Media Center PC

PCQlinux 2007 desktop edition bundles MythTV this time that converts your PC

into a complete media center. MythTV lets you play DVD and CD video, listen to

MP3s and play audio CDs too. Not only this, you can also watch any TV channel

you want to, plus you can even pause the live TV programme while watching and

can go back to where you want to watch it from. Not only this, you can schedule

the recording of your favorite TV programme if you are not at home and watch the

recorded one later. You can even configure MythTV to show important news from

your favorite news site. Plus get your local weather report and play games as

well. For this, all you need is a PC with a good graphics card with TV out,

plenty of hard-disk space, a DVD drive, sound card, an internal TV tuner card

and a TV of course.

To begin with, you need to install the PCQLinux 2007 Desktop edition. Once

installed, boot the machine with second non-Xen kernel “PCQlinux-up

(2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)”and connect the TV cable to your Tuner card. If you have a

DTH (Direct to Home) connection, connect video cable to the Video in of you

tuner card and use composite-to-stereo cable for sound. Now from the X Window,

open a terminal window Start Menu> Accessories, and issue 'lspci -v' command.

This will show lists of video interface and capture cards that are installed in

your machine. In this list check whether kudzu (linux hardware detection

program) has detected your tuner card or not. Then check whether PCQLinux 2007

has created the devices /dev folder using this command:

# ll /dev/video ?

It shows the device list as /dev/video0, /dev/video1, and so on. We used an

internal PC TV tuner card from INTEX worth Rs 1,400. To check whether the card

is working properly, go to Start Menu>Sound and Video and run 'TVtime television

viewer'. This will open TVtime interface, initially a blue screen. In order to

configure it, right click on the blue screen and it will show a set-up menu,

where you have to configure audio and video settings according to your setup.

For example, we were using DTH box and we have connected its video-out to the

tuner card's Video-in using a video A/V cable.

We configured it to take video composite input. So once the setting is

correct, you can see the TV channels on your monitor. You have to do the same

for sound. Note that you can configure both mono or stereo sound as per your

needs.

Configuring remote control



Next step is to configure the remote device, so that you can navigate menus of
MythTV. We used the remote control of a tuner card with a small work around.

Open /etc/modprobe.conf file and add the following line.

alias char-major-61 lirc_gpio

Next, copy appropriate lircd.conf file in place. Configuration files can be

found in /usr/share/doc/lirc-0.7.0/remotes/. We did the following.

# cp /usr/share/doc/lirc-0.7.0/remotes/avermedia/lircd.conf.avermedia98

/etc/lircd.conf

Note: You have to identify the lircd.conf file according to the IR

hardware you are using, else the IR may not work for you.

Configuring MythTV



MythTV requires MySQL to run. So to configure MySQL, issue:

# service mysqld start



#/sbin/chkconfig mysqld on


# mysql -u root mysql


mysql>UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('ROOT_PWD') WHERE user='root';


mysql>FLUSH PRIVILEGES;


mysql> quit


mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.20/database/mc.sql

After this, tune MySQL according to MythTV. In order to do so, open /etc/my.conf

and add the following line under



key_buffer = 16M


table_cache = 128


sort_buffer_size = 2M


myisam_sort_buffer_size = 8M


query_cache_size = 16M

Save this file and restart MySQL service again using the 'service mysqld

restart' command.

Before starting MythTV, you have to configure it with your TV Tuner card and set up the database where MythTV will store its recorded programme information

Now you have to configure the video capture and capture card into your MythTV

setup. For this, go to Start Menu>Sound and Video and start 'Mythtv Setup'

program. This will open the MythTV setup interface. Here first go to General and

click on subsequent Next buttons till you finish. Next go to 'capture card'

option and select 'New capture card'. Here select 'analog v 4l capture card' and

you will see “ video device where it says 'configured to /dev/video0' and press

Finish. Now select 'Video Source' > 'New Video Source' option, give a new name

to it and click on Finish. After this, go to 'input connection', where you will

see the list of input connections that your capture card can support. Select

each one and change the entry 'None' from the selection text box, to the name of

the video source that you have created above.

To configure it's the back-end database of MythTV, where it will record your

TV programs etc, open a terminal window and issue the following command.

# service mythbackend start



# /sbin/chkconfig mythbackend on


# mythfilldatabase


# ln —s /dev/dvd /dev/cdrom

Now MythTV is ready to serve you. All you have to do is to just connect your

TV to your display card's TV out port. Then from Start Menu>Sound and Video and

run Myth TV front end. This will start the MythTV interface. And you can enjoy a

media center environment directly on your television.

Using MythTV



Launch MythTV front end as mentioned above and you would get the following
options: Watch TV, Media Library, Manage Recording, Information Center, Optical

Disk and Utilities/Setup. From first option you can watch live TV. Second option

shows media library like recoded programs, movies and playlist of your favorite

MP3 files. The Manage Recording option lets you schedule recording of your TV

channel and records the programs at specified scheduled time and automatically

records them for you if you are out. And later you can watch them from 'Managed

Library' option. The 'Information Center'gives you updated real-time news feeds;

the 'Optical Disk' section lets you view DVD movies and/or listen to music from

CD.

Myth TV front-end screen, shows options like Watch TV, manage recording, information center, optical disk and utilities/setup

MythTV can emulate some game emulators, but you'll have to install them to

get a functional MythGame. The emulators include x-mame, fce



ultra and snes9x. You can install the required packages via yum as follows.

# yum -y install xmame fceultra snes9x

Once you have downloaded the package, configure MythGame through the MythTV

configuration section (MythTV> Utilities/Setup>Media Settings> Game Settings).

MythGame scans the games and you can launch them by selecting them.

Playing audio/video



PCQLinux 2007 desktop edition also bundles with it Mplayer, a media player that
plays different types of audio and video formats. Installed as default in both

Personal Desktop and Workstation, this player offers a never before feature on

Linux—the ability to play Windows Media including the latest Windows Media 9. In

video formats, Mplayer plays DVD, VCD, AVI, DivX4/5, MPG, WMV, QT and RM. In

audio it plays MP3, WMA and Ogg. To use Mplayer, go to the Start menu>Sound and

Video, and start the player. This opens a graphical interface for you, which has

a video screen and a video player.

Play your DVD or DivX video files using this player, be it in AVI, DivX4/5, MPG, WMV, QT, RM or any other AV format

Right click on the video screen and select the media file or VCD/DVD you want

to play. The video player interface easily allows you to perform common

functions such as play, pause, fast-forward and rewind. Similarly while playing

audio, the player also has an equalizer for fine-tuning.

The player can then be controlled by a combination of keys, which you can use

to change the volume, play, pause, fast-forward, etc. For instance, the keys —

'/' and '*' are used to control volume levels while the right and left arrow

keys are used to fast forward and rewind.