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I've been battling my MythTV install for the past couple days, and am working on it as we speak, so this article is perfect timing.

This device appears to be little more than a barebones PC and a lot of marketing induced FUD. Others have already touched on the lack of HDD, CPU and RAM, so I won't bring those back up. What I will bring up is my suspicion of the true reason why it doesn't have MythTV - Because MythTV under FC5 is a serious pain in the arse. To quote Axel Thimm from this posting on the Atrpms-users mailing list:

"Anyway, all in all currently mythtv on FC5 isn't an easy ride. If you
don't want to get in adventures, don't upgrade yet. Wait at least
until the fixed kernel makes it into updates proper."

I had originally loaded FC5 on my MythTV candidate, only to run into whacky issue after whacky issue. I formatted and reloaded to FC4, following the holy grail of MythTV install guides, and the install has been much smoother. (I'm just trying to nail down the audio / video sync issues - I gotta get my line out to stop playing 'live' audio, dammit!)

I think you'd be better off speccing out a PC from NewEgg or something, rather than purchasing one of these boxes.

Keep the thing updated, and set auto-updates to do dry-runs and email you what they could do. ... I actually have a nice shell script for that ... ask me and I'll post it online for you.

Yes, please post it or email it ... I've got a dozen or so Debian servers that could benefit from it regardless of the new storage box. Thanks in advance.

I run this from a bash script /etc/cron.daily/apt-update which delays 30-60 minutes and then runs the main script. Note that $RANDOM, and the hash function need bash and won't work in dash/sh. The cron script's code looks like this: sleep $(($RANDOM % 30 + 30))m && /usr/local/sbin/apt-update -m ... I'm not even going to try to put my apt-update script here as a slashdot comment.

This is my first public release of apt-update, released under the GPL. Also note there are other similar solutions, like apticron and cron-apt, both of which are in the Debian stable repository, but both of which seemed more code than is needed (and they are primarily for actually performing the upgrades, which is dangerous).

On RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, and other APT-capable distributions, this script will work fine. There is one snag; the script searches for "security" in the dry-run install ... DAG/Dries/RPMForge, FreshRPMS, CentOS, and ATrpms don't have a specially reserved source for security the way Debian does, so this won't work. Also of note, Axel Thrimm's atrpms package for most Fedora/RHEL derivates includes a script called "check4updates" which was the inspiration for my script. ... it is a bit more basic, but it uses what it can find of up2date, yum, apt, and smart.

Fedora (as the biggest example) *does* exist "merely at the sufferance of a corporate entity". If Red Hat stopped supporting it tomorrow, it would be gone faster than you can say "Red Hat Linux 9.0".

It's pretty much there in the form of Knoppmyth

Or, if you're using Fedora, the pre-packaged RPMs from ATRpms make installation on a traditional linux box *much* easier.

1.> rpm -U http://dl.atrpms.net/all/atrpms-kickstart-28-1.rhf c4.at.i386.rpm 2.> apt-get uptate && apt-get dist-upgrade 3.> apt-get install bitlbee irssi 4. ??? 5. Profit! (sorry about any mistakes in this attempt at karma whoring)

A few rebuttals:
MythTV is packaged just like many of our favorite complex programs. KDE is a bitch to set up, but it's pretty easy to do "apt-get install kde"

Similarly, atrpms and others package MythTV for easy installation.

Installing MythTV is a 5 step process from bare hardware.

0.) put together an old box (I'm using an Athlon 1.4ghz in my recording box and and a Via M10000 in my playback-only box) and a cheap tuner card. The Hauppauge WinTV-D series for around $40 on ebay works great. The WinTV PVR's will work even better because they offload encoding from the machine, but they're not neccessary.

1.) Install Fedora Core (any version)

2.) Install the atrpms kickstart package

3.) apt-get update

4.) apt-get dist-upgrade

5.) apt-get install mythtv-suite

Voila, you've got a working MythTV install. The setup program will walk you through initial tasks like choosing a provider for XML tv listings.

To address the problems you're having with your machine, a few possibilities are:

* You're encoding at too high a resolution. - NTSC tv really tops out at 480x480. Using more pixels provides diminishing returns.

* You're encoding with too intense a codec - RTJpeg is great for low-processor encoding. That said, I'm using MPEG 4 at 480x480, 2400 bitrate for both live and recorded TV. This is on a 1.4ghz, and I've never seen a dropped frame.

* You may not have the proper video driver installed for X. I honestly don't know how the default drivers are for NVidia cards, but I know you can get a kick ass driver from *gasp* the vendor for most distros. I had this problem with my VIA chipset until the opensource unichrome via drivers became part of the X.org package. The default VESA driver just couldn't keep up with playback.

* You may not have DMA enabled on your hard drive, making it choke on simultaneous playback and recording, especially if using a low-compression or high-resolution (read: big files) codec.

* 640mb ram is overkill. I've got one 256 meg chip in my machine. It can't hurt to have more, but don't throw more ram at it.

* The denoiser may be part of your problem - but the deinterlacer works just fine for me. The noisy signal *may* be what is causing your jumpy recording, as the encoder has to treat each new frame as a whole new scene, due to so many pixels changing, but I'd be suprised if that alone could cause a 2.4ghz to frame-skip.

Hope some of that helps!

Opening video decoder: [dmo] DMO video codecs

MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: init_video_codec
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.

mythtv-suite

ATrpms - by Distribution > common > mythtv-suite
Meta-package dragging in all of MythTV and add-ons.

This package is only useful in conjunction with apt-get, yum, or any other automatic dependency resolver.

It merely contains dependencies to all other required myth components, which in turn drag in further dependencies.

If you have an atrpms enabled apt-get or yum, all you have to do is
apt-get update && apt-get install mythtv-suite

or
yum install mythtv-suite

Have a look at the multimedia rpms to browse through the actual packages. Instructions for installing/configuring apt-get and/or yum are at the front page.

NOTE: drivers are not installed with mythtv-suite. If any rpms for a driver exists, you can still use apt-get or yum to install them.

NOTE: While rpms make installing mythtv and dependencies very easy, configuring mythtv/xmltv etc. is still needed. Please read carefully the documentation at the official mythtv web site. There are also walkthrough guides like Jarod C. Wilson's guide and Tyler Butler's installation guide also for the PVR-250.

And this is on the precompiled binaries page! How the heck will any non-Linux-geek figure this out?

Someone really needs to compile a MythTV LiveCD (or whatever) that you can just install and run on a PC with suitable video hardware. Having to figure out all this Linux mumbo-jumbo, or worse, compile it yourself, is a recipe for saying "screw it" and going back to TiVo, restrictions or no.

You can use apt for RedHat, Fedora, and Mandrake distros too. If that's your only reason for using debian, then you might consider a compromise.

See atrpms for more info.

There are a couple of other good repositories that have FC2 packages out now .

I have been using apt4rpm for the past few months now and found that I cannot live without it. It takes care of all the dependancy checking, updating, etc, etc. I rarely find something that is not listed in a repository. There is even a very nice gui called Synaptic if you prefer that sort of thing.
A good place to start is ATrpms.

--Glenn