MediaBox Blog

I finally got around to installing MythTV this weekend. And I must say I was pleased with the result. It's very simple on Ubuntu. Using the following in the console

sudo apt-get install mythtv

was all that was needed, and if you don't have mysql installed already then this will be installed also. The mythtv package installs both the front-end and back-end of mythtv on the same box, which is the way I plan on running my setup for now, but eventually I will be running a front-end only on the TF5 machine and have a dedicated back-end setup elsewhere in the house.

Follow up:

I then went ahead to install the mythtv themes and plugins that are available in the Ubuntu repositories, and you can do this by issuing

sudo apt-get install mythtv-themes mythplugins

Once this was complete I setup the back-end details for the front-end to connect to the local mysql database, which was simple enough and jumped straight into choosing a nice theme. But the first thing I noticed was that nothing fitted correctly on the screen, everything was too big. I did take a look at this article here and done what they suggest, but that didn't seem to work either. I also messed around with the font sizes within the MythTV front end configuration which seems to have no effect. I finally came across the setting 'Fine tune font size' within the Appearance settings. Dropping this value to -30 done the trick and everything seemed to fit correctly.

With the display setup correctly, I moved onto setting up MythGame. I am a big fan of older arcade games, so I wanted to setup xmame with MythGame. Finding the initial roms was simple enough for MythGame. I had configured my rom directory at /usr/share/games/xmame/roms and it picked them up no problem. When actually testing it out, the ROM titles where the filenames rather than the full names, which wasn't ideal for me. The ROM information was not populated into the database with the Ubuntu package of MythGame so I had to populate it myself. The MythTV wiki pointed me here where you will be able to find the latest romdb. It's basically an SQL script that needs to be executed on the mysql host. Something similar to this should do the trick


tar -xzvf romdb-20051116-02.tgz
mysql -D mythconverg -u mythtv -p < romdb-2005-1101-01.sql


Clearing the games database and rescanning was required for the full ROM titles to be displayed, which took considerably longer with the ROMDB in place because MythGame was comparing hashes of each ROM with ones in the database to find a match, but it got there in the end.

Finally I wanted the artwork for the games to appear within the games menu also, for this to work you need to have an image file with the same name as the ROM appear within your configured artwork directory (which was /usr/share/games/xmame/artwork for me). I came across this site and downloaded the flyers artwork pack and extracted it to my artwork folder. Once again I had to rescan the ROMS. Once this was completed I had nice looking games listings from MythGame

My next step was to configure MythMusic, simply adding MP3's to the /var/lib/mythtv/music folder or using the import option was enough to get the music playing within MythMusic, but I also wanted to get projectM visualisations working. For those of you who are familiar with MilkDrop visualisations on WinAmp, then projectM is exactly that, but it works on Linux too. You can find more information on projectM here. Getting projectM to work has not been successful though, using the Ubuntu repository versions and compiling from source fails to get projectM working inside MythMusic. There is a cmake option called USE_FBO when building projectM from source which you can disable. This does make some kind of visualisation appear, but it's far from pretty. The weird thing is that projectM-test and projectM inside Amarok works like a charm, but it crashes in MythMusic, which suggests to me that the issue could be in MythMusic and the way that it implements the libvisual library. There is work ongoing in projectM to reach version 2.0 and a fair bit for this work is on the FBO side of things. So hopefully when 2.0 is released there will be no problem getting it to work with MythMusic.

MythVideo was again something so simple to setup, dropping off video files in the configured video directory (/var/lib/mythtv/videos for me) was all that was needed. I will shortly be looking into the IMDb aspect so that title information and cover art will be displayed. But I have left it at that for now.

So, that's it for now. We have video, music and games all playable from MythTV. Shortly I will cover the LIRC setup for the IR receiver that I am making, so stay tuned.