KnoppMyth with Leadtek Winfast 2000XP Expert in New Zealand

Introduction:

I had no choice as I already had a WinFast 2000XP Expert. I therefore embarked on getting it set up with KnoppMyth. I relate below my experience in the hope that it will help others (and me if I have a crash!)

My specifications:

I have the following HW:

• Athlon XP 2000 on a ECSK7S5A mobo (SiS chipset) with on-board LAN & sound with 256MB (now upgraded to 512MB).
• 200GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm drive + 20GB secondary drive (legacy)
• Gecube Radeon 9250 video card, 128MB DDR, 8XAGP, TV Out, DVI
• ADMTek 8211 Wireless Card (aka Belkin F5D6001)
• Leadtek TV2000XP Expert, TV Tuner/Video Capture Card + FM Tuner, PCI
• LiteOn? LDW-451S, DVD+-RW/+-R Writer, DVD 12R/4W/4RW, CD 40R/40W/24RW, Internal, IDE

Preliminary things to do:

If you have windows, download a utility that will turn off zoning on your DVD (i.e. make it multizoning). This will not help you in windows as the os itself implements zoning and so do the dvd players. However, when you use Linux, there are no issues with software zone control, except with the hardware zone control in the dvd itself.

RPC protection disabling utilities are widely available. My drive's utility came from http://dhc014.rpc1.org/LtnRPC/

If you do not have a MS Windows on your system, you could try using Wine with the RPC utilities, but I have not tried this and would recommend using MS Windows in preference.

If you already have a Windows installation with channels already set up, it is best to save your channel frequencies and channel specifications. Also make a note of any programs that you regularly record.

Installation:

I installed KnoppMyth R5A16 by downloading it from http://www.mysettopbox.tv/ and installing it with the auto install option. The auto install puts the backend and the frontend on the same machine.

I have a second hard drive on my box. This caused hassles as the /etc/lilo.conf file created during the install has an option at the top that is in error and causes the lilo execution to fail. KnoppMyth will not boot. This is remedied by booting up a linux kernel from CD (The Knoppmyth CD is fine using the manual install option), mounting your root partition, chroot to the mounted partition and run 'lilo'. The offending command in the file is displayed. You can then comment out this line in /etc/lilo using pico (or vi). Run lilo again. This time a reboot should work.

I found that the first time KnoppMyth ran, it did not recognise my tv card. I nevertheless ran the mythtv-setup (it starts automatically).

General

The only things I changed from the default were the:

• TV format (3rd screen) to PAL;
• the VBI format to PAL teletext; and
• frequency table to newzealand.

Capture Cards

Select "New capture card" and ensure that "Standard V4L capture card" is selected. The default input is "Television". When finished, it should have an entry in the capture cards menu "V4L : /dev/video0". Press ESC to return to the menu.

Videosources

Select "(New video source)" and give it a name (like nz). We do not have a download utility entry for NZ XMLTV listings so leave the default North America (DataDirect) in place. Do NOT retrieve Lineups. Change the Channel frequency table to newzealand. Finish. This will now have an entry for the videosource that you just specified. ESC back to the main menu.

Input connections

The only one I am interested in here is the Television entry as I am using my tuner. If you are fiddling with Composite/S-Video inputs, then you will need to adjust the connections for those. Select the Television entry. Change the video source to the source you created in the previous menu. Leave everthing else untouched.

Channel Editor

If you saved your channel settings from Windows, then you can enter them in here. If not, read the hints further down and return to this spot (leaving the settings alone for card and channels (prompts) when entering mythtv-setup the next time round).

Note that channel number (1st screen) is not the frequency number, just your chosen channel number. For me, I chose 1 for TV1, 2 for TV2, etc. I made callsign the same. However, for Prime and Maori, I used their names in the callsigns. Video source needs to be the one you created earlier. TV format should be PAL. On the next screen, you can select the Frequency ID for the channel and any finetuning required (I did not use finetuning). It is generally a good idea to leave hue at the central number or the colours get mucked up. On some channels, the contrast has to be turned right down and the color right up. When you are done with the channels, it is time to do a little tweaking of the drivers.

Video Issues

My X display was not working well on my TV. It also defaulted to the svga driver in XFree86. This meant that the CPU was not using Xv. I therefore tried to change X to use the radeon driver. Unfortunately, I could not get a stable display on the TV with the radeon driver.

I installed the ati-driver-installer-8.14.13 package from ATI's web site?. This fixed the problem in that I got Xv support and I also got a good quality TV display at 800x600 on my TV. It was a truly painless install as it correctly automatically edited my X11 config files.

