there was none then not give me the opportunity to change the channel before it would kick me out to the main menu. I then realized that I could build a DVR for my HDHomerun using only scripts and a cron job... However, I never got around to optimizing it or making it work with titan tv.

Has anybody tried freevo? I've gotten it installed a few times, but I never managed to make it work for the HDHomerun so I gave up.

My girlfriend, plus another female room mate The girlfriend loves those reality shows. Our room mate, she likes forensic files, Dr G. stuff like that. Personally I don't watch that much TV - compared to most people I know. Maybe 2 hours total spread through out the day, and a movie or 2 on the weekends.

I found it to be completely useless, and incomplete as well. Much like the new netvision plugin. Netvision interfaces with blip.tv, youtube .. and other flash based website. It's like too many of the plugins. Not exactly working. The concepts are there, and sort of work, but ends up in frustration. Though a bit of work is being done on Netvision, and will be promising for those that like youtube quality video on their TV. (Not a fan of crappy quality streaming media. Give me a native Linux Netflix plugin, and I'll be a happy camper!)

The TV recording, scheduling, Live TV watching, everything TV, and video playback has always worked 99.9% for us. I just ignore everything else MythTV claims to do. Only use it to watch TV (live/recorded) and playback archived movies. MythWeb (the webserver, not the plugin that attempts to browse the internet) also works great. We use that interface to schedule programs. It's much easier, and has a better UI, than MythTV's on screen scheduling program. Really like the ability to browse a single channels entire schedule day by day.

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