Schlagwort-Archiv: HTPC

Mythbuntu 14.04.1 on Haswell Machine

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Installing Mythbuntu 14.04.1 on my new Haswell i7 / Intel DH87RL box proved impossible due to an annoying audio bug that prevented audio out over HDMI. For this reason I eventually opted to use Ubuntu 14.10 instead of Mythbuntu. Read the installation notes here.

This guide is by no means complete!

For the sake of completness here are my notes for Mythbuntu 14.04.1 with the things that worked.

Individual Installation Steps:

Digital Devices Cine CT V6 DVB-C Card

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yavdr/main
sudo aptitude install dddvb-dkms

Running MythTV dual headed

As before I run MythTV on my TV set in the living room and have a monitor connected in the Office. Mythfrontend should automatically launch on the TV screen. The monitor is used to display the Linux Desktop.

The Nvidia control panel of the proprietary driver made this very easy. I was in for some fiddling with the Intel graphics. It turns out that this was much easier than I thought. On a

sudo xrandr --output HDMI1 --auto --output HDMI3 --auto --right-of HDMI1

Where HDMI1 is the DVI connector on the DH87RL board and HDMI3 is the HDMI port. HDMI2 would be the display port connector.
This solution is only temporary and lost on relaunch of X. To make it permanent the configuration needs to be written to Xorg.conf. I did not complete the installation to this point as an audio bug prevented me from using Mythbuntu.

Video acceleration VAAPI

Either go the route of installing the standard drivers:

sudo aptitude install libva1 i965-va-driver libva-intel-vaapi-driver vainfo

See here for more info: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VAAPI#Configure_MythTV_for_VAAPI

Or Use the

Intel Graphics Installer

The Intel Graphics Installer will keep your system up to date with the latest drivers.

https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads

Run the following to install:

sudo aptitude install libc6 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libpackagekit-glib2-16 libpolkit-gobject-1-0 libsoup-gnome2.4-1 libsoup2.4-1 ttf-ancient-fonts aptdaemon libproxy1-plugin-webkit

wget --no-check-certificate https://download.01.org/gfx/RPM-GPG-KEY-ilg -O - |  sudo apt-key add -
wget --no-check-certificate https://download.01.org/gfx/RPM-GPG-KEY-ilg-2 -O - | sudo apt-key add -

sudo dpkg -I /home/tv/Downloads/intel-linux-graphics-installer_1.0.7-0intel1_amd64.deb
 The following NEW packages will be installed:
 gir1.2-packagekitglib-1.0{a} libpackagekit-glib2-16 libproxy1-plugin-webkit python3-aptdaemon.pkcompat{a} 
 ttf-ancient-fonts

Running the installer installed the following:

Added:
build-essential:amd64 (11.6ubuntu6)
debhelper:all (9.20131227ubuntu1)
dh-apparmor:all (2.8.95~2430-0ubuntu5.1)
dpkg-dev:all (1.17.5ubuntu5.3)
g++-4.8:amd64 (4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
g++:amd64 (4:4.8.2-1ubuntu6)
i915-3.16-3.13-dkms:all (1)
intel-gpu-tools:amd64 (1.8-1)
libalgorithm-diff-perl:all (1.19.02-3)
libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl:amd64 (0.04-2build4)
libalgorithm-merge-perl:all (0.08-2)
libgles1-mesa:amd64 (10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libgles2-mesa:amd64 (10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libllvm3.5:amd64 (1:3.5~svn201651-1ubuntu1)
libmail-sendmail-perl:all (0.79.16-1)
libosmesa6:amd64 (10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libstdc++-4.8-dev:amd64 (4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
libsys-hostname-long-perl:all (1.4-3)
libva-egl1:amd64 (1.4.0-0intel1)
libva-tpi1:amd64 (1.4.0-0intel1)
po-debconf:all (1.0.16+nmu2ubuntu1)
va-driver-all:amd64 (1.4.0-0intel1)
vdpau-va-driver:amd64 (0.7.3-2ubuntu1.2)

