This is part 2 of my continuing saga of trying to create my own home media server. The first part can be found in the post titled "FreeNAS".
After having given FreeNAS a run I figured it was time for me to give Ubuntu Server 9.10 Karmic Koala (32-bit flavor, thank you very much) and MythTV a spin. FreeNAS was a relatively easy setup. Karmic and MythTV has been everything short of a nightmare. Getting Karmic to install was the easy part. To ease things even more, I installed an awesome program called Webmin. Webmin is a network admin's knight in shining armor. You can find it here. In their own words:
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely. See the standard modules page for a list of all the functions built into Webmin, or check out the screenshots.
At the risk of sounding like I'm raving about a program I will add this: there are frequent updates, tons of administrative modules, it's free, and I couldn't even begin to tell you what the support section is like because I've never needed it - it's one of those awesome programs that simply does what it's supposed to do. Fantastic stuff.
Through Webmin I was able to setup Samba and Windows networking and get my network folders published to my home network in less than 15 minutes. From that point, I uploaded all my music, videos, pictures and what not to the network folders. Network attached storage has never been easier.
I even was able to install Transmission, a BitTorrent add-on that lets me drop a torrent link into one of my network folders and a few minutes later the download auto-magically appears in the networked torrent download folder. Awesome stuff!
Then I installed MythTV, follow this link for more info, and my life suddenly became an odd mixture of heaven and hell.
Again, in their own words:
MythTV is a Free Open Source software digital video recorder (DVR) project distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. It has been under heavy development since 2002, and now contains most features one would expect from a good DVR (and many new ones that you soon won't be able to live without).
There's much more that's not said in that description but we'll address that later.
The initial setup was quite easy:
sudo apt-get install mythtv
The amount of configuration that followed was a nightmare. My shared media resided in folders on a separate drive which meant I had to change all of the settings in MythTV to point to the correct locations. Should have been easy. On the MythTV forums they claim it should be easy. "Should be...." Except there's several places where the changes need to be made and several more where they can be made and even a couple where they might be made if the code had been kept up to date. Do I modify the .config files directly or should I use the frontend interface? How about the backend interface? What about all of them? Well, all of them is what I ended up using. And yet, the settings never seem to stick. For example: one of the plugins is called MythVideo. MythVideo manages all of your movie or video files. MKV is welcome here. So is AVI, DIVX, M4V, M4P, ISO and a whole slew of other formats. Thank the fates above that there's finally a program that speaks all of those formats! Except, in this version there are some problems.
ISOs don't play if you're using the "Storage Groups" but there's no instructions of how NOT to setup the Storage Groups. In other words, I was essentially led down the primrose path to establish Storage Groups (dynamic meta-groups that can include several storage areas) without being informed of the consequences. So, all that work and I couldn't get ISOs of my DVDs to work. That led me off to do research. A week later and I finally understand: get rid of the storage groups and I can play ISOs. So, how do I get rid of these storage groups. Not sure because apparently everyone knew not to set them up or once set up, nobody wanted to get rid of them. So now I'm waiting for the next version to come out which is supposed to resolve this issue. BTW, the current version is 0.22. The next version to come out will be 0.23. Not sure when that's going to happen though.
Ah, yeah, almost forget the MythVideos section. I love it. A movie or video collection manager. Upload your video file to the storage folder and you simply hit the "scan for changes" button. The movie shows up right away in the index. Two more buttons on the movie window allow you to look up information about the movie on IMDB or edit the meta-data to your heart's content. Automatic population of the fields and images related to the movie is awesome! Check out the screen shot:
This is a picture of the frontend manager. Frontend, in this case, being on the Ubuntu computer.
This is a picture from the MythVideo web page on my Windows computer.
They look pretty similar and pretty good. From the webpage, clicking on the title of the video causes it to be played in your web browser in awesome glory and sound! You can't control the video though. It's a play or not play affair. Unless you're watching from a Mac or an iPod Touch. Their embedded players have controls that will show up. Haven't tried my PS3 yet but I'm gonna get there. Have to re-terminate my LAN cables to the PS3....
So.... What do I mean by heaven and hell? The heaven part is when MythTV works. The hell part is just getting it TO work. Installation of my TV tuner card is a prime example. I bought a Hauppauge HVR-1600 TV tuner card. A classic stand-by card that always works. Except under Linux. The drivers aren't really up to snuff yet. That meant I had to build my own from several different locations. Me. Build my own. From different locations. RRRRIIIIGGGHHHHTTTTT. What a joke that was. Three days in the making but I finally got it done. And the card still didn't work. I had to re-arrange card slots and re-install MythTV a few times to get it all done. And still, it doesn't work because I have Verizon FIOS which requires I use a cable TV box. And IR Blaster support for FIOS in MythTV doesn't exist yet. I'm screwed. Oh, yeah, MythTV used to stream TV over the network but that plugin broke with the introduction of version 0.20.... Go figure.
For the moment, MythTV doesn't do it for me but I'm not ready to dump the Ubuntu install yet because it's working so damn well. I guess I just need to keep looking for other Media Center possibilities.
