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Speak for yourself. My MythTV system has been happily recording and playing back TV for over three years. I used Jarod C. Wilson's guide. I think it took about a day to get the core functionality working, then I got the rest (emulator games, playback improvements, IR remote behaviour) tweaked to my liking over the course of the next month.

If you're going to do the install yourself rather than try something else like Mythdora (Fedora with Mythtv all-in-one install, like Mythbuntu), give the Fedora/Mythtv install guide a look. It's what I used to set mine up, and have done so whenever I upgrade. I've got a back-end server with dual tuners and I use old modded xboxes as my front-ends.

After reading the claims, this patent seems to be more targeting sites that use search engines to return images that relate to a user's query.

Last time I installed MythTV, I used Fedora Core 5 and followed Jarod Wilson's guide and didn't have any trouble. The MythTV.org wiki also has an entry for installing on FC7. I'll likely be upgrading to FC8 when I move to version 0.21, so hopefully there aren't any major changes from these directions. You'll need to wait for the packages to become available, but I don't think it will take long. BTW, I've got a Hauppauge 250 on a PIII 1GHz with 256MB and never had a problem performance-wise.

Try Hacking MythTV. It's from Jarod Wilson who wrote one of the most popular MythTV howto out there.

I don't see what's the point of building a dedicated distro for MythTV. Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use a well-known, established distribution, and just create a software repository with MythTV?

Even the best efforts of package maintainers (like cardoe for the Gentoo ebuilds) cannot make the process of setting up a Myth system as simple as a dedicated distro.

The reason for this is that there is so much more to setting up a Myth system then just installing and configuring Myth. Even compiling from source is very simple.

The hours of toil come from:
- getting your TV tuner(s) working correctly (ivtv, firmware)
- setting up your storage (LVM?)
- defining and automating maintenance tasks (backup, channel data updates)
- getting Lirc working
- Working out the quirks of your particular setup (unavoidable)
- etc. etc.

There are many small tasks which cumulatively take a lot of time to complete which have been taken care of for you in, for example, MythDora. Many people will just follow Jarod Wilson's guide http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php anyway; why not take advantage of all that hard work in an automated installer?

The flip side is that building it yourself from scratch will allow you to diagnose and fix many more problems while also providing an interesting project which will not only record TV but give you a taste of what it takes to keep a heavily-loaded system running for weeks or (hopefully) months at a time.

Agreed. Vista handles hi-def transport streams and mpeg HD just as well as MCE2005 did. No problems at all. More than likely some people are having trouble setting their resolutions to match their TV. That was the same problem people had with MCE2005 so nothing new here. They just need to go on support forums or as said above get a decent HDMI card and not rely on crappy onboard video to watch Hidef with! It's not Vista this one I'm afraid! I imagine it's just as much fun as trying to get your Linux box running http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/mythhd.php - a similar experience to getting your TV working under MCE2005. Much easier now with Vista and an HDMI card and a HDTV. Before now you were heavliy reliant on using Powerstrip (a great program for the job but not for non-techies. The day of Media Centers being completely plug and play for home users is still a little way off assuming they want to do more than just listen to music on it. We're getting there though :)

I've run MythTV since 0.14 on Knoppmyth and Fedora -- starting with FC3.

When I started, Knoppmyth was way over my head -- particularly the finishing touches to get everything running properly. It was my first real hands-dirty experience with Linux and I appreciated for all I learned. I did did manage to get an ancient K6-3D system running Knoppmyth -- not well enough to put in my livingroom, but well enough to prove the concept and that it was worth the time and effort to build a new system on more capable hardware.

My second system was a P3 700 built on FC3 following Jarod Wilson's definitive guide, mainly because I felt that following the guide to transform a generic install into a MythTV appliance would teach me a lot about what the Myth components were, how they all fit together, how to make them all fit together in Linux, and what to do when something went wrong. I was right.

I built a third machine (my current master beckend/frontend) on FC4 also following Jarod's guide but this time on a P4 2.5 machine.

By this time I was ready to start adding FE capabilities, but I already knew the process of installation, knew about the components and dependencies, and no longer felt the need for yumming or smarting in kernel modules and so on. I used Knoppmyth to turn my old P3 700 former-backend into a frontend.

This setup worked well through several upgrades -- FC on the backend, Knoppmyth on the frontend with the only caveat being that both machines have to be running the same version of Myth. Upgrade one, you have to upgrade the other.

