Note: Last years I funded my semi-lab with 15+ various TVboxes by my private money and decided to stop investing my private money - effectively just (and seems only) - to increase sells of tv box vendors.

If you want me to work on various issues or add new hardware support - pls consider donation to help me get required hardware to work on. Please note that this will also increase my satisfaction from - currently free of charge - work on minimyth2/miniarch.

Thank You in advance !

Quick Start

MiniMyth2 is baseline for following artefacts:

MiniMyth2 artefact is dedicated firmware designed to turnaround small-factor ARMv7, ARMv8, i386 and x86_64 small-factor computers into MythTV appliance offering fully functional MythTV frontend.

For platforms supporting PXE boot - MiniMyth2 offers disk-less, zero-effort provisioned, network booted MythTV frontend appliance.

From the software perspective, MiniMyth2 is MythTV frontend with minimal required run-time (Linux kernel, GNU libraries, video/audio/IR remote drivers) allowing to run MythTV frontend with full speed & features on recent hardware from Intel/AMD/Amlogic/Rockchip/Allwinner/Raspbery.

Conceptually, MiniMyth2 potential differentiator is full state-less design. Practically it means MiniMyth2 offers fully functional MythTV fronted without ANY hardware & user specific data needed at deployment. MiniMyth2 hardware specific config is automatically generated from HW autodetection while user specific config is set with MythTV defaults. This allows real zero-config deployment. After deployment - in normal usage - MiniMyth2 stays fully state-less. No runtime/user data is stored on local storage (for best runtime speed - MiniMyth2 uses RAM disks. NFS is not used - as slow network links like FastEthernet or WiFi - are too slow for good user experience). In this context - MiniMyth2 is exactly like live USB / SD card distro with capability of automatic customizations at every boot time. Boot customization data is stored in single config file and MiniMyth2 can automatically download it at boot from central location (or read it from SD card / USB stick when central server not offers config file).

From distro perspective - when compared to other media-player-like distributions (i.e. CoreELEC, LibreELEC, etc) - MiniMyth2 is single universal rootfs image prepared for all supported boards.

From development perspective - comparing MiniMyth2 GAR with other rootfs build systems - MiniMyth2 is closest to buildroot - with difference MiniMyth2 uses canadian cross cross-compilation. In MiniMyth2 issuing make build command automates:

• downloading sources
• building build environment for building cross-toolchain
• building cross-toolchain
• building target binaries with cross-toolchain
• preparing bootable image
• uploading created bootable image to i.e. PXE server or NFS server or starts flashing SD card

In this context - MiniMyth2 GAR is closest to LFS build working in fully automated way.

MiniMyth2 GAR build system offers multi-board capability - so theoretically - it can build in one build session an single SD card image for all SoC - if u-boot allow that. Practically - due some SoC boot procedure conflicts/bootloader SoC specific overlaps - only subset of SoC are working well with such universal card SD image currently.

Major goals of MiniMyth2 artefact are:

• Make MythTV frontend zero-effort setup/deployment. Setup of MythTV frontend might be as simple as burning SD card or enabling PXE boot in frontend’s BIOS/EFI.

• Make graphics/sound/IR remote detection/configuration fully automatic. No any drivers install nor configuration is required for any from 1500+ of graphic supported. The same for audio and IR remotes.

• Make easy adoption of recent FOSS achievements as base for creating zero-effort provisioned out-of-box ready to use dedicated MythTV appliance. Project is exploiting developments in GNU/Linux area like:

  • common single mainline Linux kernel support for Amlogic/Rockchip/Allwinner/Raspbery SoCs
  • Mesa3D support for ARM 3D IP
  • stateless/stateful V4L2 Video decode (Amlogic VDEC, Rockchip HANTRO/RKVDEC, Allwinner CEDRUS and Bradcom RPIVID)
  • in-kernel IR remote decode for covering wide variety of supported IR remotes

• MiniMyth2 Changelog
• Current version Release Notes
• List of supported Graphics HW (on x86_64 platforms)
• List of supported IR receivers

MiniMyth2 Wiki

This is general functionality avaliable on current code (Mainline Linux kernel)

This is video related functionality avaliable on current code (Linux kernel + Mesa + MythTV) At the moment quality of playback is good for technology preview. On platforms with statefull v4l2_m2m video codecs: RPI3/RPI4 H.264 playback seek works well but fails on Amlogic.

• (1) - Wayland gives black screen on this HW
• (2) - EGLFS not works due z-position issue in messon-drm driver on this HW
• (3) - DRM Planes fails with KMS Atomic Commit on this HW
• (4) - mythfrontend segfaults in Wayland on this HW
• (5) - EGLFS and Wayland not working on this HW as legacy Nvidia drivers are not providing EGL nor DRM
• (6) - hw.video decode with rendering to DRM planes has very dark picture on this HW
• (7) - rkvdec2 is not yet supported on this SoC
• (8) - hevc/vp9 is not yet supported on this SoC (due no rkvdec support)
• (9) - hw.video decode with rendering to DRM planes has no OSD (probably Z-order issue)
• (10) - rendering to DRM Planes gives not visible OSD on this HW
• (11) - mesa nouveau as of 22.2.0 has issue with VAAPI decode on Nvidia ION1/ION2
• (12) - as of 6.8-rc6 kernel EGLFS in DMABuf mode not works correctly

This is summary of video samples tests conducted on current MiniMyth2 code: Video test summary