Easy personal video recording for Linux? It’s a myth

I just spent several weeks installing and configuring MythTV, an open source application that gives a computer TiVo-like personal video recorder capabilities. I learned a lot of lessons along the way I’ll share here. The biggest lesson is — don’t do it! Unless you can view the process as an intellectual challenge, spending the money for an actual TiVo will save you dozens of hours you could spend on more pleasurable activities.

First, build MythTV only if you have a spare computer already. If you have to buy new hardware to set up your MythTV appliance, it makes no economic sense, and the TiVo unit is a lot prettier than a white-box mini-tower sitting next to your home entertainment center. According to the project’s hardware requirements, the computer you use should have 256MB of RAM and a video capture card. I used Hauppauge’s $49 WinTV-Go Model 190. It lacks remote control capabilities, however; if you’re planning to put your MythTV to heavy use, consider paying an extra $50 for that feature. I also suggest using a faster CPU than the 600MHz PIII I used.

Second, don’t try MythTV on SuSE. I spent days getting the source and compiling components before taking the recommendation of someone on the mythtv-users mailing list, who suggested sticking with Red Hat or Debian; apparently the developers use the latter.

After trying and failing to install Debian from scratch, I went with Red Hat Linux 9. (Digression: Can someone explain to me how Red Hat got to be the most popular distro in the U.S.? Bland, bland, bland. With Novell’s marketing behind it, SuSE is going to kick Red Hat off its pedestal.) The project developers recommend giving Red Hat Debian-like powers by installing atrpms via the atrpms-kickstart package. Once you’ve installed it, add the line rpm http://apt.physik.fu-berlin.de redhat/9/en/i386 at-testing to the /etc/apt/sources.list file. You can then apt-get install mythtv-suite after making sure the drivers for your video capture card and ALSA sound are working.

For some reason the mythtv-suite install failed to install mythtv-backend on my system. I had to download the RPM for that application and install it separately. It in turn lacked a dependency on xmltv, which I solved by apt-get install xmltv.

With all the software in place, the next step was to set up the back end, using the mythtvsetup application. That went fairly smoothly, until I got an error message saying Zap2it, a TV program listing site, was unable to provide a list of service providers. A search of Google groups advised me to install the latest version, 5.23, of xmltv, which fixed the problem.

The setup procedure directs you to run mythfilldatabase, but just to be on the safe side, run /usr/bin/tv_grab_na --configure first to populate your channel list. When you run mythfilldatabase, walk away and get a snack, because the procedure adds program listings to your database for more than a week’s worth of time for every channel.

Finally my setup was done. I had a working MythTV installation; working, but not working well. The problem was hardware — my old CPU, old video adapter, and old sound card just couldn’t keep up with the demands of real-time video. At this point I could have upgraded my hardware, but at some point you just have to say it isn’t worth it.

You might think at this point I took my own advice and bought a TiVo. Not so. The $149 price tag for a “factory-renewed” unit isn’t bad, but I object to paying $12.95 a month for the required service agreement. Given the small amount of TV I watch, the cost/benefit ratio is way too high.

I had fun struggling with the software and eventually succeeding it getting it to work, but even I got impatient at all the detours I had to take along the road to success. I spent a lot of time, but I learned a lot too. I’d be interesting in hearing from others who’ve tried MythTV or Freevo or one of the lesser-known PVR applications. Beyond the satisfaction of making it work, was it worth it?

LinuxWorld’s Golden Penguin Bowl shines

A highlight of every LinuxWorld is the Golden Penguin Bowl, a trivia contest that pits a team of Nerds against a team of Geeks.

The host, as usual, was Chris DiBona, co-founder of Konstrux Technologies. The Nerds were represented by Linux Terminal Server Project founder Jim McQuillan, Rackspace chief technology evangelist Dirk Elmendorf, and IBM Linux architect Joshua Jensen, while Veritas Software senior Linux technical product manager Douglas Fallstrom, consultant Russell Pavlicek, and Sun Microsystems senior manager Danese Cooper were Geeks. Samba team lead developer Jeremy Allison, journalist Jason Perlow, and RealNetworks Helix community coordinator Rob Lanphier served as judges and operated the computer running the PHP script with the quiz questions.