Upgraded:
i965-va-driver:amd64 (from 1.3.0-1ubuntu1 to 1.4.0-0intel1)
libegl1-mesa-drivers:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libegl1-mesa:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libgbm1:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libglapi-mesa:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libopenvg1-mesa:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libva-drm1:amd64 (from 1.3.0-2 to 1.4.0-0intel1)
libva-glx1:amd64 (from 1.3.0-2 to 1.4.0-0intel1)
libva-wayland1:amd64 (from 1.3.0-2 to 1.4.0-0intel1)
libva-x11-1:amd64 (from 1.3.0-2 to 1.4.0-0intel1)
libva1:amd64 (from 1.3.0-2 to 1.4.0-0intel1)
libwayland-egl1-mesa:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
libxatracker2:amd64 (from 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 to 10.3.0-0ubuntu2intel1)
vainfo:amd64 (from 1.3.0-2 to 1.4.0-0intel1)
xserver-xorg-video-intel:amd64 (from 2:2.99.910-0ubuntu1.3 to 2:2.99.911-0intel1)

Downgraded:
libdrm-intel1:amd64 (from 2.4.56-1~ubuntu1 to 2.4.56-1)
libdrm-nouveau2:amd64 (from 2.4.56-1~ubuntu1 to 2.4.56-1)
libdrm-radeon1:amd64 (from 2.4.56-1~ubuntu1 to 2.4.56-1)
libdrm2:amd64 (from 2.4.56-1~ubuntu1 to 2.4.56-1)

Audio

I only get very jaggy audio out over the hdmi connection to my TV. I’ll have to check whether this is due to the cable, TV or the output itself. Interestingly the audio works fine on the displayport out connected to the monitor.

To easily select audio devices and output formats use the pulse audio volume control.

sudo aptitude install pavucontrol

List all audio devices with

aplay -L

Test audio with the following

cat /dev/urandom | aplay


cat /dev/urandom | aplay -D hw:0,3 ## Where 0,3 is your hardware's coordinates

There may be a possibility to upgrade the sound stack:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProcedure

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/UpgradingAlsa/DKMS

Unfortunately I found out that Mythbuntu 14.04.1 is plagued by an annoying bug that prevents audio over HDMI. The are reports that upgrading the sound subsystem solves this issue but I decided not doing this and using Ubuntu 14.10 instead.

Installation Notes for MythTV on Ubuntu 14.10

Haswell MythTV Server for 2015

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After several years of running my MSI Speedster based MythTV box I decided it was time for an upgrade. Not because the machine failed to handle its duties but because I was simply in the mood of building something new. I have to be clear that from a performance perspective, the Core2Duo Merom chip in the old machine was still fast enough for running MythTV. With the addition of VDPAU video decoding on a dedicated Nvidia card processor usage stayed low even during HD playback.

What has changed in the meantime

Intel’s integrated graphics solution (in my case the HD4600) has greatly improved since the days of the i945 chipset present on the old board. The latter was basically unusable for anything but the most basic of tasks. No dual head, no HDMI sound, no video acceleration. All of the above have been addressed making a dedicated card unnecessary. Not only will this save power but also lower cooling requirements.

Thanks to VAAPI Intel chips can now also do video decoding of the most popular formats in hardware. Haswell can currently do the following:

  • MPEG2 decode
  • MPEG2 encode
  • H.264/AVC decode
  • VC-1 decode
  • H.264/AVC encode
  • JPEG/MJPEG
  • Video Post Processing

Power usage is now down from 78 watts at idle to a mere 25 watts. This should save me about 60 bucks in power bills a year. Not exactly enough to justify the investment but a nice side effect.

Hardware Changes

Processor

From a sheer power perspective a cheapish i3 would certainly be sufficient. But I wanted to have extra horsepower for the future, possibly also running VMware ESXi and so I went with a Haswell 4770S. 4 Cores, Hyperthreading, a low TDP of 65W and a full feature set for virtualization to IGP. When idling the modern processors use no more power than their lower spec cousins.

Mainboard

C’t magazine published an article about a low power (10W) Haswell build. This was inspiration for me and so I also chose to use the Intel DG87RL board even though intel decided to move out of the mainboard business. Aside from using little power, the mainboard also offers all the features I was hoping for:

DVI, Displayport and HDMI outputs, USB3 and a mSata slot and no legacy interfaces.

Intel DH87RL Motherboard

RAM

I chose a single 8GB Kingston Value DDR3 stick.

SSD

Samsung EVO 840 mSATA SSD

Samsung EVO 840 mSATA SSD

Given the Mainboard already contains a mSATA slot I bought a Samsung EVO 840 120GB disk.

