DVR Project

I set up a PVR! I think. I’m still not clear on the difference between a PVR and a DVR. And I’m able to take those recordings wherever I want, because it’s mine!

I more or less followed along with the wonderful guide by Curtis Gedak here: https://gedakc.users.sourceforge.net/display-doc.php?name=pvr-rpi-mythtv-fe-be

My hardware and costs, in early 2024

• I used the raspberry pi 4 max kit 4GB from canakit that Curtis Gedak linked there (the fanless bit sounded nice, raspberry pi 5 was more expensive.) Cost to me: 144.95, +26.95 shipping, +16.33 tax (I’m in California) for a total of $188.23. Pricier than I would have liked, but I didn’t want to have to think about it.
• I already had a spare keyboard lying around, but I may dig out an old wireless keyboard and see if it still works in order to use it more often. Cost to me: 0, but that’s because I’m using what I already had.
• Hard drive: 2TB cheap-ish WD easystore from best buy. Cost to me: $69.99 + 5.42 sales tax for a total of $75.41. (It was on sale)
• j5create Powered USB hub. This ended up being a surprise purchase, and was pricier than I would have liked because Best Buy in person had a limited selection, and I was trying to get one to avoid some of these problems with backpowering (which I’m not certain I did avoid this). But the raspberry pi wasn’t able to power the hard drive on its own, and an externally powered hard drive would have been more expensive even if I’d returned the 1TB drive. Cost to me: $39.99 + unknown tax because I was picking up some other things for the household while I was there. Let’s say a total of $42.89?
• Surge protector/power strip my husband already had lying around. Cost to me: $0.
• Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD dual USB tuner for ATSC/QAM. This is going to be literally only a Jeopardy! box. I might record some other things opportunistically, but I didn’t need all the flexibility of a HDHomeRun box. Cost to me: $69.90 + 10.59 shipping + 0 sales tax (… am I going to need to remember this for next year’s taxes?) for a total of $80.49
• Antenna. I already had a selection available to me from previously just hooking it straight up to the television. Tuning’s a pain… but cost to me, $0.

Total cost to me, not including previously owned stuff: $387.02. Which is more than I thought, when I was just putting it together. In my head this project was about $250. Rounding errors, the USB hub, shipping, and taxes added up. I need to keep a better eye on this for future projects. Hey, at least writing this out is keeping me honest?

Yes, I could have just bought a Tablo box for like $125, but I’m paying to have fun at this point, I guess. And to keep control of my recordings. I’m sure there’s ways to get it out of the Tablo box, but… I wanted to have fun.

The actual setup

Again, I’m mostly following along with the tutorial I lined at the beginning, but here are some notes about what I did differently.

I didn’t end up using the spare ethernet cable I had around - wifi was working just fine. 5GHz. 802.11ac.

I initially started by skipping step A, “Download OS and Install on microSD card”, and just used the built-in SD card and picked 64B os lite. I ended up re-doing it with the latest raspberry pi version (which is now, at the time of this writing, bookworm), with the GUI method and the Raspberry Pi imager, because some combination of the kodi-mythtv-pvr and kodi and mythtv backend versions wasn’t working, and mythfrontend was being super choppy. But the backend was working just fine on bullseye as long as I was viewing it from another computer.

The SD card reader that came in the CanaKit kit was cool, but also was a pain to get the SD card in and out.

Step B, assemble hardware, also had the powered USB hub in between the hard drive and the raspberry pi. I think I need to always power up the pi before the hard drive? Not certain, but there was one spot where I was away from any monitor and it seemed to just be constantly rebooting. Right now they’re both on the same power strip, and I’ll turn it on and off together.

Step C was mostly skipped on the second go-round because I set it up in the imager image; but I did set it up to auto login later. Also, I’m doing audio over HDMI, so I didn’t touch the alsamixer stuff.

I set the static IP to 192.168.1.116 (because that was what it was assigned to anyways when I set it up) inside my router settings, bypassing most of step D.

Step E, install. I used the following two forum threads to figure out how to compile the deb package instead of figuring out how to navigate orangedox:

https://forum.mythtv.org/viewtopic.php?t=4799 (for the first go-round)

https://forum.mythtv.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=5529 (for the second go-round)

In both cases, I used fixes/34 instead of fixes/33, since that’s stable since then if I’m reading things correctly.

On the first go-round I skipped step F, Install Kodi and Other Software, then came back to it later because I ended up moving it near the TV to be able to plug in. I ran into issues on bullseye, where no channels would show up but I could still view recordings, so I eventually tried again on a clean install on bookworm for the second go-round. I also didn’t enable the support for mounting.

I skipped all of step G, configure MCE remote control support, but we’ll see if I come back to this.

Step H, raspberry pi is moving /boot to /boot/firmware, so I modified locally pi-SDtoHD-helper.sh to say /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt instead of /boot/cmdline.txt

Step I, MythTV-Setup for HDHR with OTA EIT EPG, was a little different. I used it on the first go-round, but mythtv-setup is deprecated, and it struggled on the second go-round to find the database, so I used the web interface instead: http://localhost:6744/setupwizard Also, the card type was obviously different: the capture cards I use need the option “DVB-T/S/C, ATSC or ISDB-T”. I skipped ./run_mythfrontend.sh, until I was trying an alternative to kodi.

I skipped all of optional step J, Change to Schedules Direct EPG via XMLTV.

I only did step L, Configure Kodi, on the second go-round. On my windows machines, I installed Kodi, and the only difference there is that instead of installing the mythtv add on from the command line, I installed it from the add-ons list. Also, Kodi’s power options other than “exit” are for the entire system, even on Windows, so I rebooted my computer by accident when I only meant to restart Kodi.

https://kodi.tv/download/windows/ https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:MythTV_PVR_Client

Also, I had no sound at first; Kodi defaulted to headphones not HDMI in its audio settings.

Some useful notes for the future:

• sudo shutdown -h now
• sudo systemctl stop mythtv-backend
• don’t break debian
• Scanning for new channels is under input connections; pick either input.
• If I can’t install something with apt because I broke debian and the versions are now mismatched, I can specify a version in order to force a downgrade. from that link: libvpx1 : Breaks: libvpx1:i386 (!= 1.3.0-2) but 1.2.0-2 is installed -> sudo apt-get install -f libvpx1=1.3.0-2

Some future improvements:

• Remove the power off options in Kodi (something about other skins?)
• Keep debugging the antenna signal, and possibly set up an outdoor antenna. The support at Antennas Direct was super helpful when I filled out their contact form. But I also never got wscan or another similar thing working on the raspberry pi - my current antenna placement is using the TV’s built in manual channel tuning.
• Actually figure out how to back up the database for mythtv - I couldn’t get it to work and just configured things from scratch on the second go-round since there wasn’t much on there anyways.