MythTV Rebuild COMPLETE!

This weekend I also took a crack at rebuilding the MythTV, largely due to the fact that it was working so well that I didn’t bother to keep the OS up to date and the repositories that feed the custom bits needed by Myth went away. With the recent sunsetting of our beloved Zap2It Labs DataDirect feed, a MythTV upgrade was required anyway to get support for the new data provider so the timing was pretty good.

I decided to use a new pre-packaged Linux distribution named MythDora which touted a very simple installation and the support of Jarod Wilson, the author of one of the best all encompassing tutorials on setting up MythTV.

This system is based on Fedora Core 6 and set up to add a GUI installer to configure the fiddly bits of MythTV that can cause the most headache. Never one to make it easy on myself, I elected to also convert my system to high-def output by way of a new nVidia 6200 graphics card.

That complicated things just enough that I never got to see the cool GUI installer. It appears that a nVidia driver inconsistency relegated me and my new graphics card to the text based installer, but that option served its purpose just fine.

The installation went extremely smoothly, automatic partitioning set up LVM for me without a blip, and support for my three tuners was detected as part of this installation and configuration made without headache. It even had a dialog for me to configure which remote I wanted to use. Smooth!

The only remaining things that I had to overcome were: setting up my namespace in my resolv.conf to ensure my frontend would talk to my server correctly, turning on digital support for my sound card (a simple checkbox, once you find it), and setting up MythTV for my channel listings and tuner cards.

The biggest headache, predictably, was setting up my graphics card to use my 55″ plasma. I made several attempts at modifying my xorg.conf to support this myself but I was hesitant because an improper modeline has been known to damage the TV itself. I solicited the help of the MythDora forums, and the next morning I woke up to find someone else that had a similar model Samsung TV that used the same factory settings as my Hitachi and a few clicks of the mouse later I had my MythTV interface glittering into life in dazzling 720p resolution.

The total mean time to rebuild was a total of around three hours. That’s including the fiddling with my video card, which is a marked improvement from the weekend that I spent last time. I can’t recommend MythDora more as a MythTV solution, and I hear they’re working on a simple upgrade process for future releases. I’m eager to see that, if you have any further questions post up a comment and I’ll see if I can answer them.