Hacking

If you manage to get the channels to come up at all, my experience was that the quality of the picture was very poor. The other thing I noticed is that the first time that the mythbackend started after a boot, the tuner starts in NTSC-M mode, causing the backend to die and the frontend to freeze for a while and then to complain miserably.

To solve this, the cx88 modules should be loaded as early as possible. I inserted cx88xx and cx8800 into the /etc/modules file to load it at boot. I also changed the priority of the mythtv-backend process in the init scripts to 98:

To correct the colour and sound problems, I had to download the CVS snapshot of video4linux from http://dl.bytesex.org/cvs-snapshots/ I chose the most recent one: video4linux-20050715-203750.tar.gz They do not seem to keep these snapshots very long so you will have to chance it with whatever is available. By the time you read this, the CVS may have made it into the mainstream kernel so try using the most up to date kernel first.

I unpacked the video4linux source and also installed a kernel. I did not try the stock 2.6.11.11 kernel packaged with KnoppMyth and instead downloaded 2.6.12.2 (as I wanted to insert mppe encryption into ppp for vpn in any case). The video4linux source requires the kernel source to be present. I first compiled the kernel (with all of the video4linux stuff asmodules). I then rebooted and did a make on the video4linux source code and then did a make install and rebooted again. REMEMBER: lilo is your friend!

I found a post that solved a nagging problem with short bursts of static on my sound system at:

Miscellaneous:

I found that I did not need to specify any options for the various cx88xx modules for my Leadtek Winfast 2000XP Expert to work correctly. However, your mileage may vary. See: http://www.spinics.net/lists/vfl/msg14394.html for more information.

My Winfast Expert card was detected as card=5 tuner=44. However, the modules then changed the tuner to 38. This may be due to the card in NZ being designed for PAL systems. If your card remains detected with tuner 44 and it does not work, you may try to configure it as tuner 38. modinfo is your friend!

To get programming information, I use the mr.geek.co.nz as listed in the NZMythConfig wiki and set it up to download an update daily.

Remote Control

For LIRC instructions on the WinFast2000XP? expert, see: http://lists.zerezo.com/video4linux/msg00697.html The problem is that the LIRC interface still uses the cx88xx module, which has undefined keys. These are not passed to the dev/input interface, meaning that many of the useful keys on the remote are broken. To remedy this requires a hack of the v4l source.

The Remote Control with the Winfast Expert is marked Y0400052. Some of its keys work with the vanilla cx88xx modules. However, many of the keys are undefined. I have therefore made a patch to the code in the cx88xx code to make my remote keys work and put in keybindings that work in MythTV.

I am in two minds about using LIRC on top of the hacked cx88xx modules. In the first place, it is easier to just bind the keys straight into the MythTV keys in the module itself. However, doing has made the custom cx88xx modules incompatible with other cx88xx implementations. However, who is to say that the cx88xx keybindings are the correct ones? What about the other undefined keys - how do they get mapped? I have a serious lack of time to fiddle with this so I will continue to use my hacked v4l code.

I am certainly not in the mood to try the kbd remapping of the keyboard with the CX88xx module. It looks very complicated in comparison with the LIRC/v4l hacking options.

Timer - wakeup

Obviously, a computer uses much more power than a VCR. To preserve the power bill at manageable levels and to prevent the computer running all of the time, I decided to implement a timer to automatically shut down the system when it is idle and wake it up again when it it time to record a show.

Instructions for doing so can be found in the WakeupToRecord wiki.

I used the nvram-wakeup option initially. Although my mobo ECS-7S5A is supposedly supported in nvram, I found that the settings did not work. In fact, I discovered that it corrupted my bios :-< despite indicating that my motherboard was supported.I vaguely remember reading someplace that the registers had changed with a bios update that I did. I was therefore faced with using guess-helper with a multitude of reboots. The config file generated seemed to work but then I found my bios was again corrupted. I have now successfully used wakeupclock but it does require tweaking of the scripts in the WakeupToRecord wiki.

After another BIOS update, this time from the overclockers forum for my motherboard everything went well. Previously, I could not get it to do a soft reboot without hanging before post when using DDR memory. Local APIC has been enabled and the memory timings tweaked. Now the wakeup works perfectly.

In my attempts to make the backend do a reboot, I also discovered that it will execute any script for the wakeuptime only once. If the system then fails to reboot, it will tell you in logs that the system is idle and will reboot but the wakeuptime script is not re-executed. This can be solved by restarting the backend (when it will again correctly go through the wakeup scripts once). It is also important to specify a script in check field, even if this is merely 'exit 0'.

Notice

This page is now quite old (2 years + ). The author has moved on to newer hardware and is no longer able to assist others with the above setup. I wish you all the best with your endeavours.