Even though this was about two years ago, the Knoppmyth install was easy and painless, and I was prepared to deal with irregularities like tweaking xorg.conf. I also really appreciated that the Knoppmyth CD would let you run a frontend off the CD -- allowing you to instantly test hardware without touching the drive.

Last weekend, I finally retired the P3. It's currently on holiday, but will soon return to service as a file server. Instead I built a new frontend on an Athlon 64 4000.

I decided to give Mythdora a whirl since I know it's been under heavy development including the involvement of Jarod. I was really impressed with how smoothly and quickly the installation went, including post-install scripts to handle things like IR hardware and binary nvidia drivers (I know, I know, but the binary driver really works better for Myth than the Free one). I went from having a pile of boxes at 4 pm to a working Mythtv system at 9:30. It might have been quicker but I had to run to the shop when I ran out of beer.

I didn't try a Knoppmyth install on this hardware, but have no doubt that it would have gone just as smoothly. Cecil deserves a lot of respect and credit for the fantastic job he has done with Knoppmyth over the years.

Of course I did have quite a bit of Myth-specific experience behind me and knew from the start to buy hardware that was rock-solid compatible -- like an nforce board, nvidia gfx card, turtle beach sound card, on-board 10/100 LAN, etc.

The point is that by last weekend I was a lot more familiar with Fedora than with Debian, so I was really happy to be able to so painlessly migrate my FE to Fedora. I have no doubt that those more familiar with Debian will be just as happy with what Cecil has done in Knoppix.

And more than anything, lot of credit is owed to the folks behind MythTV -- from Isaac Richards, the original creator, and all the key developers, to folks like Jarod, Cecil, and Dennis for enormous contributions in making Myth more accessible, to all the numerous active and helpful folks on the mailing list. They've made MythTV into a product that truly is a world-beater -- by far the most powerful, most flexible, most extensible, and downright most pleasurable media engine on the planet.

Here's looking to 0.21.

For those who already have Fedora installed, there's an excellent guide available at http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php which is simple to follow and worked for me on the first try (I went with a Hauppage 150 card). Personally, I preferred installing it the software myself, so I have a better idea of where to look when something breaks. I have yum cron'ed to run nightly, and so far I haven't had the install broken by any new packages since the install (4 or so months ago).

For the longest time, I absolutely refused to install Windows MCE on my media PC for exactly that reason. However, after finally giving it a test-drive (just to confirm my prejudice, you know), the surprising conclusion was obvious: I've tried pretty much all mediacenter packages out there, and NONE (even the commercial alternatives) are even within shouting distance of MCE when it comes to ease of installation, stability and user friendliness. I can get a clean machine up and running in an hour with MCE. Compare that to the RedHat MythTV Howto, which takes many hours for even a basic install. And after that, it's a pain to get everything set up and working as it should. All that is a steep price for avoiding DRM that (in my experience) never gets in the way. Of course, all this changes when suddenly a bunch of content becomes impossible to record, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there (or when it gets here, across the big pond).

Personally, I'm willing to pay for content, but generally speaking most of the ads I see are not anything I'm interested in, which annoys me. I hate going to a tech news website and seeing ads for mortgages. I hate going to cooks.com and seeing ads for a site on looking and feeling "younger" (realage.com).

For sites like this, it rapidly becomes apparent that the purpose of the site is to generate ad revenue, for which the content is a draw, rather than a site that presents good content and is supported by ads. When I perceive this then the site is not one to which I will return in any case, ads or no.

Remember how the web used to be in the early 90s? You had some "THIS IS MY PAGE BLINKING TEXT DANCING HAMSTERS LOL!one" pages and then you had some black text/grey background sites with 500k of text on how to beat some game or cook a souffle. The latter is what I want to see (and incidentally I think that sites like myspace are wonderful for putting all the crap in one place). A site like Jarod Wilson's guide to MythTV has pertinent ads and a VERY high content/ad ratio. TFA has links to HP forensics solutions in an article about Firefox. No thanks!

You can make your life a lot easier by using the Fedora Myth(TV)ology FAQ, or, as another poster suggested, Knoppmyth. Personally, I've been using RH since 1996, so I felt much more comfortable using the former approach, and my MythTV box has now been running for about a year. It's a puny Celeron 1.7G with an equally puny 64MB nVidia graphics card, 512MB of RAM (256MB would probably have been enough), 2 Hauppauge Nova-T DVB-T tuners and a 300GB HDD. About the only seriously geeky thing I did was build a VGA-to-RGB-SCART adaptor because I loathe composite and S-Video output.