Most of the questions touched on IT, Linux, and open source topics, but there were a handful of general knowledge items to keep the teams on their toes.

After the Nerds buzzed in on the first four questions and answered them correctly, the Geeks protested they were having trouble with their buzzers. DiBona awarded the Geeks 500 pity points on an ambiguous question.

Neither team answered every question correctly, but the low point may have come when DiBona asked what fuel Voyager I uses to power its thrusters. Cooper tentatively proposed, “Rocket fuel?” Cooper redeemed herself by knowing that the country that signed a million desktop Linux contract with her company in November was China.

One bonus question made the Nerds sing nerd lyrics to the tune of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” making it clear why they work in technology and not entertainment. DiBona chided the audience for laughing at the teams, instructing them to reach under their seats, where they found lyric sheets taped to the bottom so they could sing along.

The Nerds gained points by identifying a photo of Linus in a dunk tank at the recently LinuxConf in Australia, and defining Zeno’s Paradox.

“What is Theora?” stumped both teams, and neither was able to expand the acronyms PVM and MPI. They declined to buzz in on What sport do Fide and USCF oversee?

By the end of round 3 the Nerds were ahead by 20,500 to 15,500. The final round challenged the teams to name as many programs as they could for 500 points each. DiBona entertained the audience by singing while they worked, until the audience begged him to stop. Though both teams came up at least 25 names, the Nerds’ lead was too much to overcome.

Bruce Perens expounds ‘Open Source State of the Union’

“He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!” Like Chicken Man, Bruce Perens seems to turn up wherever Linux, and especially desktop Linux, is being discussed. At LinuxWorld in New York, Perens spent more than 30 minutes telling a small room full of about two dozen members of the press what he thought was happening in the Linux world.

Perens, wearing a blue tie with a Tux pattern and a badge with a streaming LED billboard promoting himself, began with a commercial for his Prentice Hall book series, then launched into his analysis of everyone’s favorite punching bag, SCO Group. Perens discussed the evidence provided so far, then declared, “There is an act of fraud in process — software piracy.” However, he doesn’t believe SCO has committed any crimes that can be proved against them, because the company must have been careful to not have discoverable communications of their real intentions — which, he said, is “a stock-kiting scheme.” Perens doubts whether the suit against IBM will continue now that the company has presented its evidence to the judge, and called SCO’s action against Novell “a nuisance suit.”

Moving on, Perens, the executive director of the Desktop Linux Consortium, predicted 2004 will bring serious desktop deployments. “We have the software that 80% of the world needs,” he said, including browsers and office applications. This year will see improved integration and bug filtering, Perens said, but he thinks we are at least a year away from a stable Linux kernel for laptops because of flaws with ACPI.

Perens outlined his vision for UserLinux, an effort to decouple Linux from large, highly capitalized companies, aimed at letting enterprises add seats without an incremental cost. The proposed distribution is based on Debian, which, he said, with close to 10,000 packages and 1,000 developers, is larger than Red Hat and SuSE. On top of the software “we’re assembling a global support organization” to make UserLinux appealing to a wide audience. Perens still intends to include only GNOME as a window manager in UserLinux, maintaining that it’s confusing for users to have two window managers, and a burden to support departments. KDE will still be available for those who choose to use it, but it will not be an official part of the distribution.

Perens feels the biggest challenge to open source going forward is software patents. In the U.S., 50% to 95% of software patents should not be granted, he said, because they are not inventions and are written extremely broadly. He expects that after SCO suit is over, we’ll see a number of patent lawsuits brought against Linux. Since one American intellectual property organization he cited estimates that it costs $2.5m for each side to fight a patent lawsuit, any such legal action could be crippling.

In closing, the speaker and author noted that “perens” is the Latin word for traveling. It seemed a fitting appellation for the peripatetic pundit.