Reincarnated MythTV backend

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

This is just a FYI, in case anyone is interested.

My old MythTV backend[1] crumbled due to hardware failures as I was doing some maintenace on it
(trying to replace a couple of failed hard drives - how ironic).
Long story short, I ended up replacing motherboard (including cpu and memory), system hard drive and the data hard drives (mirror).
I reused the rest, including the PVR-500 tuner card.
The new machine got it's os upgraded a bit; it now runs FreeBSD 6.4-stable instead of 6.2-stable:
tingo at kg-fil$ uname -a
FreeBSD kg-fil.kg4.no 6.4-STABLE FreeBSD 6.4-STABLE #0: Sat Aug 13 17:30:21 CEST 2011     root at kg-fil.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/FIL62  amd64

The specifications for the reincarnated machine is here[2]. The integrated NIC on the new motherboard didn't work with the old version of FreeBSD
(neither 6.2 nor 6.4 detected the card), and other cards I had which were using the re(4) or rl(4) driver didn't work; in the end I used a 3Com 3C905B-TX card.

Points to note:
- I use analog cable with a Hauppauge PVR-500 card
- I use this driver[4] for the PVR-500 card. It compiles without trouble under FreeBSD 6.4 (but you need to make patch-iicbb and make a new kernel)
- I am running an old version of MythTV (0.20 - mythbackend version: 0.20.20060828-3 www.mythtv.org)
the reasons for this is that I have been unable (even with help from port maintainers and other knowledgeable people on this list) to get newer
versions (0.24, 0.23 and perhaps 0.22 as well) of MythTV to work with my PVR-500 card.
- I am running an old version of FreeBSD (6.4-stable now, before it was running 6.2-stable) as the os on this machine,
mainly because this was the "going version" back in 2006 when the machine was set up, and I didn't dare upgrade the os too much when using an old ports tree.
Eventually I will test if the the old version of MythTV, drivers, etc will work on FreeBSD 8.x-stable.
- my MythTV frontend is a Mac mini G4[3] running OS X.
- this setup is capable of playing SD, but not HD content. The frontend is too slow to play HD content. I haven't tested if the upgraded backend is capable of HD playback.

References:
1) http://sites.google.com/site/tingox/ga-k8nf-9
2) http://sites.google.com/site/tingox/asrock_m3a_ucc
3) http://sites.google.com/site/tingox/mini_g4
4) http://www.muc.de/~ag/pvrxxx-20080409_1.tgz
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen