Configuring the MythTV Backend

Now that everything is installed and hopefully working properly, the next step is to configure the MythTV backend. Login to the Gnome desktop as the mythtv user, open a terminal session, and create the recordings directory:

[mythtv@htpc ~]# mkdir /var/lib/mythtv/recordings

Then run  mythtv-setup. For this post, I'm just going to do a basic configuration with just the digital portion of the capture card. I'm not going to do any extensive tweaking, I'll save that until later. I just want to do a basic setup to make sure that the basics are working as expected.

[mythtv@htpc ~]# mythtv-setup

Inside the GUI, I performed the following tasks. First, I had to tell MythTV what type of capture card I had. Since the WinTV-HVR-2250 has two digital tuners, I setup two DVB capture cards. I'm not going to setup the analog tuners for now.

• Capture Cards > (New capture card) 
• Card type: DVB DTV capture card (v3.x)
• DVB device number: /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0
• Finish

• Capture Cards > (New capture card) 
• card type: DVB DTV capture card (v3.x)
• DVB device number: /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0
• Finish

For the next step, you'll need to setup an account in Schedules Direct, which is a service that MythTV uses to get channel and program data for your area. The service costs $25 a year and has a 7 day free trial. You'll need to add at least one lineup that is appropriate for your area and the TV service that you have.

In my case, I have the cheapest Comcast service that is available in the Seattle area, which basically allows me to watch unencrypted local channels over the cable wire plus some additional channels that I don't really care about. I attempted to setup an over the air (OTA) antenna a couple of years ago but found that I couldn't get very good reception for some channels so I bit the bullet and went with the Compcast service because I didn't have the motivation to mess with OTA antennas. I might revisit it at some point in the future.

I should also mention that if you have a more extensive service with a cable or satellite provider, then all of the channels, with the exception of the local channels and maybe some music channels, will be encrypted, so the capture card will not be able to tune into them. I believe the way that people have gotten around this issue is to hook up their HTPC to the cable/satellite box (which unencrypts the signal), and then use an IR blaster to change the channel on the cable/satellite box whenever the channel is changed in MythTV. I've never set this up before, so I can't speak too much about it. I'm sure there's plenty of articles on the Internet that talk about this topic.

Going back to Schedules Direct, I basically created a new lineup for my zip code and selected the "Local Broadcast Listings - Antenna" lineup. Most of the channels that I watch are in the lineup, however, when I did a channel scan using my capture card (later on in this post), there were a number of channels that the capture card picked up that were not listed in Schedules Direct.

• Video Sources > (New Video source)
• Video Source name: (I called mine Seattle Digital. You can name it whatever is appropriate for you)
• North America (SchedulesDirect.org) (Internal)
• User ID: (SchedulesDirect username)>
• Password: (Schedules Direct password)
• Retrieve Lineups
• Data Direct lineup: <select the lineup that you setup in Schedules Direct>
• Finish

Now that MythTV knows about the capture card and the Schedules Direct lineup, the next step is to tie the two together and to scan for channels.

• Input Connections > [DVB: /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0] (DVBInput) -> (None)
• Display name (optional): (I called mine Digital Tuner 1. You can call it whatever you like)
• Video Source: Seattle Digital
• Scan For Channels
• Desired Services: TV
• Scan Type: Full Scan
• Frequency Table: Cable
• Modulation: Cable (QAM-256)
• Next
• Finish
• Next
• Finish

As I mentioned before, the were a number of channels that the capture card picked up which were not listed in my Schedules Direct lineup, but for the most part, the channels that I cared about were there. I'll tweak with the channel list at some point in the future. For now, I'm going to tie the second tuner to the Schedules Direct lineup.

• Input Connections > [DVB: /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0] (DVBInput) -> (None)
• Display name (optiona): Digital Tuner 2
• Video Source: Seattle Digital
• Next
• Finish

And finally, tell MythTV where the recordings should be stored

• Storage Directories > Default > (Add New Directory)
• /var/lib/mythtv/recordings

Exit out of mythtv-setup and run mythfilldatabase, which will pull the listing data from Schedules Direct and put it in the MySQL database. This can take a while to run the first time around.

[mythtv@htpc ~]# mythfilldatabase

Then set mythtvbackend to start at boot and start up the service

[root@htpc ~]# chkconfig mythbackend on
[root@htpc ~]# service mythbackend start

Next up, configuring mythfrontend...