Power Supply

My current Corsair PSU still works but does not run with a Haswell build for it does not support the Haswell C7 sleep states. Corsair described the problem like this:

According to Intel’s presentation at IDF, the new Haswell processors enter a sleep state called C7 that can drop processor power usage as low as 0.05A. Even if the sleeping CPU is the only load on the +12V rail, most power supplies can handle a load this low. The potential problem comes up when there is still a substantial load on the power supply’s non-primary rails (the +3.3V and +5V). If the load on these non-primary rails are above a certain threshold (which varies by PSU), the +12V can go out of spec (voltages greater than +12.6V). If the +12V is out of spec when the motherboard comes out of the sleep state, the PSU’s protection may prevent the PSU from running and will cause the power supply to „latch off“. This will require the user to cycle the power on their power supply using the power switch on the back of the unit.

This forced me to also get a new PSU. Maybe a good idea as the Corsair now has quite a few hours on its clock. I opted for a Seasonic Platinum P460. The P400 would have been the better option but was out of stock. I comes with a fully modular cable harness. The only problem I have is a clearly audible hiss from the PSU. It is a fully passive unit relying on convection and airflow within the case to stay cool. Because my Antec P180 (or the newer P183 variant) use a separate chamber for disks and PSU that is set apart from the rest of the case I need to include a fan in this chamber. in the past the PSU fan of the Corsair PSU was responsible for the airflow across the disks and PSU. With the new passively cooled Seasonic P460 I have a need for a case fan in the bottom.

Case Fans

I chose the Noctua Nf-s12a Uln, a 120mm low noise fan that comes already equipped with anti vibration pads and runs between 600 ad 800 rpm.

Software Installation Notes

Read here all my notes

Updates to the build

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After the introduction of Windows 7 the wish for an update got larger. Installation of Windows 7 Professional proved easy enough, however a few quirks remained:

  • The web interface for scheduling recordings does no longer work as its developer started working for Microsoft and no longer has time to update Webguide.
  • ArcSoft Total Media Theater needs an update to work under Windows 7. The update is not free.
  • The Philips Remote no longer works correctly. Only the Media Center functions run as expected, but the entire functionality regarding music and the 2-way communication of titles, artists, albums et al on the display are now defunct. Philips will not release updates for Windows 7 compatibility.

Playing games was not on the original agenda when planning this particular HTPC, however things have changed a bit. MS Flight Simulator was what brought up the need for stronger graphics. ATI had just released its second version of the Radeon HD 5770. New to the envelope was a new cooler design. It first seemed like a step backwards from the „video tape“ enclosure of the first cooler but Anandtech reviewed the new cooler and actually found it to be better than the original.

The OrigenAE case does not offer a lot in terms of depth for todays high end gpus. The Radeon just barely fit. Make sure to attach the power connector before inserting the card in its slot. The GeForce 9400 chip runs much cooler when the radeon is in place. That was to be expected. Given the fact that the 5770 is very efficient when idle, I would assume that the system actually uses less power when idle now than without a dedicated graphics card in place. I would need to measure that though.

Additional disk space

After about a year of usage We found that the storage system was getting a bit low on space. A fourth disk was added to the HTPC for backup purposes. The 2TB Western Digital WD20EARS drive was mounted on top of the bluray drive. OrigenAE allows for installation of a fourth disk in that spot even tough it certainly is one of the hotspots of the case being far away from any cooling air. SMART info shows the disk runs approx 5 degrees Celsius hotter (about 48-50°C) than the drives in the cage next to the fan.

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Putting it Together – The Build

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Putting it all together is fairly straightforward. We only had to fight a few minor quirks.

I opted for installing the Motherboard first. Despite being a full ATX case the OrigenAE case is still rather cramped. You do notice that once you start installing components. Installing the motherboard works well using a magnetic screwdriver. Putting the Scythe Ninja cooler on top of the CPU proved to be more tricky because of the push pin system. You have almost no space to move with your fingers. So I’d recommend anyone installing the Ninja prior to installing the motherboard in the case.

The combination of the GA7AUM-DS2H Gigabyte board, the OrigenAE S16V and the Ninja makes the choice for an optical drive rather easy. You cannot use a drive with a depth greater than 170mm. I also makes sense to use angled SATA cables and angled SATA power connectors on the optical drive. You can see that fairly well on the pic here how cramped everything is in that setup. Given that the space behind the optical drive is so limited, there is no other way of mounting the CPU fan on the side blowing towards the PSU fan. As I said before, the CPU itself would not really need the fan but the Nvidia chipset is greatful for a bit of airflow. Temperatures drop significantly even tough the fan doesn’t really blow at its cooler directly. One could also stick on a Scythe 40mm fan to the northbridge heatsink directly. But these tiny fans have a tendency to get filled with dust and stop working. So wherever possible I try to avoid them in my builds.

