Welcome to my guide on setting up MythTV for the Nova-T. You'll be glad to know is that the new Nova-T does work on Fedora Core 4 with MythTV 0.19. The problem is how to set it up is distributed amongst many websites. My aim is to communicate my experiences of trying to pull together that information.

Introduction

There are some very useful guides on the web but due to the variety of systems, one guide cannot suit all. However, the most useful guides are listed below. I refer to them throughout this page and you will need to switch between this guide and them.

Jarod Wilson's Fedora Mythology

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/

A brilliant HOWTO site for setting up MythTV on Fedora. Has nothing about DVB and Nova-T however.

Martin Smith's DVB Guide

http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/mythdvb.html

Great site for setting up and testing DVB. Doesn't specifically cover the Nova-T.

For other setups the first port of call would be the MythTV wiki. See http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Hardware.

Hardware

You can buy a Nova-T from e-buyer and Dabs. At time of writing e-buyer was the cheapest @ £45.89. All new Nova-T's use the Conexant chipset. Many Nova-T guides on the web assume the use of the old Phillips chipset.

The spec of the box is a 933MHz Pentium III with 512MB RAM and onboard sound. Although this is a low spec box it seems to work fine although the is a slight delay on channel changing. I can watch live TV, pause, timeshift, record etc. I think its possible to get away with this low spec due to the fact that I am using a digital card (DVB). I would be inclined treat this as a minimum spec for a Nova-T card and may not be enough for one the the Hauppauge PVR cards.

I also used an NVidia GForce4 MX with TV Out. The NVidia chipset has excellent Linux support. See http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. The GForce4 MX cards have full support for MPEG2 offload. This basically offloads some of the MPEG decoding to the card which is supported by X Windows and the latest NVidia drivers downloaded from the NVidia site.

I use two discs; one for the OS and MythTV software and the other just for the video files. This allows me to configure the video disk with a different file system (xfs) and also upgrade it later without having to migrate the software. Since the disk head that is writing video is not constantly repositioning itself for OS and database activities the playback and recording performance should be more reliable.

Other media such as music, movies and photos I have left on a different server. I have mounted this server as a directory and then set the locations of the media files to point to directories on the mount point. I use a 100Mbps wired LAN because wireless wouldn't be fast enough for real time streaming of video media.

Setting up Fedora

Before installing Fedora read Jarod's HOWTO page on the Initial Setup. Read carefully the section on setting up another file system. You will need to boot with "linux xfs" or "linux jfs" to be able to choose xfs or jfs as file systems at install time.

You can always convert a volume to another file system using mkfs if you already have Fedora installed using:

mkfs -t xfs /dev/hda1

for example.

Now follow Jarod's guide exactly until you come to section 5 Get Your System up to Date. Instead of getting the latest kernel using yum we need to get the latest kernel source and rebuild it to include the Conexant driver module. So skip this section and continue on to Section 10 Get and install capture card driver(s). At this point we need to rebuild the kernel to setup the Conexant drivers to get the card working.

Ignore the section titled "DVB capture cards (Nova-T, Fusion DVB-T, other non-North American HDTV)". It doesn't not appear to have any info regarding Nova-T cards.

Getting the card working

The good news is that the drivers for the Conexant chipset are included with Fedora from build 2.6.12 onwards.

Loading the Kernel Module

The connexant Nova-T drivers are built into the newer stock kernels, but we need to make sure that the Balckbird drivers are not loaded.

Edit two files as follows - comment out any line that has the word blackbird.

/lib/modules/**kernel name**/modules.alias
/lib/modules/**kernel name**/modules.pcimap

where **kernel name** is your current kernel - if you are following Jarods guide you should be able to use $KVER

Add the cx88_dvb to /etc/modprobe.conf as follows: 

alias char-major-81 cx88_dvb

This will load the Nova-T drivers at boot time.

Do a reboot and modprobe should pick up the cards.

Just bear in mind that if yum ever upgrades your kernel there will be a fresh set of modules.*** files to edit.

Nvidia TV Out

THe XOrg.conf will also need to be edited to enable the TVOut on the graphics card. The best thing to do is configure Twinview so you can connect a monitor and a TV for troubleshooting. Consult the driver readme file for setting up Twinview.

Checking the Drivers have Loaded Correctly

To list teh loaded modules run:

lsmod

It should now have cx88 listed as a module. You should also see a new device in /dev called dvb.

If its not there then these things may have gone wrong:

Check the output of dmesg to see if there are any errors associated with the card.

If everything is OK with lsmod and dmesg but there is no /dev/dvb entries then check that the required entries in the udev rules are there as specified on Richie's page.

Setting Permissions on /dev/dvb

The permissions on /dev/dvb are initially set for just root access. In order for the device to be accessible to non root users we need to override the permissions in created by th eudev systm in /etc/udev.

