This repository is no longer hosted at Github; see its new homepage on Salsa.
This is a set of images that makes it simple to set up a basic headless server for MythTV. These images run on top of my Debian base system, which provides excellent logging capabilities. This image is part of the docker-mythtv image set.
MythTV is a large and complex piece of software, and will require customization. Some people use the MythTV backend to talk to local PCI or USB TV framegrabber/tuner devices. Such use, if it is even possible under Docker, is out of scope of this document. However, many TV tuners are now network-accessible, and thus may be used over a local LAN with a Docker container without incident.
These images, therefore, handle the installation of MythTV for you. You will be responsible for the configuration to your own situation. Please familiarize yourself with the information on the MythTV website before proceeding.
You can view the documentation for these images on their Github page.
These images are provided:
- jgoerzen/mythtv-backend - the MythTV backend server processes
- jgoerzen/mythtv-backend-mysql - as mythtv-backend, but with an integrated MySQL/MariaDB server in the container
If you do not already have a database server on your network, selecting the mysql variant will simplify your installation, though it is optional.
You can download with:
docker pull jgoerzen/mythtv-backend-mysql
And run with something like this:
docker run -td -p 6554:6554 -p 6543:6543 -p 6544:6544 -p 6549:6549 -p 5901:5901 \
--stop-signal=SIGPWR \
--hostname=mythtv-backend \
-v /musicdir:/music:ro \
-v /playlistdir:/playlists:rw \
--name=mythtv jgoerzen/mythtv-backend-mysql
On a newer host, like Debian bullseye, use this instead:
docker run -td -p 6554:6554 -p 6543:6543 -p 6544:6544 -p 6549:6549 -p 5901:5901 \
--stop-signal=SIGRTMIN+3 \
--tmpfs /run:size=100M --tmpfs /run/lock:size=100M \
--hostname=mythtv-backend \
-v /musicdir:/music:ro \
-v /playlistdir:/playlists:rw \
-v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:rw --cgroupns=host \
--name=mythtv jgoerzen/mythtv-backend-mysql
(Omit the -mysql from both commands if you have a MySQL server elsewhere that you
will connect to.)
Note: it is critical that the hostname be specified. MythTV uses the hostname as a key into its settings database, and Docker's randomly-assigned hostnames will cause issues in this scenario. See more about hostnames on the MythTV site.
Although the MythTV backend is able to be run as a headless server, it nevertheless requires setup to be done via a graphical program. This poses a bit of an annoyance for the normally all-text Docker environment.
I have, however, provided you with two options for accessing it.
Option 1 is to use VNC. If Docker is running on localhost, or a host you can ssh to with port forwarding, it will expose VNC screen 1 on port 5901. You can connect to this with a VNC viewer and control it that way.
Option 2 is to use SSH with X11 forwarding. This is a more advanced
option that is largely outside the scope of this document. The basic steps
are to add -e DEBBASE_SSH=enabled to your docker run command, forward
port 23 into the container, provision a password for a user inside the container
with passwd or similar, and then use ssh -X to connect to it.
Please note that SSH is an encrypted protocol, but VNC generally is not; it is not secure to expose the VNC port over the Internet.
Either way, you will need to know how to get a shell prompt within your
container. If you, for instance, named it mythtv-backend, then
docker exec -ti mythtv-backend bash will do the trick.
As we go along, I will try to make it clear what steps you can do with your own Dockerfile (which will be most of them).
The mythtv-database package generally wants to be installed on the database server itself.
You may have some trickery to do here.
First, let's assign a username and password. Run:
dpkg-reconfigure -plow mythtv-common
Next, if you do not already have a MythTV database, install the package that configures or sets up the MythTV database. Because it requires a database to be present to install, it is only provided by default in the mythtv-backend-mysql package. This package will configure your database to an existing server. Open a shell in the container and run:
apt-get update
rm /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/docker-clean
apt-get install --no-install-recommends mythtv-database
It will ask for a password for the administrator account. It will then create the needed database. Please note that this only needs to be done once; you do not need this package installed in your ongoing containers.
Now you're ready to configure the backend. Fire up the VNC server with:
su - mythtv -c startvnc
su - mythtv -c "DISPLAY=:1 xterm"
The first time you run startvnc, it will prompt you to enter a password.
Make up something secure.
On your workstation, a command like this should connect you to the GUI:
xvnc4viewer localhost:1
Enter the same password you set before.
In the GUI that appears, run:
mythtv-setup
On the general settings page, the IP address of the backend should be set to the interal IP address (more on that below).
When you are all done, stop the VNC server with:
su - mythtv -c 'tigervncserver -kill :1'
Here are some files you may want to install:
- ~mythtv/.mythtv/config.xml (/var/lib/mythtv)
- /etc/mythtv/config.xml
You could prime the Debconf database with the MythTV passwords with:
echo 'mythtv-common mythtv/mysql_mythtv_password password foo' | debconf-set-selections
echo 'mythtv-common mythtv/mysql_mythtv_user string mythtv' | debconf-set-selections
echo 'mythtv-common mythtv/mysql_mythtv_dbname string mythconverg' | debconf-set-selections
echo 'mythtv-common mythtv/mysql_host string localhost' | debconf-set-selections
So this is pretty annoying. MythTV insists on storing the IP address as seen by the backend in its database, and other machines use that IP to reach it. With docker, there is generally no way tihs works because of NAT.
Also, if you use a capture device like the HDHomeRun which communicates back to MythTV via random UDP ports, it can be just about impossible to make things work with the standard docker port forwarding.
However, there are some workarounds.
You can:
- Use NAT reflection on your firewall to forward packets back in to your network.
- Bridge your Docker containers to the network
- An example:
docker network create --driver=bridge --ip-range=192.168.0.192/29 --subnet=192.168.0.0/24 --aux-address "DefaultGatewayIPv4=192.168.0.1" -o "com.docker.network.bridge.name=brlan1" brlan1 - After that, you can add
network=brlan1 --ip=192.168.0.193do yourdocker run, and you do not need any-pbecause it will be directly accessible on the new IP.
- An example:
- Add egress iptables rules to your frontends
- You can set the BackendServerIP and MasterServerIP to the "visible" IP
of the backend (will probably have to do this via mysql). mythbackend
will fail to bind to a visible IP, but a userland redirector like
redirmay do the trick.
I tried adding -O BackendServerIP=blah -O MasterServerIP=blah to my
mythfrontend command line. That let it boot, but wasn't sufficient for
streaming.
mythbackend doesn't seem to properly write its PID to /var/run/mythtv, and therefore commands that try to kill it won't work.
This is prepared by John Goerzen jgoerzen@complete.org and the source can be found at https://salsa.debian.org/jgoerzen/docker-mythtv
The Debian operating system is configured to automatically apply security patches. MythTV, however, does not have such a feature.
Because this is built from the deb-multimedia.org sources, I cannot easily provide historical builds, since deb-multimedia itself does not. Threfore, only current deb-multimedia.org builds are available.
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