Since about 2003 I have used Debian for my MythTV box. We affectionately refer to it as the freevo, a pun on TiVo. Originally when I evaluated the deployment software, I used FreeVo for a brief period of time.
The hardware I have used was my desktop until I upgraded in 2003, with a few minor changes over time that were mostly due to failures. Power supply, video card, added a hard drive, etc. When we moved at the end of April 2009 I decided it was time to re-engineer my solution. I love Debian, it is lean and you can make it do exactly what you want and only that. The ability to limit ancillarary functions was great since it is only a single core 1.3GHz CPU and at one time it was encoding XVID on a single tuner Hauppauge card (about $40). Slow enough that you could not watch live tv.
The new deployment runs MythDora, a distribution tuned for MythTV and has several wizards to assist in easy setup. I am using a split backend/frontend design now with only a UPnP setup on the frontend in my livingroom. The backend was a budget off-lease system that has a dual core 3GHz CPU, a 750GB hard drive and a 1.5TB hard drive. With LVM that gives me a 10GB OS partition and almost 2.2TB of video storage. I have a Hauppauge PVR-500 dual analog tuner with MPEG2 hardware encoder and HDHomerun dual digital HD tuner with MPEG2 hardware encoder. The installs were very easy, and by selecting backend AND frontend on the server, and frontend on the client stations it went very smoothly through setup.
I have run in to a couple of minor problems. The most recent first then working backwards. I use schedulesdirect for the TV listings, and after two weeks I did not have my guide anymore. I checked, and there was not a cronjob to run mythfilldatabase. Since MythTV is running as the mythtv user, I edited /etc/crontab and added a line to run it once a day:
32 2 * * * mythtv /usr/bin/mythfilldatabase &
That means to run it every day at 2:32am (arbitrary time when I wasn’t likely to be using the system) as the mythtv user (so permissions definately will not be messed up and to maintain security). I provided the full path, and used the ampersand to tell it to run in the background.
The second problem was more insideous. MythDora uses Network Manager for the network configuration. Since this is supposed to be an appliance, and I want the backend (required) and frontend (optional) to have static IPs. To facilitate this, I modified /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and setup the IP, subnet, etc
DEVICE=eth0
HWADDR=00:17:a4:42:82:93
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=192.168.0.80
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1
Normally I would put GATEWAY in /etc/sysconfig/network but I opted to place it in the interface configuration since it only has one interface and I was feeling lazy. After I did this, and possibly restarted, NetworkManager emptied the /etc/resolv.conf and so dns lookups failed. Stupid NetworkManager, we will fix its wagon:
chkconfig NetworkManager off
service NetworkManager stop
And then put something useful in /etc/resolv.conf:
nameserver 192.168.0.1
Since the new house is not cabled for ethernet and MPEG2 is bandwidth intensive I bought a pair of NETGEAR Powerline A/V Ethernet Adapters, model XAVB101-100NAS. I had a pair of the 85Mb adapters and the video would stutter occasionally. The higher speed 200Mb adapters do not suffer from this problem at all. They are still limited to 100Mb on the interface, but have 200Mb on the shared network domain.
Now everything works.
I discovered on June 6 that the tv listings were empty again. I checked, and anacron isn’t running and doesn’t start on boot
service anacron start
chkconfig anacron on