Use MythTV

Installed MythBuntu!

I have a Linux box at work running MythTV with FOUR tuners. We record all the news feeds for our clients and then charge them out the wazoo for a copy (:

I can’t tell but what else would the 40 Gb hard drive be for? Anyway, I’m putting this off because I don’t understand television.

I dont think I will be doing this or trying to do it any longer. I have discovered the Mac! The mac mini that I got, “just worked” straight out of the box. I installed VLC and Remote Buddy, and I have an instant media PC, slick and smart as hell.
No setup, no finagling, pure power.

If you are not sure to go fully Linux because of the extreme amount of work involved in MythTV, pony $700 dollars toward a refurbished Mac.

The system still requires a TV card (Hauppauge PVR/HVR) and a remote (iMon) but I can play movies, view slideshows with OpenGL transitions, listen to music – even though it seems a bit slow to skip tracks. The Weather, Web and News plugins work too.

Thanks to the Ubuntu repositories it was quite easy to install, at least compared to the installation guide on the Mythtv site. Instructions can be found here on updating your installation sources if you run Ubuntu:

http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

I have to admit that being forced to find out so much about the inner workings of the Linux OS in such a short space of time has left me feeling quite mad so I’m off to Barbados for a bit to regain my sanity :)

For those fellow noobs wishing to venture into this project I would suggest reading up on the Linux files system and on using commands from the terminal window. (check out sudo, cp, chmod, pico, ./configure, ‘make’ and ‘make install’)

It’s funny (or maybe not) that in the Linux world, at least for the uninitiated, solutions need solutions in order for problems to be solved.

Or you could put it this way.
A, doesn’t work so you search and search until you find B – woopee! But B is a tricky feller and will only work if you have C so you go in search of him. If your lucky, C will be a nice bloke and will fix B so that you can use A, but if your unlucky C will insist that you modify X and that some bloke called Kernel Source is on your computer.

Well folks, that’s Linux for you!

But there is something about it that inspires people to innovate and I like that. MythTv is just one of those innovations; think Media Centre 2005 with any and all restrictions removed.

Checkout:
http://www.mythtv.org/

I’d like to set up a Myth box based on this configuration:

Ubuntu 6.1 (Edgy aft)
Athlon XP 2600+
512MB
2×160 PATA HD’s
Geforce 5/6200 w/TV OUT (currently a Geforce2 Mx)
Hauppauge PVR2/350 or HVR1300
Thermaltake Tenor media case w/blue lights disconnected :)
iMon remote control

I told my wife we’d build a MythTV box early next year. Not sure what platform to use but I was thinking maybe a Mac Mini because of the little form factor. I guess we’d have to max out the RAM and hard disk, though.

If I had a spare computer laying around, I’d have used it, but being that I was relocated and could only take with me what I could check on a plane, I bought everything new. Found a 1Ghz Pentium III on Craigslist for 100ish. It had a Geforce2 with s-vid out so that was great. I got the IVTV compatible WinTV 500 (2 tuners for recording and watching/recording two shows at the same time – also has onboard mpeg encoding to save PC processing time) on Newegg for 130 and a 400Gb HD from Frys for 110. Set up the PC with fedora core 4 and kde and installed the whole mythtv suite using yum. I’ve since compiled a newer version from source to up my geek cred, but I’ll admit I took the easy way out initially and it works wonderfully. Aside from some slowdowns (due to lousey planning on my part), it runs great and I’ve been slowly filling my HD up for about two weeks now.

I cannot figure out why it is constantly freezing – so I’m installing windows media center. I am keeping the mythTV hard drive as is – which was useful as I haven’t finished the Windows Media yet and the kids wanted to watch the DVD on the big screen – so the system has the mythTV hard drive back in it for now.

I’ve got the myth tv system up and running, but it’s still flakey.

1. It freezes almost once a day – so most times I turn it on I have to reboot
2. The recordings are almost always erased before I watch them.