Last night Aq and I drove to Leeds where I was doing a talk about [LUGRadio](https://www.lugradio.org/). The talk took place at the rather amusingly titled *E.C. Stoner Building* which acts as the home of the [West Yorkshire LUG](https://www.wylug.org.uk/). Ironically, after spending two hours on the road getting there, we saw a large sign for WYLUG on the building but virtually every door we tried was locked. We asked a few people how to get in, but they all spoke lies and we remained locked out in the bitter, naaarthern cold. At this point, it was starting to feel like a surreal cross between [Labyrinth](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091369/) and [Cube](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/), until we finally met a chap who let us in.

The talk seemed to go pretty well, and the response from the audience was good. The talk I gave was an updated version of the one I gave at the UKUUG conference in Swansea, and this one seemed to push more of the right buttons. The talk lasted around 40 minutes and covered most of bases, such as where LUGRadio came and from and how we did it, cordially filled with plenty of anecdotes and factoids. It was good to meet sheepeatingtaz from the forums at the event (we met him when we pulled up in the car – I reckon he *must* be some kind of stalker 😛 ), and he has done a short [write-up](https://forums.lugradio.org/viewtopic.php?p=17155&highlight=#17155) of the event. Good to meet you, sheep. 🙂

After the talk, we all piled in for dinner at a rather nice Italian restaurant. Earlier at the talk, John Leach and his other half popped along, and they came to the dinner. They were great fun and it was excellent to meet up. I am really looking forward to them coming down to [LUGRadio Live 2006](https://www.lugradio.org/live/2006/index.php/Main_Page). It was also great to meet up with James Holden again. James originally asked me to go up to do the talk, and he is a really sound chap. Interestingly, I sat next to Wookie, the legendary embedded Debian hacker. I have seen Wookie around quite a bit in the past at shows, but never got a chance to speak to him. Nice chap, pretty funny and scarily clever – you know, I am glad people that clever arnt arseholes with plutonium. 😛 After the dinner, we went to the LUG’s local, and had a few beers. There I met a guy who looks stunningly like Goldie. I got chatting to him and his girlfriend Libby.

Thanks to WYLUG for such a warm reception, and I really hope to get up there again sometime soon.

Good weekend, this one. On Saturday a bunch of old Uni pals came over for our annual fake Christmas day. This involved plenty of food, drink, a game of Trivial Pursuit (in which the female of the species was shown up as the weaker player), and some Christmas presents. It was good fun, and good to hook up with everyone again.

## MythTV

Saw [this blog entry](https://www.secondhandlederhosen.com/articles/2005/12/10/why-mythtv-is-not-there-yet) today that references my [MythTV on Ubuntu Breezy guide](https://jonobacon.com/viewcomments.php?id=597). This is an example of a fairly common viewpoint on MythTV:

> Sweet Jesus, who wants to go through that much crap to watch TV? I’ve lost all interest in being a sysadmin for my computer; I’m not about to turn maintaining a TiVo into a full-time job.

This is totally understandable, but I think Chris rather misses the point. At the moment, MythTV is not really intended to be particularly easy to set up, and I liken it a bit to Linux back in 1998 – Slackware 98 was pretty capable at hammering in some server functionality, but it was a total bitch to set up. Now spin forward a few years and you can see how much easier to install Linux is. The other point is that if you want an easier ride installing MythTV, use [KnoppMyth](https://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html). I chose to use Ubuntu because I know Ubuntu and I also love hacking together boxes like this. I built every PC in my house, built my firewall and I am gonna build an Asterisk box – most people don’t do this kind of this, and thats perfectly understandable.

## Performance

Good to see more and more performance work going on. Performance seems to be something of an illusion, and the methodology of performance seems to be connected to the illusion of usability. Performance tuning seems to take one of two routes:

* Save some time – actually cut down cold and warm start times, and literally trim the footprint required by an application.
* Pretend to save some time – don’t improve performance but instead distract the user. The canonical example of this is the GNOME/KDE splash screen – it provides no function other than making the user see something when GNOME starts. Its good to see that the GNOME hackers are working to actually get rid of the splash screen and just boot faster.

Achieving these goals seems to be about clever hacking, but also clever use of time. A good example of this is [Glynn Foster’s recent post](https://www.gnome.org/~gman/blog/09122005) about using time cleverly to get the user logged in quicker. Part of the challenge is in getting usable performance data, and it is interesting seeing hackers try to get this. Examples of this include [Mark McLoughlin’s efforts](https://blogs.gnome.org/view/markmc/2005/12/11/0) anm Michael Meeks [efforts to run OpenOffice.org on an old, knackered computer](https://www.gnome.org/~michael/).

Now, what I am interested to find out, and I put this to anyone who knows anything about performance, is *how can I help without delving into C/C++?* I would love to contribute reports about how applications are performing, but how can I contribute valid performance data without being a Federico or a Behdad? It strikes me that contributing performance timings is the equivalent of contributing a bug report – a genuinely useful task that can help developers hack on their code more effectively. Anyone know how I can contribute?

## Speaking

Tomorrow I head up to Leeds to do a talk about LUGRadio. Should be interesting, and I am looking forward to meeting up with the chaps at [WYLUG](https://www.wylug.org.uk/) and also meeting [John Leach](https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/). If you are near Leeds, come on over. 🙂

Well, I am pretty much nearing the completion of my MythTV box, and I figured it is now time to get all of this lot documented. Unfortunately I did not make notes while I built the machine, so most of this is from recollection and checking through settings and older blog entries. As always, your mileage may vary, but good luck and keep me posted how you get on!

This guide has been quickly scribbled down, and is in no way exhaustive, but I hope it helps. 🙂

## Equipment

I am using the following gear:

* AMD64 with 1GB RAM
* ATI Radeon X800 graphics card with TV out
* [Silverstone LC-14M](https://www.silverstonetek.com/products-lc14m.htm) case with built in iMon infra-red and VFD (LCD) display
* PVR-350 encoder/decoder
* 300GB IDE Hard Disk
* DVD/RW
* [SkyControl](https://www.heenan.me.uk/control-sky-from-pc/) Sky changing unit

This is all plugged into:

* Thompson 28″ widescreen TV
* Surround Sound system
* Grundig Sky Digibox

I am not going to cover how to set up the hardware, so check out your ‘ol friend Google for advice on building the computer.

## Plugging it all in

This is how I have plugged it all in:

* The S-Video output from the Sky box goes into the input of the PVR card.
* The red and white phono connectors from the sky box go into the input in the sound card. To do this, I bought a stereo phono to mini-jack lead.
* The output from the Radeon card goes to the TV. To do this, a special lead plugs into the output of the card in which you can plug an S-Video lead into which hooks to the S-Video input on the TV.

## Installing Breezy and MythTV

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the MythTV packages for AMD64 are knackered, and as such they won’t install. I did consider compiling it all, but I decided to bail and run the normal x86 packages on the machine. As such, I installed the normal 32-bit Intel version of Breezy on the box. Plenty of documentation is available about how to install Ubuntu. While installing, make sure that when it asks you for a user account, you give it an account called `mythtv`. This is where you will spent most of your time.

Once installed, you need to install the relevant packages, so log in as the `mythtv` user. On my machine I wanted the full shebang, so I just installed everything with the word `myth` in front of it. Everything should install fine apart from `mythgame` which has a b0rked package. I am sure this will be fixed sometime soon, but it didn’t work for me. This list of packages will pull a load of stuff in, including MySQL, Qt and more. While installing, a MythTV package (maybe called `mythtv-database`) will ask you for some MySQL settings. Give it the username `root` and an empty password – this is the default account for MySQL. If you want to change the settings later, you can do so with [MySQL GRANT tables](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/adding-users.html) and then just update `/home/mythtv/.mythtv/mysql.txt`. The `.mythtv` directory is where some configuration is stored. In reality you only ever use the directory when tweaking the database or remote control settings.

Once the packages are installed, run:

sudo mythtv-setup

This will ask you a bunch of questions, and just run through it and answer as much as you can. When it asks if you want to clear the Video Card and Channel settings, just say yes. When you have been through the questions, exit by pressing Escape repeatedly and we can begin configuration.

