I’ve been a periodic user of Linux for the last 10 years and have experimented with most of the distributions out there. At the current moment, Ubuntu is my personal favorite for ease of use and features. The steps I describe here are pretty standard, but I’m documenting them more in case I have to do this again than for any other reason. Consider it my personal cheat sheet.
- Download the latest MythBuntu installer from http://www.mythbuntu.org/downloads and burn to a CD. I used BitTorrent.
- I went through the Mythbuntu-control-centre settings.
- According to the Mythbuntu instructions, I enabled the auto builds off of the US repository and 0.22-fixes branch. I also turned on the testing PPA, we’ll see how it works out. I had to run sudo apt-get update before the apt-get upgrade would work. During the upgrade, I had to answer a few questions about mythweb and remote frontends. I then set the user to auto-login although I wish I could choose which user logs in automatically. I’d rather have it as my unprivileged mythtv user rather than the semi-privileged (via sudo) user account. I turned on all of the proprietary software options available. For the IR receiver selection, I chose the IR Soundgraph iMon Antec Veris option. See my separate upcoming post on how I got that working.
- Also in MCC, I chose to enable SSH. Once SSH is turned on, you can complete any of these steps over X-forwarding. SSH to the box with a command like ‘ssh -X <user>@mythtv-host’. If you are on a Linux machine or OS X with X11 installed, a new GUI window will load up when you start a graphical program on the remote host.
- For now, I am skipping the Mythtv-setup configuration. At the moment I don’t have any recording devices connected, so Myth is just being used for video playback. In the MythTV Frontend configuration, set the video directory to wherever all your content is stored. For me, this required setting up some samba mounts via the /etc/fstab file. I use user authentication with the username and password stored in an external credentials file. Each /etc/fstab entry looks something like:
//192.168.10.76/tv /mnt/tv_shows smbfs auto,credentials=/root/.credentials,uid=100,mask=000,user 0 0
where the file /root/.credentials has permissions 400 and contains both a “username=<username>” and a “password=<password>” line.
At this point, I have a semi-functioning MythTV installation and can watch videos through MythVideo. I still have to
- Get the remote and LCD screen working (via lirc and LCDproc)
- Grab all the metadata for the video files (via jamu)
- Setup HDHomeRun for Live TV Watching & Recording
- Setup Firewire recording from my Comcast cable box.
- Configure ALSA to play audio through the digital SPDIF output
- Setup backup and system maintenance jobs