I think installing a 3rd party heatsink on the chipset such as a Thermalright HR-05 would make the CPU fan unnecessary.

Cables from the PSU that are not needed can easily be tucked away between the case wall and the optical drive. This is one spot where there is sort of too much room. Certainly helpful if you don’t have a PSU with modular cables. Currently we have a Zalman fanmate installed to help us find the optimal speed for the CPU fan. I hope during this summer we’ll find out how much airflow is really needed so we can install a fxed resistor or a lower speed fan. One can see that Fanmate cable fairly well it’s not tucked away with cable ties and the like but just thrown in really.

The OrigenAE case comes with some rather large holes with rubber gommets for the 80mm fans on the back. Somebody looking for a quiet system ought to replace the stock fans immediately. They are certainly not bad but just not quiet by our standards. The OrigenAE rubber gommets are rather brittle. We installed the decoupling pieces provided by ichbinleise.ch with the fan leaving the original gommets in place. Otherwirse the holes would have been too large most likely.

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Software

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Contrary to me my friend wanted to use Windows at the base of his HTPC. Essentially this left us with two options: The open source MediaPortal or Vistas Media Center. While undisputedly having fewer features the latter promised to be simpler to set up, use and maintain.

One of the features I love about MythTV is that you can always hit the record button on the remote when watching a show and it will record the entire buffer which means you end up with a recording that contains everything since you started watching that particular channel. Even in the Windows 7 beta you still cannot do that.

The editions

Media Center only comes bundled with the Home Premium and the Ultimate edition. The price difference for the OEM version is only marginal and we might end up being lucky to have one of the features that only Vista Ultimate provides. Especially Remote Desktop and Complete PC Backup and Restore come to mind.

comparison chart
SOURCE WIKIPEDIA.ORG HOME PREMIUM ULTIMATE
Availability Retail & OEM Licensing Retail & OEM Licensing
Running application limit Unlimited Unlimited
Desktop Window Manager Yes Yes
Windows Aero Yes Yes
Windows Movie Maker Yes Yes
Windows Media Center Yes Yes
Premium games Yes Yes
Joining Windows Server domains No Yes
Remote Desktop Host No Yes
Group Policy No Yes
BitLocker No Yes
MUI Language Packs No Yes
Windows Ultimate Extras No Yes
Complete PC Backup and Restore No Yes

Because some of the codecs and add on apps are still only available in a 32bit version, we dropped 64bit support and some 500MB RAM in favour of better support. In a years time things may look different though.

Bluray support

Bluray support for Windows comes in two flavours: Cyberlinks PowerDVD Ultra and ArcSofts Total Media Theater. But only the latter offered decent Media Center integration. PowerDVD places a link in Media Center but launches an external program. Not quite what you expect from a $100.- software package. This has changed very recently with the release of PowerDVD 9 that adds a native UI for Media Center. I guess the two are on par again…

TotalMedia Theater also allows you to reencode the new lossless audio formats on the fly to be outputted via S/P DIF; nice if you don’t have the latest receiver yet.

Interestingly ArcSoft only delivered a boxed version and did not have a download version in its online shop. A bit sad if you want to immediately use what you just bought. I guess we are slaves of modern times already.

In order to create backups of the Bluray titles you own, we used Slysofts AnyDVD HD. At the time they offered AnyDVD HD with lifetime free updates. This is unfortunately no longer the case.

Music

We had the option of using two music players. Either Windows Media Player that is tightly integrated with Media Center or Apples iTunes. The latter even seemed to be nicer to use than WMP. Integration to Media Center is not so important as you generally don’t want to turn on your TV or worse yet, the projector to select a track. So we needed another solution for that anyways which came in the form of the Philips 7500 universal remote.

Using apps such as MusicBridge or MCETunes allow you to sync your iTunes Library to WMP. Get the best of both worlds.

Plugins

There’s a few must have’s in my opinion to extend the functionality of Media Center. Most of those Plugins are free.

A bunch of them are listed on these sites:

 

Webguide (free)

This is pretty much similar to mythweb, offering a nice and polished web interface to schedule you recordings and much more. You can even watch streams from your machines recordings. It installs a web server along the way.

MyMovies

Media Centers own Video „Plugin“ is not very powerful. MyMovies does what MythVideo does and much more still. Along the way it installs a SQL database server. It is free but some features require unlocking. You earn points by submitting metadata about DVDs and the like. Gather enough points and you can unlock more features.

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