When it dawned on me that when I move to California in September, I won't be able to take my Time Warner DVR with me, I decided to cut the commercial teather and build my own dvr. Using the afore-linked HOWTO to setup MythTV I was probably able to save myself a ton of heartache, but the process has not been entirely smooth. In fact, until I saw this message on the users list yesterday, there was a good 10 day period where I couldn't figure out why my system magically stopped showing tv video (I'm an apt noob and got burned by an automatic bad upgrade ... guess i'm in-apt ... sorry, bad joke).

Anyway, in back-revving to the working version of ivtv, I realized it is a perfect candidate to be dkms-ified. One Sunday afternoon later, and here you go (or directly at ivtv-0.1.9-25dkms.noarch.rpm). This DKMS-enabled ivtv RPM contains both the utility portions of the ivtv package pre-compiled as well as the ivtv driver source which DKMS then builds for whatever kernel you're running (which means it replaces both the old ivtv RPM and the the ivtv-kmdl RPM).

From what I've seen with mythtv, the previous convention was to use "kmdl" to mark kernel driver RPMs, but why limit yourself to pre-compiled binaries for only one kernel at a time, when you can utilize DKMS to do all the dirty work for you? Moreover, you can satisify the hard-core types that only want to build from source on their own box while satisfying us lazies who just rely on an RPM. Plus, now, as you boot into new kernels, DKMS will automatically build and install the ivtv package for you (assuming you have your kernel sources installed). If people think this is a worthwhile thing, let me know and I'll perhaps go repackage the other kmdl rpms for myth.

Oh yes, and speaking of feedback, does anybody know:

- How I can convince X that my TV is not as wide as it thinks? I'm using a Hauppauge 350 card, and while the tv output fits the screen perfectly, all the background myth menus get the left hand sides cut off. Also, for some reason, they mythconfigure pays no attention to my X and Y offsets which I would think would be useful in attenuating this problem.

- Why audio is coming out of the RCA audio jacks on the 350 and not the headphone jack? I direct the audio into the MIC of my soundcard, but when I then output that through my stereo, it's rather crackly.

- Why when I try to bring the menu up during live tv playback, it hangs my entire system?

As you can tell, it's all a work in progress. But hopefully dkms will make this process easier for everyone.

By Gary at 06:36 PM in Linux | Comments (4)