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MythTV – One problem solved

This one didn’t take too long to figure out. A little time with Google and I found the solution. There’s a little perl script that came with MythTV that will create an XML file that mythfilldatabase can use to put the icon information into the DB. It ended up just being two commands, though there are a few holes (mostly local stations). Anyway, here’s what I had to do (because I installed from an RPM my contrib is at the path below):

$ perl /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.18.1/contrib/mkiconmap.pl
Answer the questions
$ mythfilldatabase --import-icon-map iconmap.xml --update-icon-map

And just wait for it to run!

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MythTV — Like TiVO w/no subscription!

I had heard about this thing called MythTV a couple of times when looking at posts on Slashdot, mostly when issues regarding TiVO came up, but I had never looked into it until recently. Then my wife mentioned that she kinda wanted a TiVO and that got me started with a more in depth look. From what I could tell, the easiest thing to do was through a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 into a semi-decent computer, install linux, then install MythTV. Easy, right?

So I used Froogle to find the cheapest price on a WinTV 350 card that I could. Once it arrived, I followed Jarod Wilson’s giude to installing MythTV on Fedora Core 4. Over the course of the next two days (a lot of the time was spent on waiting for installs and downloads) I got MythTV 90% of the way there. I couldn’t seem to get the sound to work. So I emailed the MythTV users list and discovered that I missed an option in the setup to use the PVR 350 for video out and for sound. Oops.

So now I have a working MythTV installation that allows me to pause live TV and time-shift my viewing. I also have it set up so I can log in from anywhere on the Internet and set the box to record a show. So if I’m at my parent’s house and realize that if I stay any longer I’m gonna miss some show I’ve been wanting to watch, I can just log into my Myth box and set it to record!

I still have a couple of little issues with Myth, but overall I love it. My current issues are (off the top of my head):

  • Channel changing is really slow
  • The fonts in the on screen guide are so small they’re pretty much useless
  • I still need to figure out how to make channel icons work – solved
  • My wireless network card is unreliable (it’s an older 802.11b card that sometimes loses connection)
  • The On Screen Display and the setup menus often place things off the screen where they aren’t really visible
  • The sound output from the PVR 350 can only be used for TV sound. Other things that require sound (such as MP3 playback, games, etc) don’t work without a real sound card
  • I only have a 20GB drive for my /video mount so that limits how much stuff I can record
  • It may be that I just haven’t found the module for it, but there’s an FM tuner in the PVR 350 that I don’t seem to have any support for in MythTV

Some of these are obviously thing I have to solve while others are issues with MythTV and/or the ivtv drivers.

UPDATE 26-Nov-2005: Solved the first problem – got my channel icons!