## Setting up the PVR-350 card

To use the PVR-350 card, you need the [ivtv](https://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page) drivers. Download the driver source code to your system and then follow the [HOWTO](https://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Howto). Make sure you follow all of the steps, including renaming all of those pesky kernel modules. Once you have done this, you need to set up the firmware. [This page](https://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Firmware) gets you through this rather unnerving process, so follow each instruction in great detail.

At this point, reboot and then re-run `mythtv-setup`. Clear the TV card settings and continue to the main menu. In the *Capture Cards* menu item you should see something such as `MPEG : /dev/video0’ – this is your PVR card. Press down to select it and then press Enter. In there you need to change the *Default Input* setting to `S-Video 0` – this is where the feed from the sky box is coming into the card.

When I first got the card running, I had no audio. To solve this, I needed to add some module parameters – obviously (!). Go to `/etc/modprobe.d/`, create a new file called `ivtv` and add the following nonsense:

alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
options ivtv ivtv_std=2 tda9887=0 ivtv_debug=1
options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
options tuner pal=1
install ivtv /sbin/modprobe tuner; /sbin/modprobe msp3400; /sbin/modprobe saa7115; \
/sbin/modprobe saa7127; /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install ivtv; \
/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -j reg=0x6c,val=0xfa; /sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c; \
/sbin/modprobe ivtv-fb; \ /usr/local/bin/ivtvfbctl /dev/fb0 -noglobalalpha -localalpha

This should get the audio working fine – it certainly did for me. Now, why didn’t *I* think of that. 😛

## Testing MythTV

To test MythTV, you need to start the backend server and then the frontend client. To start the backend, run the following command (you *must* do it as sudo):

/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start

Then, as the `mythtv` user, run the following command to start the frontend:

mythfrontend

You will need to do this whenever you want to test bits of MythTV out.

## TV Listings

TV listings vary from country to country, and I am going to cover how to get this working in the UK. First, you need to install the `xmltv` package.

Now, in a terminal window (click on Accessories->Terminal) run `sudo mythtv-setup` and go to the *Video Sources* menu option. In there, call your source `RadioTimesUK` and from the *XMLTV listings grabber* box, select `United Kingdom (alternative)`. When you press the Finish button, press Alt-Tab to flick to the terminal window and it will ask you if you want a particular channel. Just type in `all` to select all of them and then you are taken back to the first screen.

Now go to the *Input* menu item, select the `SVideo0` entry and press enter. In the *Video source* box, select your `RadioTimesUK` entry and then click finish.

Exit the setup program and in the terminal, now type:

mythfilldatabase

This program will go away and fetch all of the listings for all of those channels and stash them in the database. This takes *ages*, utterly, utterly *ages* so don’t worry if you think its hung – it probably hasn’t.

When this process has finished, fire up `mythfrontend` and go to *Manage->Schedule->Program Guide* and you should see the schedule information in there.

## Getting your listings into shape

Although you have your TV listings, you need to buff and sheen them to make them useful. A lot of channels will be downloaded, and you need to assign each channel a channel number (the sky channel number so it can be changed with the SkyControl box) and specify the name of the channel. You will also want to turn off a number of the channels. This not only includes any movies/sports channels you don’t subscribe to, but also regional channels (there are listings for every regional BBC1, BBC2 and ITV station as an example) and those crappy channels that are on from around channel 400 upwards. 😛

This is best done in the web interface, so go to the following address in your browser:

https://localhost/mythweb/

Click on the spanner icon and then click on *Channels*. You are then provided with a bunch of channels and boxes you can set for each one. This is what you need to set:

* `channum` – set this to the sky channel number (e.g. 101 for BBC1)
* `callsign` – set this to the name of the channel (e.g. BBC1). This can probably be copied from the *name* box. This text appears when you browse channels
* `freqid` – set this to the sky channel number (e.g. 101 for BBC1). This is the number that the SkyControl box uses to change the channel
* `visble` – untick any of the channels you don’t want to include in your listings

## Remote control

The remote control included with the Silverstone LC-14M is pretty darn good, and the type of IR unit in the case is an iMon Soundgraph. Drivers for this are at [this site](https://venky.ws/projects/imon/), although the driver has now been added to the latest version of [lirc](https://www.lirc.org/). lirc is the de-facto tool that most infra-red devices are supported under on Linux. Breezy does not include the version of lirc with the driver, so you need to compile it yourself. Instructions for compiling it are [here](https://www.lirc.org/html/install.html#compiling).

I recommend that when you compile lirc, you install it in `/opt/lirc` – this helps you keep track of where compiled software lives. When you run the `autogen.sh` script, add `–prefix` to point where lirc should installed:

autogen.sh –prefix=/opt/lirc

When the software is installed, you will have `/opt/lirc/` with some stuff in there. First, you need to make sure `/dev/lirc` exists. If it doesn’t, run:

mknod /dev/lirc c 61 0

With this all set, now run the lirc daemon:

/opt/lirc/sbin/lircd

Run `ps ax` and you should see it in there.

The next step is to create mappings for MythTV to the remote control. Before you do anything, you need to create the mappings to each button on your remote control which MythTV and other applications reference. To do this, run `mode2` in the `/opt/lirc/bin` directory and you should see a hex code produced when you press a button on your remote. Note this code down and the button you pressed. These now need to be specified in `/etc/lircd.conf`. You need to add a description of the button and the hex code, such as:

AppExit 0x288195b7
Record 0x298115b7
Play 0x2a8115b7

* Go and download my [lircd.conf](https://jonobacon.com/files/mythtv/lircd.conf). Feel free to just replace my hex codes with your own.

Now run:

/opt/lirc/bin/irw

When you press your remote buttons you should now see the button description appear.

A quick point about the directional buttons. At the moment, there is no official support for the directional pad. Some people have been working to get this going, and you should check out [this thread](https://venky.ws/forums/viewtopic.php?t=60) for more details. There were three potential patches, none of which worked for me. I just cheated by using some other buttons for up, down, left and right.

You now need to map your button descriptions to the mythtv keyboard commands. I have only partially completed this, and I have done it for all the important stuff. This all happens in `/home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc`. It comprises of a bunch of blocks like this:

begin
prog = mythtv
button = Menu
config = M
end

First, the `prog` part indicates which application is being configured. Next, you specify the button description in the `button` part and the keyboard command in the `config` part. Example: if you are using mythtv to watch TV and press `m` on your normal keyboard, it will pop up the menu. The above snippet maps this key to the `Menu` button on your remote control. These lirc mappings need to be not only set for mythtv, but also for Xine (the program used by MythDVD to watch DVDs).

* Check out my [lircrc](https://jonobacon.com/files/mythtv/lircrc) file

## The LCD display

LCD displays in Linux are most typically driven by [LCDproc](https://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/). Unfortunately, the iMon Soundgraph is a bit too new for the current release of LCDProc (this may of course changed when you read this), but the driver is present in the LCDProc available on [Venky’s site](https://venky.ws/projects/imon/). Follow the instructions exactly as they appear on the site and it should work out fine.

When you compile LCDproc, also stick it in `/opt` by using `–prefix=/opt/lcdproc` when running `autogen.sh`. When it is compiled and complete, run it:

/opt/lcdproc/sbin/LCDd

You can test out the display by running:

cat “MythTV rocks” > /dev/lcd0

If after this you get *permission denied* errors when you try to access the LCD display again, you may need to reboot. Also, note that the LCD is not cleared when you reboot, just in case you are worried that the letters have been burned into the display due to your tinkerings.

To make MythTV play nicely with the LCD display, enable LCD output in one of the setup options in mythfrontend (I can’t remember off hand which one it is).

## TV out (and the ATI card)

To get the output from your computer onto your TV you have two options:

* Use the TV out of your graphics card
* Run an X server on the PVR-350

I first had a crack at the X server approach as it sounded rather cool. I gave up fairly shortly due to the sheer lack of documentation available. Take a look at the [ivtv](https://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page) site for some details, but there isn’t much about. As such, I plumped for the TV out with my Radeon card.

