I've been thinking about this project pretty much ever since I replaced our television with a video projector last March. In the meantime, I've just been reading about the matter and thinking about alternative ways of doing it, but yesterday I got on with the job.

Plan: To build a DVB-enabled, Linux and MythTV powered HTPC to act as a DVD player, video recorder, living room entertainment system, and whatever else comes along. In this space, I'll be documenting the process, talking about the gotchas I've ran into, and how I've managed to solve them. Perhaps I'll be asking for a bit of advice as well. The instructions on the web for this are at times quite sparse, often out of date, and occasionally misleading, so hopefully this will help someone. Read on for details...

In September, I bought an Athlon XP 2500+ system with an ASUS A8N7X-VM/400 motherboard. The primary reason I bought that, instead of for example an Athlon64 system, was that I wanted a compact M/B with most things integrated to it, because I was already thinking of building this project on that system. I didn't want to get something totally overpowered for the task, but not something that I couldn't be sure would be up to the task, either. This machine has been running Fedora Core 2 since its installation until about a week ago, when I upgraded it to FC3. It was equipped with a RADEON 9600 PRO card, but in the beginning of this project, I removed that to use the integrated GeForce 4 MX, which is easily good enough for video display, and in fact thanks to NVIDIA's well-optimised drivers, possibly better for that purpose that the ATI, given that we are in a Linux environment.

Yesterday, I bought a budget DVB-T card: TechniSat AirStar 2 TV PCI. I was told it has good reception, and its form factor is one of the smaller cards, which will be good later on when I exchange the case of the PC to a HTPC case. Many of the current crop of DVB-T cards are very high, possibly too high to comfortably fit in a relatively low-profile system. This card is of the latest revision, with an included remote control and IR receiver, which makes the package pretty high value, but a bit worrying considering on Linux it has to be supported by a volunteer effort.

True enough - it turned out that though FC3's default kernel includes the DVB subsystem as modules, it did not include the correct driver for the updated frontend chip (mt352) on the card. Only the earlier revision (mt312) worked out of the box.

Fortunately, this is a problem that can be easily overcome by using the very latest (as of November 2004, anyway) DVB drivers available a the LinuxTV website. Linux kernel module installations have come a long way: it used to be that something like this would require patching, reconfiguring the entire kernel, waiting for the whole kernel compile, and ultimately a bit of anxiety, no matter how used one becomes to the routine, of whether the new kernel would even boot the machine. No more - with FC3, you don't even need the kernel sourcecode. Simply check out the dvb-kernel module, and run make in the build-2.6 subdirectory. The only (small) complication was in deciding how to replace the existing prebuilt modules with the new ones. I decided to simply copy the new ones on top of them. I could have always returned where I started from by reinstalling the kernel RPM. No need to do so - the updated drivers work like a dream.

Comment by ThornyDevil on Sun, 19 Jun 2005 16:17:18:
Thank you for this journal. I couldn't understand why I was having problems with my new AirStar 2 card using KnoppMyth - but now I know! "frontend chip (mt352) on the card. Only the earlier revision (mt312) worked out of the box. "

Comment by Osma on Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:31:44:
Kernels since 2.6.10 (I think) include the mt352 driver by default. These days I have two of the cards in my HTPC, working very nicely together.