Or, you could follow Jarod's Wilson's Step-by-step guide to building a MythTV System on Fedora Core 6 w/ATrpms which takes about an hour, including installing FC6. Since the majority of that time does not require interaction on the part of the user, surely you should pro-rate the hourly cost.

Oh, and as an added bonus, the site details what hardware you need to get in order to make sure you won't have hardware issues: so assuming you have an old computer lying around (otherwise, why would you complain about incompatibilities?), you only need to purchase about $200 in video hardware.

So, let's say you have now expended $300 in real and opportunity cost to build this HD Myth Box. A similar TiVo product would run you ~$1030 in the first year (oh! you didn't know that the HD TiVo starts at around $800? $200 indeed).

So, the realities are $300 vs. $1000. If you want to piss away 5 hours' salary on something, that's on you, but it's an illegitimate claim to make that it is too difficult to justify the time investment to set up a Myth box.

I have tried getting my tv cards working on a currently installed FC4 but had no real luck, and didn't fancy ruining a perfectly functioning media server just to experiment. The cards definitely work BTW (dvb_bt8xx Zarlink MT352). I have a spare HD so I tried installing a live cd version of PCLinuxOS which has been remastered to concentrate on MythTV. Unfortunately, the damn installer kept complaining that I needed to reboot to make the changes to fstab before I could format the drive. After every reboot the drive was still not set up, and the partitions had been rearranged. When run as a live cd the mythbackend can't write to the dbase because it's on a read only mount point ! So I gave up on that and decided to follow the instructions here. I went for FC5 because I already had it on dvd. But the initial yum update was 700 MB and so it's still running. I haven't got much further yet, so I may investigate this new distro.

Do it your self and you can fine tune it. With MythDora It's recommended that you do not do an "apt-get dist-upgrade," "apt-get upgrade" or "yum upgrade" as you run the risk of breaking something.

The problem is that my desktop has no legacy interfaces. In particular, the DVD drive is SATA, and the keyboard is USB. Knoppmyth and Mythdora cannot currently handle installing from a SATA optical drive. Knoppmyth kindly popped me out to a shell when it couldn't find the installation source directory, but the drivers for the USB keyboard apparently hadn't been loaded, so I couldn't type anything anyhow.

I'm currently installing Myth 0.20 over Fedora Core 6 with the help of the MythTV on Fedora HOWTO by Jarod Wilson. It's been very helpful, but I still find myself spending a lot of time tweaking things to get everything working correctly. MythTV installation is just plain hard.

Umm... installing Myth *is* trivial. Installing all the hardware drivers and so forth, not so much. Fortunately, there are resources like Jarod's Myth-on-Fedora HOWTO which make this process much less painless. Personally, I had my backend installed on FC5 in an afternoon. My frontend took a little longer, only because I'm using a fairly recent VIA EPIA board, and so the OpenChrome drivers were a bit troublesome.

I've been using MythTV for about a month now, and I'm very happy with it. It took a couple hours to get everything worked out on Fedora Core 4. Many thanks are owed to http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ for the MythTV repository. That guy does an awesome job!

The one thing I haven't found is a stand alone front end that streams the data from the recording box rather than requiring an entire download before playing. It's not a big deal, but it would be nice to have.

Well, it's all a matter of what you want. Like most OSS vs closed software, the question comes down to: How much is your time worth, and how much flexibility do you want?

You could run Tivo and have a quick setup, nice interface, and good support. But you gotta pay for the subscription, and you can't (legally) remove the DRM from the recordings or push anything from your PC to your tivo other than .tivo files.

You could run MCE with a little more tweaking. You could view movies stored on your server from your MCE box, and view, record, and archive TV shows at your whim. But, MCE has a very narrow list of supported hardware, you have the bloat of XP, and as with Tivo, the recordings are huge files, with no built in way to transcode (convert to a different format) files on the fly.

Or, you could use MythTV. You have a wide array of hardware to choose from. Setup is a pain in the ass, even following the Holy Grail of MythTV installs. After you install Myth, you still have to get the whole frontend / backend thing working, as well as a million other tweaks here and there (remote control, zap2it configuration, transcoding settings, etc., etc.). But, if you're succesful, you have a box that does everything you'd want it to... Records tv shows and transcodes them to smaller files, keeps them on a dedicated server if you want, plays all your music and other video files no matter where on the network they're stored, and as of this new release (which I haven't tried out yet; I'm still battling 0.19-fixes), the ability to burn straight to DVD.