I chose to use the proprietary ATI driver as I did not want to ponce around with it too much, and I suspected the driver would get me up and running pretty quickly. At first I just downloaded the driver and manually run it, with no success. This is the wrong way. You should definitely install the driver by following [this HOWTO](https://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=423584). Follow it to the finest detail and you will be up and running no problem. When you are configuring the card, just answer as much as you can, and remember that the TV card needs PAL as its TV out. It may offer a range of PAL options; I think I chose PAL-I.

When you have been through this, run the graphical ATI config program (it should be in your Applications menu) and turn on TV-out. Also change the resolution of your screen to 800×600 to help it along.

In X.org, there is a new extension called `xv` that accelerates video on the screen. To use this and improve your performance, add the following lines to `/etc/X11/xorg.conf` at the bottom of your `Device` block:

Option “OpenGLOverlay” “off”
Option “VideoOverlay” “on”
Option “OverlayOnCRTC2”

This caught me out for a while when I could get no video working on the TV (fine on the monitor, but not the TV). The last line pumps it out to just the TV and not the monitor. Then again, I assume you are not going to have a monitor permanently plugged into this box. 😛

You also need to add the following to the Monitor block for you TV:

DisplaySize 720 576

This is the PAL resolution for the TV. Thanks to [Xalior](https://www.rimron.co.uk/) for the `DisplaySize` tip. 🙂

Whenever making these changes, remember to restart X.

* Check out my [xorg.conf](https://jonobacon.com/files/mythtv/xorg.conf) file.

## The SkyControl box

It is important to be able to change the sky channels on your DigiBox from your MythTV box. To do this, grab yourself a SkyControl box and follow the instructions that you get with it. I followed them exactly and it all worked out great. The important thing is to install the software that comes with it and then add the command given in the instructions to the option to run an external channel changing command.

The key thing here is that the `freqid` option for each channel that you configured in the web interface, *must* be set to the correct three-digit sky channel number. Do this right, and you will be a hero to your friends.

## Final thoughts

Well I hope this quickly scribbled HOWTO helps you get things off the ground. Building a MythTV box is an intensely fun and gratifying project, and it really opens your eyes to the potential of homebrew PVR. Keep me updated with how you get on. 🙂

Thanks to: Scott Thompson, juski, ivor, Xalior, Bill, Joseph Heenan and many more. Also thanks to #mythtv-users – they have been intensely useful. 🙂

Wow, [lugradio.org](https://www.lugradio.org/) is getting a beating. We suspect this is not only down to the fact that the show is netting more and more listeners with each release, but also [Channel9 picked it up](https://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=142765#142765) and they have a *shit load* of readers online at any one time. As such, `audio.lugradio.org` has been disabled until we have some more bang to our buck.

Last night Sooz and I pulled out the TV cabinet and organised all of the cables. It seems that my flicker problem in Myth has gone, so that may have been down to interference. I then fixed a segfault problem I had with the Escape key on the remote, and finally left the box on overnight to record some shows as a test. The problem was that each show started two or three minutes early. This is fine unless you record two shows one after the other on the same channel as it puts the end of one show at the start of the other. This is configurable though I think, so should be no problem.

A major problem I seem to have though is that the TV listings grabber seems to be running a lot and it takes *ages* to complete. Does anyone have any suggestions how to limit the running of `millfilldatabase` to around 4.30am each morning? This is a real pain at the moment, but I know it will be easily fixable. The problem is that it slows the box down and causes the TV output to stutter, so I want to get it under control.

Great Asterisk seminar yesterday, it was incredibly useful. I am looking forward to playing with it when I get some time next week. Thanks for the [offer](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/viewcomments.php?id=594#comment1) of some Python scripts Simon, I am sure they will come in handy soon. 🙂

Two days off tomorrow and Friday. 🙂

Spent a few hours last night fixing up my MythTV channels. This involved the long and rather laborious process of going through the channels on my Sky box, and copying over the settings to the MythTV monster via the web interface. I did the majority of the channels and now it is all looking rather sweet. You know, you never fully fully appreciate how much crap is on TV until you do this. Anyway, they are mostly done now.

One of the nice things in MythTV is that you can have a channel icon shown in the TV guide and on-screen display. The problem is that each of these icons needs to be added manually. Does anyone know of a script that screen scrapes a bunch of these icons from a website somewhere and puts them in MythTV? I was considering writing something like this if I have some time, but I am rather busy at the moment.

