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Since it is MythTV month....

I have a friend who has a server I setup for him awhile back. Its running Ubuntu Server 8.04. Basically it is a headless server (no keyboard, mouse, monitor) crammed in a closet acting as a file server.

He has just got an HDHomeRun and has it connected to an OTA antenna. It works fine as he can use the HDHomerun software on any of his other PC's on the network and access either tuner.

Anyway he wants me to come over and setup MythTV on it. I was going to put the backend on the server and set it up to use the two tuners available on the HDHomeRun.

Anyway my questions are. I know I can install myth-tv on the box with apt-get.... But.

1) Does the backend install without any GUI requirements? I dont have an X server or any desire to load any on this box since it is staying in his closet with nothing but a network and power connection

2) Can I configure the backend over the network with a MythTV frontend? Or am I going to have to shut down the server and connect a keyboard and monitor to it to install and configure the backend? I was hoping I could do all this with minimal effort. (I am lazy)

3) Do I lose anything feature wise by having a backend only server? Basically can I do everything I need when it comes to scheduling and such with a front end connected to the backend?

I have an HDHomerun myself and love it, but don't use MythTV with it, so this setup will be new territory for me.

What you can do is install the FreeNX server on the headless server. You can find instructions here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FreeNX

If you then install the NoMachine client (http://www.nomachine.com/) on another system you can access the MythTV backend from any system, even outside your local network. The backend does require a monitor for setup purposes. I have mine setup this way and it works great. I imagine any VNC server/client setup would also work.

Thanks for the info. I will check out FreeNX. I have heard of it, but I didn't think it was appropriate for this setup since I do not have an X server and any desktop installed on this server. It is purely console / text based system. I basically ssh into it to administer it.

Never thought about using VNC though. I have used X11VNC on a couple desktop Linux systems I have setup for relatives. I don't leave x11vnc running, but basically ssh into the box and then run x11vnc for remote access to help them through problems and shut it down before exiting the ssh session.

Course x11vnc requires X. Is there a console based VNC that would allow me to see the main console screen on a remote Linux box so I can go through the MythTV setup.

You will need X installed for doing the backend setup. Most of the Myth centric distros have VNC installed and can be turned on easily. There's also the MythWeb interface that gives you all the functionality of a frontend. You can even watch recorded shows through MythWeb.

Got it all installed and working for him. Never had to leave my house! Did it all remote over the internet. Didn't have to use freenx or boot any X environment on the server.

Basically ssh'ed into his box and installed mysql-server, myth-backend, and mythtv-database (plus associated dependencies). Did some of the miscellaneous command line setup needed.

After that was finished I ssh'ed into his box and enabled X11 forwarding. Basically...

ssh -X -l username serveraddress /usr/bin/mythtv-setup -p portnum

Then I was able to do the Myth backend setup. A little slow doing it this way, but it took just a an hour to do the whole process and have his backend working fine.

He fired up a frontend on his main system and it worked great. He scheduled a few test recordings and everything worked great!

That is so cool. Nice to know it is possible to do it this way. Glad you got it working for your friend.

Yeah it's a testament to Linux and the power it has that I was able to do it remotely. Also without any reboot of the sever (not that it would have been a problem to reboot).

Biggest question he has now (and maybe someone here with more experience can help) is about transcoding.

He wants to transcode some recordings to divx and have a couple different resized resolutions depending on if the show is 16:9 HD, or just a digital 4:3 resolution.

Previously he has used the HDHomeRun tools to just capture an MPEG2 stream directly to file on his main system. Then he used ffmpeg (I think) to re-encode it the way he wants. He had some notes for particular networks or shows on what would be the amount he would strip from the 4 corners, destination resolution, etc.

Problem is the resizing part. The 4:3 shows need to be resized but also need the black bar stripped away from all four corners. His current efforts don't seem to be able to do much more than just resize, but he was hoping for more options. With ffmpeg he would resize down to 640x480 for 4:3 content, deinterlace, and remove black bars and any of the closed captioning "noise" at the top of the screen. For 16:9 content he resized down to 624x352 or so and deinterlaced. Might have done some black bar removal, but I think most of the 16:9 HD streams don't need any work that way.

I couldn't find any options to do all of this with MythTV, so any advice on if it is possible and if it can be done inside MythTV would be greatly appreciated. If it has to be with some external script or program that is fine too, but would love to automate this for him.

Also he asked me how to change to a channel when a program is highlighted in the guide. He said when he brings the guide up and highlights a program that is currently on, he would like to go right to that channel and watch it live. If he hits enter it goes right to recording options. He said currently he goes to a live TV stream and uses the up and down arrows to find a channel with the OSD and hit enter, but he would like to do it from the guide if possible.