I've used XP MCE, Tivo, Xbox Media Center, and I'm just finalizing my MythTV install. I can't tell you which is best yet, as they all have their hits and misses, just like most software packages.

I would recommend this excellent guide for installing it on Fedora. I use FC3/myth at home currently, and it works wonders.

The amount of difficulty involved depends on the distro you use. I've had good luck with Fedora Core (3, 4 and 5), using binary rpms from atrpms and the nice howto written and updated by Jarod Wilson (http://www.wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php). Setting up a backend should not take more than a day, even for someone with limited Linux experience like me. And the setup of a frontend workstation is a matter of yum'ing the rpms and install the various packages. Knoppmyth is a good distro for the Debian fans out there.

Can MythTV control my existing cablebox (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250)? It's got a USB port

I felt the same as you do for several weeks and I also consider myself pretty well acquainted with linux. And, contrary to some of the testimonials I'm reading, KnoppMyth did not do it for me and my pcHDTV 3000 card.

Now I'm in pretty good shape with a simple, single broadcast tuner system. I'm not using MythGame, MythFlix, or MythPhone but I am using MythStream, have all the other modules working whether I'll use some of them or not, and have only one significant bug to squash (for which I _do_ have leads) before I would declare my setup perfect for open source.

If I could put my finger on one key to success, I would say documentation. I blew away the KnoppMyth and installed Fedora 4 because a guy who has used various versions of MythTV with various versions of Fedora has the best documentation I found on the net. But not _comprehensive_ documentation. All-in-all, I have an expandible two-ring cover binding about an inch of hints, tips and other documentation printed single- and double-sided. Whether that is encouraging or discouraging depends upon the reader I guess. It _can_ be done. Some key links from my bookmarks:

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php#hw
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/tips.php
http://www.irblaster.info/
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-23.html
http://yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialMySQL.ht ml
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User_Manual:D aily_Use
http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/mythtv-users @mythtv.org/1654163.html
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users /170450

I felt the same as you do for several weeks and I also consider myself pretty well acquainted with linux. And, contrary to some of the testimonials I'm reading, KnoppMyth did not do it for me and my pcHDTV 3000 card.

Now I'm in pretty good shape with a simple, single broadcast tuner system. I'm not using MythGame, MythFlix, or MythPhone but I am using MythStream, have all the other modules working whether I'll use some of them or not, and have only one significant bug to squash (for which I _do_ have leads) before I would declare my setup perfect for open source.

If I could put my finger on one key to success, I would say documentation. I blew away the KnoppMyth and installed Fedora 4 because a guy who has used various versions of MythTV with various versions of Fedora has the best documentation I found on the net. But not _comprehensive_ documentation. All-in-all, I have an expandible two-ring cover binding about an inch of hints, tips and other documentation printed single- and double-sided. Whether that is encouraging or discouraging depends upon the reader I guess. It _can_ be done. Some key links from my bookmarks:

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php#hw
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/tips.php
http://www.irblaster.info/
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-23.html
http://yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialMySQL.ht ml
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User_Manual:D aily_Use
http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/mythtv-users @mythtv.org/1654163.html
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users /170450

First, please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193371&cid=158 64227a prior Slashdot comment for my detailed writeup of what a totally state-of-the-art MythTV high-definition system is capable of. I've had this system up and running since early January 2006, and its power and features still so far exceed any available commercial application it's not funny.

The funny thing is that I heard so many stories about how MythTV is the ne plus ultra of difficult installations that I actually put off getting started for some time after assembling the necessary parts. Some common MythTV installation mistakes:

MISTAKE: Not trying to build one because everyone knows MythTV installation makes grown men weep.
SOLUTION: It might do so . . . For those who've never installed Linux before. Yes, having some experience with Linux, or the willingness to learn along the way with learning MythTV internals, is essential.

MISTAKE: Not trying to build one because MythTV only runs on custom-built, homemade systems and I don't know how to build one.
SOLUTION: I'm two thumbs when it comes to hardware; even my earlier 2.8TB RAID 5 array (which I'm not using for MythTV storage, but will at some point) was more a software project than a hardware one. For MythTV, as I mention in my message above, I simply bought a stock 3.0GHz Pentium 4 Sony Vaio system. It did have the advantages of a) being pretty darn quiet and b) being black with flip-down covers covering the drive bay (a family member who visited recently didn't even recognize the case as belonging to a PC until I pointed it out), but these were simply superficial bonuses. There's no need to have to handcraft a SFF system in a "media PC" case unless one really wants to.

