We came, We saw, We kicked its ass!

About a month ago the hard drive in my MythTV server took a bad turn. Luckily I was able to transfer all the recorded shows off in time. I began the process of looking to build a new server and wanted to try running the backend inside Xen, but also wanted to run Xen on a machine which supported the new hardware virtualization technology. I gathered all the pieces together, decided on going the AMD64 route and waited for everything to arrive. Needless to say the process of getting MythTV running inside a Xen instance was not trivial.

First I tried booting KnoppMyth using the HVM option, but soon discovered that support for exporting PCI devices was not yet supported if you were using HVM. Then I tried using the regular method which did support exporting PCI devices, which was another trial. The trick was to tell the host operating system to ignore the card, telling Xen to allow the guests full access to the card, and then telling the MythTV guest to use the magically option extra=”swiotlb=force” so that the IVTV driver wouldn’t cause the guest to kernel panic.

After this was sorted out I was finally able to install the MythTV backend server and configure it, transfer the saved recordings over and voila! A working DVR. Unfortunately, the machines that I had been using for frontends were using older versions of MythTV and were unable to connect to the backend server. Tonight I decided to fix that. I actually started by looking to see if there was a MythTV client for Windows since Jenn uses Windows on her computer. I found MythTV Player and installed it, and was pleasantly surprised that it worked fairly well.

After that I decided to tackle the machine that was acting as the frontend client in the bedroom. I had looked at MiniMyth before but it could not get it to work. I decided to give it another visit. What appealed to be about it was the option to boot a machine over a network and have it running the MythTV frontend, all without the need for a hard drive. First I tried the version that used a ramdisk (a portion of the machine’s memory) to store it’s root filesystem. This worked but the playback results were poor because the machine in question only had 256MB of RAM. I decided to try the option of using NFS for the root file system instead. This worked out much better and after tweaking it a bit to get the ATI USB remote control working, I now have a working frontend using MiniMyth. Next step is the xbox frontend in the living room.

UPDATE

Discovered earlier the reason why XBMCMythTV could not connect properly to the MythTV backend, turns out it can not read the new password algorithm used in Mysql 5.0. Here is the fix.