MythTV on Ubuntu 16.04 with Digital Devices CineCT V6

I was looking forward to the next LTS release of Ubuntu to upgrade my machine. I was forced to run 15.04 because the last LTS did not support my new Haswell based hardware. In the meantime MythTV was upgrade to version 0.28 offering a few new neat features.

Two issues kept me from upgrading my aging installation: It had a few broken parts here and there and I had a new 256GB SSD waiting to be used. The former issues were such that I figured it would be harder and more time consuming trying to fix everything after the upgrade instead of just going with clean install.

Download the Ubuntu ISO from a mirror near you and put it on a USB drive or a DVD. Boot from the thumb drive and kick off the installation. I opted to format my SSD with btrfs. The possibilities to create snapshots seemed interesting, especially for future tinkering and upgrades. So far I have no experience whatsoever with btrfs.

After the finished clean install there’s the first few packages that need to be installed:

sudo apt-get install aptitude

sudo aptitude install mercurial git libproc-processtable-perl ncurses-dev linux-source libcupsimage2-dev

Digital Devices Cine CT V6 DVB-C Tuner Card

The 15.04 approach using media_build_experimental caused a few issues. I found this excellent write-up by Daniel Scheller on github explaining how to compile the required ddbridge module without directly touching the Ubuntu kernel.

# mkdir -p /usr/src/dvbdev && cd /usr/src/dvbdev

# git clone git://linuxtv.org/media_build.git

# git clone https://github.com/herrnst/dddvb-linux-kernel.git

# cd dddvb-linux-kernel # git checkout mediatree/master-ddbridge

Move to the media_build directory and prepare the linux-media tarball:

 # cd ../media_build/linux/
 # make tar DIR=../../dddvb-linux-kernel
   <long list of files scrolls through>
 # make untar
 # cd ..

# make stagingconfig

# make -j9

# make install

after installation you can load the ddbridge module with

modprobe ddbridge

Setting up EPG

aptitude install xmltv

MythTV installation

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mythbuntu/0.28

sudo apt-get update

sudo aptitude install mythtv

The UPC Cablecom channels that are freely available in my region can be found here.

Cleanup

With everything else working it’s time for some cleanup:

aptitude purge yelp eog rhythmbox empathy-common evolution-data-server-common evolution thunderbird unity-webapps-common libreoffice* unity-lens-video unity-lens-photos unity-lens-music 

apt-get autoclean

apt-get autoremove