Mythbuntu Server Setup

From Mitopian Wiki

First you run the install, which I didn't take notes for so I'll skip over for now...

After installing, the frontend will come up at every boot. Just exit out of it for now. Once you are at your desktop, lets start by setting your IP to a static address.

Contents 1 Setting IP Address 2 System Update 3 Mythbuntu Control Center (MCC) 4 Initial MythBackend Setup 4.1 General 4.1.1 Host Address Backend Setup 4.1.2 Locale Settings 4.1.3 Mythfilldatabase 4.2 Capture Cards 4.3 Video Sources 4.4 Input Connections 4.5 Channel Editor 4.6 Storage Directories 4.7 System Events 5 You're Done!

Setting IP Address

This is rather easy if you're familiar with Linux, but not all are that familiar. You can look through the application menu all you like, but you will be hard pressed to find where to set your IP address. Instead, right-click on the connection icon in the top-right next to the clock, and then go to edit connections. Common sense from there.

Set your IP address to something outside of your networks DHCP scope to avoid potential problems.

System Update

Even if you selected to download and install updates during the install, there will still be a good number of updates to download an install. We might as well start off with the most up-to-date packages, so click the icon in the top-right by the clock and let the system update. If the icon hasn't shown up yet, you can start it manually via the menu tree:

Applications >> System >> Update Manager

Mythbuntu Control Center (MCC)

One of the very nice features of Mythbuntu is it's control center. You will find this in the menu tree:

Applications >> System >> Mythbuntu Control Center

Here you will set many of the base options of your system, and if necessary the control center will install the required packages for you, and usually run a configuration script to setup the package to the most common settings.

Later I will fill in the different options that I am using in the system that I'm currently building.

Initial MythBackend Setup

Before you can setup or connect any frontends, you need to configure your MythTV Backend. To do that, start your MythBackend setup via the menu tree:

Applications >> System >> MythTV Backend Setup

It will tell you that it has to shutdown the backend to run the setup, which is fine.

General

Most of these settings can be left at their defaults. Bellow I will only mention the pages that have items that need to be changed. If there is a page that isn't listed here, I didn't change anything on that page (at least at this time, there are items that may need to be changed later when doing more customized configurations).

Host Address Backend Setup

First things first is we need to set the IP address to the new IP address on the server. The defaults are fine for an all-in-one system, but since ours is a client-server setup, we need to have the real IP address here. Since this is the first and primary backend, you will set both the "Local Backend" IP and "Master Backend" IP to the same. If you add additional backends later for more processing / transcoding power, then you would set the "Local" setting to the IP of the new backend, and the "Master" setting to the IP of this first, primary server.

Leave all the ports to the default unless you really know what you're doing (in which case, why are you reading this???)

Locale Settings

Most of this can be left as default, but you should change the "Channel frequency table" to us-cable unless you are just going to be using OTA signals.

Mythfilldatabase

Check the checkbox so the mythfilldatabase program will automatically run periodically to refresh the guide data.

Capture Cards

A MythTV system, while usable for video and photo storage, online video viewing etc, is all possible without a TV capture card, the whole reason for going with a MythTV system is so you can record... well... TV! Here is where you setup your capture cards so that it knows how to do that recording!

In my case, since I'm using the HDHomeRun tuner, I'll select the obvious choice (which in this case is correct, but I know from previous experience with the Plextor tuner, that the obvious is NOT always correct!) "HDHomeRun DTV Tuner Box".

Since this is a dual tuner, I have to add it once with tuner 0, and then again with tuner 1.

Video Sources

Video Sources is where you get your scheduling/guide data from. This is usually from your SchedulesDirect account. If you're not familiar with it, it's only $20/yr for scheduling data. Very cheap for the only recurring cost you'll run into for your MythTV system other than your cable bill.

Input Connections

This is where you tell your tuner cards what video source they're connected to. For my setup, they are both connected to the same cable source. Sometimes you might have one connected to an OTA antenna, and another connected to DirecTV or something. This is where you would tell them this!

After you tell it which source to use, perform a channel scan.

After the scan, it will tell you what it found, and ask you if you want it to add the findings to your channel lineup.

For testing purposes, I'm going to list what results I have:

• 15 non-conflicting ATSC
• 1 non-conflicting SCTE
• 82 non-conflicting MPEG

Channel Editor

This is where you can edit the channel names and download your channel icons. This doesn't have any effect that I can find on the functionality of the system itself, but it does help with your live-tv browsing etc in knowing what channels are what.

A side note: the default channels don't always get recognized for their icons and sometimes need tweaked a little bit, usually the HD tag or something simple...

Storage Directories

This is where you can now set the directories that you want to use for the different kinds of recordings. You can use any mounted filesystem, including NFS, Samba shares, USB drives, etc.

The default location for these seem to be /var/lib/mythtv/xyz (where xyz = livetv, recordings, video, etc) If you have a specific hard drive you want these to be on, I would suggest having it's mount point be /var/lib/mythtv/

System Events

This is where you can set custom commands to be ran when different system events occur. I personally havn't found a need for these yet, but obviously someone did :)

You're Done!

Ok! Now that wasn't so hard! Your initial backend configuration is now done, just exit the setup, type in your password to let mythbackend startup again, and then hit yes to have Mythfilldatabase run for the initial time. This will run for a while for the first run as it has to download all the schedules for every channel for the next 2 weeks!