[mythtvnz] Chch setup help please?

[Jim Cheetham]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Wayne
<waynefilter at embeddedengineering.co.nz> wrote:
>> I installed the Mythbuntu distro on my machine, after hitting numerous
>> problems getting the mythtv packages to play together sensibly. It is
>> a full OS; it's been trivially easy to treat this machine as "ubuntu
>> desktop" and to add other layers of software for different tasks.
>>
> Any general comments on what you needed to do "getting the mythtv
> packages to play together sensibly" please?

With Mythbuntu; nothing. Installed and worked out of the box with all
the backend features I needed; only had a little hiccup figuring out
how to get the DVB-S cards setup (permissions on the dev files ... run
setup as root!).

> What hardware were you installing on?

Unhelpfully very generic server stuff; just a bunch of RAID-1 disks
(just under 2TB available storage through LVM), an armful of RAM (4GB
so I didn't have to go 64-bit ... but I did), dual core 2.2GHz Intel
CPU, nVidia GeForce 8400 GS; but I'm not doing any frontend on it at
all, which is where most of the headaches seem to lie. I've chosen to
use another appliance as a playback machine, copying files over NFS
shares and so on. No streaming. I lose some features this way, but
gain others.

If I were building a new server, I'd look for something that allowed
me to virtualise the myth backend; it would have to allow the VM guest
to access to the DVB-S cards, and I'm not really sure what can do
that; certainly not VMWare. Possibly Xen on the metal, but I'd
probably need VT support in the CPU which this machine doesn't have.
KVM I don't know anything about, sadly. But this machine is stable-ish
and the WAF is high, so I don't feel the need to mess with it any
more!

-jim