Create a file called: 10-dvb.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/. Since the file starts with 10 it will be read before the default file 50-udev.rules. Add the follwoing line to your new file /etc/udev/rules.d/10-dvb.rules:

KERNEL=="dvb*", PROGRAM=="/etc/udev/scripts/dvb.sh %k", NAME="%c", GROUP="mythtv", MODE="0666"

This changes the ownership group to mythtv and the permissions to -rw-rw-rw. Creating a new file as above prevents this change from being overwritten by an upgrade.

Testing the Card

Once the drivers have loaded then its time to test the card.

Download the linux dvb apps 1.1.0 from the Linux TV project:

http://linuxtv.org/downloads/linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.0.tar.bz2

Extract and build using make. Note: you do not need the drivers from Linux TV since we are using the kernel cx88_dvb kernel module.

Now follow the instructions on Martin Smiths page for tuning and testing the card:

http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/mythdvb.html

Note: that mplayer can also be installed using yum.

When I first ran it mplayer ran with a green screen, although I could hear the sound OK. I had to run mplayer specifying the video out as xv for it to work on my NVidia card e.g.:

dvbstream -o -ps -qam 16 -cr 3_4 600 601 | mplayer -vo xv -

Other postings have reported that it is easier to test it with another application such as http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/.

Once we have reached this stage then we have a working Nova-T card in Fedora and we can move on to install the rest of Myth TV.

Setting up the Nova-T Remote Control

Returning back to Jarod's guide now brings us to the remote control section. The cx88_dvb module has built in drivers for the Nova-T remote control. Fedora Core 4 also comes with lircd which is the Linux IR Control Drivers. This section does not cover what's needed for the Nova-T.

For setting up the remote follow this guide:

http://www.parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu2.php

The guide is for Ubuntu but works just as well for Fedora with the following modifications;

First stop the lircd service if its running:

/sbin/service lircd stop

Ignore the section on getting Lirc - it is already installed on Fedora.

Now follow the instructions until you reach LIRC Config. The following changes need to to made to the instructions:

Edit the file /etc/init.d/lircd. add the parameters specified when you test lircd to the LIRCD_ARGS variable. This ensures that lird is pointing to the correct device for the Nova-T remote.

All of the remaining instructions are OK for Fedora.

Configuring MythTV

Now go back to Jarod's Fedora mythology pages and carry on from section 12 Set up MySQL:

Set the root password where its says "ROOT_PWD" to be blank.

Section 13: Set up MythTV in Jarod's guide is very US focused and Martin Smiths DVB Part 2 guide is not very clear for Nova-T users either. So its now worth transferring to another guide. Follow the instructions on:

http://mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/mythtv/

starting from "Running mythtv-setup".

When doing the full scan you can get the frequency to use from your channel.conf file setup in part 1 of Martin Smith's guide:

grep "BBC ONE" ~/.tzap/channels.conf | cut -f2 -d:

If you have trouble tuning see below.

When you reach the point in this guide when it asks you to run mythfilldatabase then STOP. Before we fill the database with channel listing we want to configure XMLTV properly. See below.

Tuning Problems

Initially full scan failed with "STATUS NO LOCK". No channels at all could be found. In order to fix this I did the following:

Once I had set these values then the scan worked normally and all the Freeview channels were added.

For other tuning problems see Martin Smith's guide part 2.

MythTV 0.19 Latest: 0.19 tuning can now import the channels.conf file. I've not tried it but that's definately worth a go first.

Configuring Icons and XMLTV

XMLTV refers to the channel listings information. Channel icons are also available. To save time configuring this manually for each channel there are some scripts to help us. Follow the instructions on this page:

http://www.parker1.co.uk/mythtv_id.php

You can ignore the instruction to install xmltv. yum will have installed is as part of MythTV Suite.

Note these scripts assume there is no root password on your mysql database. If you have setup a password then the scripts need to be edited to have a -p on the mysql commands. This will then prompt you for a password.

After your xmltv file has been created check that all of the lines have the form:

channel channel4.com

deleting any empty channel entries. Otherwise mythfilldatabase will fail.

Running MythTV for the first time

Now you can go ahead and run the backend using:

mythbackend &

Look in the console for any error messages.

Now populate the database with TV listings using:

mythfilldatabase

This can take a very long time to run by the xmltv section above will reduce the time since quite a few channels will have been cut out.

Once that completes you can run the frontend:

mythfrontend

Again check the console for any error messages. If you see any messages relating to lircd failing with a socket connect then go back and check the lircd installation is pointing to the right event.

At this point MythTV should, finally, fire up and you should be able to watch telly!

Configuring the rest of MythTV

Now you can follow Jarod's guide from Section 14. Configure Automatic Startup to finish off the rest of the installation.

Forums

The following is a list of useful forums for troubleshooting not covered here:

Hauppauge UK Forum - Linux/Third party applications

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/forumdisplay.php?f=67

MythTVtalk.com

http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/