Posted by Shane C. Mason on Jan 24th, 2007
This tutorial will walk you through the basic steps of installing the Freevo PVR on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu version: Edgy Eft (6.10)
Freevo version: 1.6.2
Freevo is a home theater system for Linux (think Tivo). While it is not as feature rich as MythTV, it should do everything that you would want a PVR to do. These instructions will show you how to install these packages from source, as opposed to using apt-get. If you want to do that, follow these instructions from the Freevo wiki.
Library Dependencies:
The first step is to install all the dependencies. Python 1.4 is installed by default, so we can start from there. We will first need to install the SDL bindings for python. Open a console and issue the following command:
sudo apt-get install python-pygame
Now, mmpython, which is the Media Metadata Retrieval framework for python.
sudo apt-get install python-mmpython
Now the eGenix mx extensions, we need several packages, so we’ll use a wildcard to make sure we get them all
sudo apt-get install python-egenix*
Install the Twisted service framework.
sudo apt-get install python-twisted
Now, element tree (included by default in Python 2.5 or later):
sudo apt-get install python-elementtree
And, last of all, libexif. This is used for tagging jpeg images.
sudo apt-get install libexif12
There are some dependencies not listed on the dependencies page. We’ll install them now: (Note, I added these to the dependency page)
sudo apt-get install python-imaging
sudo apt-get install python-numeric
Application Dependencies:
Freevo uses other applications to do the work of playing, viewing and recording media. Either Xine or mplayer is needed for video, so we’ll install both. Note, if you want to watch encrypted DVDs (most commercial DVDs) you are going to have to pull some tricks. Start here. For now, we’ll start with the basic applications to get you going.
sudo apt-get install
sudo apt-get install mplayer
sudo apt-get install xine-ui
sudo apt-get install mencoder
sudo apt-get install sdvd
TVTime is used for viewing live television.
sudo apt-get install tvtime
sudo apt-get install xmltv
W need lame for mp3 encoding:
sudo apt-get install lame
There are other applications that you might find useful listed on the dependencies page.
The next step is to download the latest release here. It will be a compressed archive file; for the purposes of this document, we will refer to it as freevo-1.6.x.tar.gz. After you download it, open a console in the directory you saved it and issue the following commands:
tar -xzvf freevo-1.6.x.tar.gz
cd freevo-1.6.x
sudo python setup.py install
Set it up by running:
freevo setup
For some reason or other, this doesn’t do everything you need it to. So, still in the freevo-1.6.x directory, run the following:
cp local_conf.py.example ~/.freevo/local_conf.py
You will need to edit the file ~/.freevo/local_conf.py in your favorite text editor. Now, configuration should be the same no matter what system you are using. There is loads of good info on that at the Freevo webisite.