With world sporting events as they are (World Cup 2010 and Olympics 2012 on the horizon), we as an IT Department thought it best to come up with a way to show Live TV in school before the rush of requests came. In order to get it to all areas of school without needing an aerial at each point we needed a solution that we could run across the network.
After some research MythTV came to my attention as a server/client method of delivering TV across a LAN. Having a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1300 at home, I knew I at least had something I could start to use without having to invest in a new system.
So, we began with the WinTV card just mentioned, an old Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic Edition X102, 250GB HDD and an installation of XUbuntu and a gnome desktop environment (us Windows boys and our GUI's!). For help on installing Ubuntu Server (I used Karmic version for this project as had used it for Nagios setup - a blog for another time) check here. When installing Ubuntu Server, I also installed LAMP at the same time. This will be useful later on when we install the web based aspect of MythTV to manage, record and view programmes. Once MythTV was installed (again using havetheknowhow.com - Install MythTV) we were ready to try and watch Live TV on the Ubuntu Server. Successfully we did but had a couple of issues, firstly we were only able to get a small range of Freeview channels and after trying many Google searches a couple of things became apparent which I feel I need to mention.
Firstly, the WinTV-HVR-1300 is an old card now and has problems in Linux. After our first scan we got a small band of channels but subsequent searches revealed no channels at all. Unfortunately our aerial was also pointing in the wrong direction so I cannot say with any certainty whether the card was at fault or the aerial was the problem. After we found we'd lost all the channels following our initial success, the Hauppauge Nova-T range of TV cards seemed to be recommended most (and appeared on the MythTV wiki under Hardware) and so purchased the Model 909. This discovery though was not before finding out about the v4l-dvb project at LinuxTV.org, it extends the hardware driver database in linux in case you have a different card that is not being picked up. If hardware isn't the problem however, havetheknowhow.com also has another excellent troubleshooting tutorial "When 'Scan For Channels' finds no channels".
After the install of the new card, channel scanning was a lot better (as with the previous card it seemed to find nothing after our initial scan) and so we got back the few channels we started with. We were able to confirm our aerial was also contributing to the problem when we tried using a freeview box to scan for channels. Once it was pointing in the right direction we had all the channels we should be getting and were ready to move on.
In the next part, now that we are all hopefully up and running watching LiveTV, we will move onto a web based viewer and recordings scheduler that will help form the basis of MythTV being a Media Server also that we can integrate with Sharepoint.
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