The next focal point is trying to improve picture quality (it looks good, but a little too colour saturated), and importantly, reducing some of the flicker I am getting. The flicker is not horrifically bad, but it is slightly distracting. This is where it gets complicated though – I don’t know if this is an issue with my TV, the video card TV out, or MythTV. A sheer lack of understanding about what causes flicker is also playing a part here. Does anyone know how to prevent this flicker?

Everything is confirmed and ready for the [talk I am doing at West Yorkshire LUG](https://www.wylug.org.uk/meetings.html) on Monday next week. It looks like its gonna be a great night, so if you are local yokel, you should head down. John Leach from [Everybody Loves Eric Raymond](https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/) fame pinged me yesterday to say he is heading down to say hi.

A few other points:

* In the last couple of days, around six people have told me they are now building a MythTV machine. Cool. I also saw Bill online last night and he is making steady progress with his box.
* Congratulations to the [GStreamer](https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/) chaps on their 0.10 release. They have been working like crazy recently, so its great to see they have pushed this important release out.
* Happy birthday to [Davyd](https://www.livejournal.com/users/davyd/).
* [Episode 4](https://www.lugradio.org/) is out, and the server is taking a hammering. We are going to arrange for some more memory for the box for the next episode as is was creaking somewhat. We may need to consider some form of load balancing for the website as well as the mirrors.
* Installed [CrossOver 5.0](https://www.codeweavers.com/) and tried to install Office 2003, but it failed. Bah! Nevermind, the CodeWeavers chaps are a good bunch, and I am sure they will get to [my ticket](https://www.codeweavers.com/support/tickets/browse/?ticket_id=71773) soon. 🙂
* Damien is [asking for suggestions](https://blog.gnomemeeting.net/index.php?p=21#comments) to rename GnomeMeeting. I sent [over a few](https://blog.gnomemeeting.net/index.php?p=21#comment-710), and also suggested *JonoForPresident*. He replied saying he liked it and was considering it, but I suspect he is spinning me a yarn. 😛
* [Project Orange](https://orange.blender.org/) are making some stunning progress. 🙂

Today [we](https://www.openadvantage.org/) are heading over to an Asterisk seminar. This should be interesting and help prepare us for the VoIP seminar that we have so foolishly organised. There is lots to learn, but I am sure we can arrange for a band of winged monkeys to help us out if all else fails.

You know, I have known for a while that I have a rather unusual name. Aside from my meat-related surname, the name *Jono* is not particularly well established. This odd combination has mean’t that from what I can tell, I am the only *Jono Bacon* on the Internet, so one could assume that there not any other Jono Bacons in the world. Hmmm.

With such a rare name, you need to keep it real with other Jonos. As such, I sent an email over to [Jono Coleman](https://www.jonocoleman.co.uk/) who is a famous Aussie DJ over here. As a man who shares in the wondrous Clan Jono, I figured we should unite and affirm our union:

> Hey Jono,

> You know, the world has far too few Jonos in it, and I figured we need to club together otherwise some lunitic Stuarts or Davids may get a little
above their platform. As such I figured I should email you to bolster this soladarity between Clan Jono.

> Good to see a fellow Jono doing well. I am part of an Open Source podcast called LUGRadio (www.lugradio.org) that is doing rather well. We currently
have around 15,000 listeners.

> The Day Of The Jono is coming…

> Cheers,

> Jono

Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to share in our obvious relation:

> IM ACTUALLY JONATHAN (JONO) COLEMAN …BUT THATS CLOSE ENOUGH STAY COOL JONO COLEMAN BBC LONDON 94.9FM AND GMTV ON ITV

So, the man seems to only use *Jono* as some kind of frivolous nickname. Preposterous! Sure, my name is officially *Jonathan Edward James Bacon*, but it has been Jono since the age of 9. I am sure he will see the light sometime soon. 😛

If you know any other Jonos, do let me know. 🙂

Thanks for the comments about Xine. I am looking into a way of getting over these bugs, and exploring some other options. In related news, its good to hear that [Bill](https://whizzy.org/) has seen the light and chosen MythTV over his collection of home-brew hacked up PVR scripts. Welcome to the club, Bill. 🙂

Tonight we (Seraphidian) played a festival and it went quite well. Great to play on a stage that has contained so many awesome bands. It was also good to hook up with some people we have not seen for a while after our period of time not gigging.

