I jumped in yesterday and figured I better get my act in gear since the listings end next week.

I didn't quite want to screw up my known working 20.1 setup yet so I figured I'd throw it on a virtual machine under KVM and use my hdhomerun (qam) as the tuner.

I cloned a disk image of feisty, updated it as required and got to work. Luckily, there are packages available in the repository already. You just need to enable 'pre-released updates' in Synaptic and refresh the list...you should now have 20.2 packages available.

I then went over to schedulesdirect and created an account. Quite straight forward, it activated on the 7 day trial (honestly, if it didn't have the trial, I'd have never even tried...it was very smart to allow this!) for my lineups.

Channel scanning for the hdhomerun has improved greatly. It isn't perfect but at least it was bearable this time. It seems to know to ignore encrypted streams and just put the unencrypted ones in. Now I still did have problems with some channels like Music Choice which for whatever reason, Mythtv just doesn't want to display though they do work fine from VLC. Honestly, I don't really care :) I weeded out the bad channels with the channel editor and went and assigned xmltv id's to the good channels. I only started out with about 30 channels this time vs 150+ that I had to weed out in 20.1 so this was great. I now have 12 QAM channels though 2 of them are PPV barkers. This is all the channels that are available to me via QAM so this is good.

Installed the packages, configured as needed (mysql connections, IPs etc) and then realized that I still only have 20.1 frontend on my desktop so I went ahead and installed the new frontend and fired it up.

And it worked....that's about it...guide data is correct, it was painless to sign up and the packages in the repo worked just fine.

Note that this was a fresh install of Myth, so I don't know how well upgrading will go.

Backend is a 64 bit smp (virtual machine) and frontend was a 32 bit UP system so there's packages for both kernels out there.

I am quite happy with the performance of the backend in a VM! If I could come up with a way to get analog tuning in there, I'd convert for good. KVM has come a very long way in the past few months and is having no problems with HD at all.


-Trouble

I have upgraded probably 30 machines so far and not had a problem with any one of them.

The myth guys did a good job on this update.

I have upgraded probably 30 machines so far and not had a problem with any one of them.

WOW! Did they all have the same Distro and config? Do you run a business providing MythTV hardware/software solutions? What upgrade path did you use?

I'm about to update mine in the next couple days. I wanted to wait until all the college football games were completed on saturday first :)

I updated my main system....No real issues other than I let the kernel get upgraded too and for whatever reason it didn't have ivtv support....I just wussed it and booted back to my old kernel that worked just fine.
-Trouble

Trouble
what you mean by analog channels in there?

KVM doesn't pass through PCI or USB devices (Xen can do so however) so I can't access my PVR250 and 500 PCI cards from the VM, that's all. I wish there were a HDHomerun type device that had encoders built in for capture!
-Trouble

WOW! Did they all have the same Distro and config? Do you run a business providing MythTV hardware/software solutions? What upgrade path did you use?


They all have the same hardware and distro that I have built, with a couple variations.

I do own a business selling Ubuntu Media Centers with MythTV. At the risk of getting in trouble for posting the link.

http://tvease.net

The support site has large forums and we answer questions for everyone, not just our customers. Check it out. We have been in business roughly 7 months and its growing fast.

Took me 5 minutes after I setup the web site, which took 5 minutes itself. I thought it had screwed it up some HD channels but then I found out Cox had swapped channels around the night before. Once I corrected that it's been working great.

Nice report, thanks. Can you give a bit more information on your virtualization setup? I've been playing around with Xen and VMWare server on my Linux box, in preparation for building my new backend.

Are you also doing MySQL in a VM (same as MythBE, or another VM)?
I like having MySQL in a VM, for easy complete backup snapshots, easy migration to hardware, etc.

How about the storage, is that on the host OS, accessed via NFS?

Are your VMs paravirtualized or full hardware virtualization?

Virtualization setup was pretty generic - Standard Feisty kernel with latest KVM modules at the time from sf.net(maybe kvm34?) KVM is full hardware virualization only at this point though I believe someone had made a fork to try some paravirt capabilities. MySQL was installed in the same VM as the backend - It was a generic Feisty OS install with Mythbackend added from the repository. The only issues were .htaccess and the DB password.
Initially I recorded directly into the virtual disk image. This was fine but the image was rather small at ~10GB or something. From there I went to an NFS mount to my server (actually the same server running the VM itself). Both worked fine. No problems recording 2 HD streams simultaneously and watching a HD recording at the same time via NFS. Again, I'd certainly go 100% VM if I could pass through USB or PCI devices to the VM ala Xen's paravirt capabilities.
-Trouble

Thanks for the info. I'll post my summary once I get a chance to do the same. I'll probably start with VMWare, after running into a lot of roadblocks with Xen (mostly related to 32bit paravirtualized clients on a AMD64 host).

You mentioned the PCI device issues.. Why not use Xen to get those? Any advantages of KVM over Xen at this point? I haven't tried KVM yet.