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Fedora Core 6 has an impossible install bug that installs an i586 kernel on i686 machines, but report it as an i686 kernel. This means that everything’s hunky dory after install until you start messing with drivers, say the nVidia kernel module. The nVidia installer installs i686 drivers, but the kernel’s really i586 so “nothin’ works.” The average joe would never figure this out.

The trick to a successful install is to specifiy ‘i686’ on the command line at the start of the install. That actually works well, until you have to update the system. The updater will update to the new kernel, OF THE WRONG ARCHITECTURE AGAIN! So now all your drivers that we’re working before the update, fail. Luckily the same fix works after the update. Here’s the bug:

Fedora Core Install Bug

Otherwise, things appear run smoothly with Myth TV.

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I’m working on my third MythTV installation without much success. Of course, the goals are higher:

1) HDTV recording and playback

2) Distributed storage, recording, and playback

3) Games

I’ve spent a couple weeks on it already and have not got close to requirement one

The sordid tale starts with the purchase of an pcHDTV 5500 card. Starting with the modest hardware configuration:

AMD 2200+

512MB

160GB

On board 440MX

I tried Fedore Core 4 and got no where fast. I then tried Fedora Core 5. The pcHDTV drivers need to be compiled and I had little trouble with that. Then came HD channel detection on my Millennium Digital Cable connection here in East Seattle. I didn’t really know what I was doing so predictably had great difficulty. Ultimately, the user xyzzy provided his custom atscscan which greatly helped out in scanning for channels. It can be found here:

atscscan

I’ll detail what I did to find channels in a later post.

Then came viewing channels. Predictably, the pcHDTV folks were completely useless in their support of Xine for viewing HDTV, even on FC5 which they ‘support.’ Nothing worked. I finally got a HDTV image by installing the stock libxine binaries from freshrpms.net and compiling the xinehd frontend from pcHDTV. I didn’t want to continue with this configuration so I thought I try Fedore Core 6 as it has pcHDTV 5500 drivers built in.

After configuration, I was easily able to record HD with my pcHDTV 5500 in Fedora Core 6. Playback was another issue. I tried to get my modest box to use the nVidia XvMC extensions to offload some of the work. In hind site this was a mistake as most of the content viewed will be XVID but be that as it may… The atrpms distribution is broken with respect to mplayer and XvMC. I tried the official distribution and the FreshRPMs version without success. I’ve abandoned XvMC and have now moved to standard MPEG decoding. Unfortunately, my AMD 2200 is not fast enough to decode the 1080p I recorded earlier.

So now I’m left with a Myth TV box that can record unencrypted HD from the cable, but not play it… I’ll have to get a faster front end machine I guess.

Now I’m off to getting my Motorola DCT6416 III working with Myth and my firewire card. Good times…

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