Oh, and I have been meaning to post some pictures of the [LUGRadio Live 2006](https://www.lugradio.org/live/2006) for a while now. They have been in my gallery for a while, but I originally held back as we still needed to confirm the venue. Now everything is confirmed, and hopefully paid for, and I can reveal some shots.

First of all, this is one side of where the exhibition area is going to be:

Here is the other side:

This is the main room when you walk in. You can see the side of the bar:

This is the left side of where you walk in – this is likely to be one of the BOF points:

This is where the main stage seating area is, and you can see the stage in the far side of the room. Also, note the plasmas (woo!) – oh and ignore the bald gimp in the middle:

The side of the main stage:

Here is the back of the room with a seating area and the LAN gaming area:

Closer view of the LAN gaming area – bigger than last year:

A lightning talks room:

This room is going to be another lightning talks room if we run a second lightning talks track, otherwise we will use it for something else:

Cool, huh?

Episode 4 of [LUGRadio](https://www.lugradio.org/) hits the wire tomorrow and I think many of you will find it pretty interesting. Fingers crossed we can get a Slashdotting. 🙂
—–

Well, well, well. Today I am proud to announce that the final major chunk of the MythTV puzzle, TV out, is working. Freedom fighters among you will be disappointed to learn that I resorted to the proprietary ATI driver, but from what I can tell, this is the easiest way to get TV out working. I give up on the PVR-350 X server option. Also, beers need to be resoundingly sunk after I read the fantastic comments by Bill and Adam. Thanks guys. A few cold ones await you…

To get TV out working I followed the superb [instructions on the Ubuntu Forums](https://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=423584). I had previously attempted installation of the driver with little success, and this short HOWTO got me up and running straight away. Slightly delayed by a lingering problem with `dpkg` bitching about `mythtv-database` not being configured, I eventually managed to persuade the little shyster to run. At first the output on my TV looked rather washed out, that was until Susan pushed the magic *turn on S-Video button* on our TV and it sprung to life.

So, want to see some photos? Of course you do. Firstly, here is a shot of my MythTV theme running on the telly:

Next up is the rather sexy on screen display theme that I am using:

While a TV show is on, the LCD display on the case shows what TV show you are watching:

Now, that should be displaying `Five` instead of `1097`, but that is only a quick tweak away. I had a few oddities with the TV listings today that need poking.

Of course, you always need to know the weather forcast:

And for music fans, its great to keep all of your tunes in the living room. Ideal for when you have guests over and want to woo your company with *Mortification*, the christian metal band (yes, thats right):

(full size pictures [in the gallery](https://jonobacon.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=3366))

Still a few little niggles to fix, but I am sure these are no problem. One slightly concerning problem that we encountered this evening was when we tried to watch a *Back To The Future* DVD. When I plonked the DVD in, it would load up fine with sound and video up until I selected the *play* option from the DVD menu. Xine would then crash out complaining that something else is using the sound card. I tried the usual workarounds of killing esd, closing down all applications and finally rebooting, but to no avail. This is rather odd – has anyone had any odd problems with Xine and DVDs?

In other news, tonight, [Aq](https://www.kryogenix.org/) and I moved the final sites from angel3 to angel4 (this server). This included [Recreant View](https://www.recreantview.org), [PHP West Midlands User Group](https://www.phpwm.org), the [LUGRadio Wiki](https://wiki.lugradio.org/), the [Infopoint](https://infopoint.jonobacon.com) site, and [Susan’s site](https://www.susancurtis.com/). Pretty much everything is moved now with the exception of email and mailing lists. Due to our lack of understanding about exim and mailman, we have persuaded the few mail users to move their mail elsewhere, and I also asked the [lug.org.uk](https://www.lug.org.uk) crew if I can shift the phpwm list over to their server. This should hopefully be fine. 🙂

Finally, mixed [LUGRadio](https://www.lugradio.org/) Season 3 Episode 4 today and it sounds pretty cool. It will be with you all on Monday.

Sooz was away last night to attend a BBC training course today, so I descended into full pants-and-chinese-food mode and spent the entire evening hacking on MythTV. The latest major win is that audio in both TV and DVD now works. Those of you who are trying to get TV audio for your PVR-350 working with Ubuntu should ignore the rest of the crap on the Internet and simply add the following to `/etc/modprobe.d/ivtv` (info gathered from [here](https://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php?page=debian267):

alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
options ivtv ivtv_std=2 tda9887=0 ivtv_debug=1
options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
options tuner pal=1
install ivtv /sbin/modprobe tuner; /sbin/modprobe msp3400; /sbin/modprobe saa7115; \
/sbin/modprobe saa7127; /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install ivtv; \
/usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -j reg=0x6c,val=0xfa; /sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c; \
/sbin/modprobe ivtv-fb; \ /usr/local/bin/ivtvfbctl /dev/fb0 -noglobalalpha -localalpha

I only have a few small remaining issues now:

* Get TV out working, well sort of. TV out from the PVR-350 works for watching TV, but not displaying the MythTV interface. To do this I need to run an X server on the PVR-350 or use the Radeon X800 TV out. The PVR-350 X server approach loads the module and runs X, but the display is corrupted. I installed the proprietary ATI driver, but as yet no luck with TV out, and `aticonfig` does not want to work.

* Fix a segfault bug when I press Esc on the remote control to exit a screen. This should just be a simple `lirc` mapping fix.

I also installed a new theme called Retro and a new On Screen Display (OSD) theme. This makes the interface seem even nicer. I don’t have the links right now, but will post them later.

After doing some research into unifying themes on the Linux desktop, it turns out that there are number of potential solutions, each with their own benefits and pitfalls. The challenge is not only in finding a good technical solution, but also figuring out a solution that is doable for the different toolkits.

There are a few current efforts:

* [MetaTheme](https://www.metatheme.org/) – here an abstracted theme engine has been developed, and they have achieved some reasonable success. It is still not complete, but they seem to be doing some good work. The problem here is that they seem to be developing an entire theme engine that is subject to the lowest common denominator, and previous experience has netted us the view that matching themes automatically in toolkits does not work.
* The [Qt-GTK bridge](https://www.freedesktop.org/Software/gtk-qt) – this project seems to have stalled a little, and the unification only goes one way.
* Individual themes, a ‘la [BlueCurve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve); a project that was quite controversial and did not actually seem to fix the problem all that well.

There are some other proposed efforts:

* [Controlling themes with CSS](https://tango-project.org/Shared_Framework) – an idea being pushed around the Tango project. This is interesting in that it not only solves the theme problem, but also some HIG issues.
* Unifying themes by writing a spec and developing native implementations – this is [the idea](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/viewcomments.php?id=588) that I have been shunting around for the past few days.

I think the most interesting ideas that we have are a CSS controlled theming engine and standardised themes that can be implemented naively. Although the benefits of a CSS controlled theme are not only great in terms of making themes easier to create for artists, and the benefits of unified human interface guidelines, the threat of a non-standard implementation (a ‘la IE) and the fact that *everyone* needs to buy into it, makes it less doable. The benefit of the standard themes approach is that the implementation is specific to the toolkit, and the buy-in is at the theme level and not the toolkit level.

I am positive this can work, and I spoke to [Richard](https://www.stellingwerff.com/) about the possibility of [Clearlooks](https://clearlooks.sourceforge.net/) being one of the standardised themes – many GNOME *and* KDE themes seem to be very similar to Clearlooks. He was rather excited by the project, but he still has not finalised how Clearlooks Cairo is going to look. Maybe work on the spec can happen when it is complete?

In other news, [Everyone Loves LUGRadio part 3] was published:

Most amusing.

Also, the MythTV box is progressing, but I wish I knew that S-Video leads don’t carry audio last week. That would have saved a few hours of poncing with [ivtv](https://ivtv.sourceforge.net/).

The [Infopoint](https://infopoint.jonobacon.com/) project is going to move to a new site and get more attention. More news on this soon/