MISTAKE: Trying to build a high-definition system on the cheap.
SOLUTION: Anyone who does not feel confident about his technical skills and doesn't need high defintion ought to buy a TiVo. Seriously. Don't think that a MythTV system will somehow save you money, because it probably won't and probably won't look as nice sitting under the TV set. For those who moan and groan about the monthly TiVo fee, I'll bet they're also the ones who moan and groan about paying $15 a month for World of Warcraft despite it being a far, far, far better value per dollar than any movie, DVD, or other videogame purchase. Get out of living in mom's basement, loser!

That said, anyone who wants to build a high definition-capable system needs to look at MythTV hard because, as mentioned, it can do things no commercial system can do. However, high definition takes horsepower. Lots of horsepower. The mythtv-users list sees a constant influx of new people who think that they can get away with assembling a HD-capable system with the spare parts sitting in their closets. They fail, then go away whining about how "MythTV is hard."

Here's what one needs:

* 3.0GHz Pentium 4 or better. Don't try to use a less-powerful system and then rely on XvMC to fill the gap.
* Nvidia FX 5200 or better. No, don't try ATI. No, don't try a MX400.
* Lots of storage space. Each high-definition recording stream takes 5-8GB per hour. I can record three such at once. Do the math.
* A standalone PC. The best way, by far, to install MythTV is to follow Jarod Wilson's justly-famous installation guide, which uses Fedora Core. Don't try to press in a system already being used for something else to the task (at least not as a frontend); it's not worth the hassle.

BOTTOM LINE: Anyone with some prior Linux i

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.

Very savvy consumers will hack together ["PC-TV hybrid"] setups themselves.

Yes, we are indeed building them ourselves. However, we are doing so primarily because we can't find what we want on sale anywhere for any price. The below is an adapted version of a recent Usenet post of mine describing what I have come to daily take for granted with my high-definition MythTV setup:
------------
. . . MythTV works, and works well, for those who are interested in a "HD TiVo" without any of TiVo's limitations. I must admit to chuckling whenever I see a question in alt.tv.tech.hdtv or elsewhere asking how to record from a HD video source with a computer in terms that make it clear the poster and the respondents view the task as something akin to cavemen discovering fire.

I work long, long hours and, when I get home, often don't have any more energy left to do more than want to just relax in front of the tube. When I do so, I want to have as much choice in what to watch as possible. Let me tell one and all of what I with 100% reliability do with my MythTV setup every day:

• Push a button on the remote[1] to wake the 47" 1080p[2] LCD panel[3] from its DPMS slumber.
• Pick from a gigantic library[4] of high-definition programs that MythTV constantly adds to[5] based on my choices.[6]
• While playing the program, rewind, fast-forward, and jump to arbitrary points as desired. I can also adjust the playback speed anywhere from 0.5X to 2X without affecting audio pitch.[7]
• I can push a button to instantly and accurately skip over commercials.[8] If I've gone too far, another button will skip me back to the previous spot.
• If I exit a recording, the next time I watch it the playback will continue where I left off.[9]
• If I ever need to restart MythTV, pushing a button on my remote twice within three seconds will cause it to do so.[10]
• If I want, I can run MythTV on my MacBook and watch the exact same programs[11] with the exact same elegant and attractive user interface.[12]
• All this time, MythTV is silently recording yet more for me to watch.[13]

If any of this intrigues you, I recommend visiting:

• The MythTV Wiki and the mythtv-users mailing list archive, the two largest repositories of MythTV knowledge.
• The terrific Fedora Core-based installation guide I used.
• A well-regarded MythTV reference design for those who want to either buy it off the shelf from the vendor or build it themselves. I'm neither a customer nor an employee; all I did for my own setup was buy a Sony Pentium 4 system on sale at Fry's then add the video card, ATSC capture card, gigabit Ethernet card, remote, and NAS. However, in retrospect, there's something to be said for buying at once all the parts except the NAS in one convenient, already-integrated form.

[1] Home Theater Master MX-500 universal remote. I programmed it using a $30 infrared keyboard/mouse combo.

[2] MythTV does an *excellent* job of deinterlacing 1080i recordings into 1080p for those displays that can handle it. Any Nvidia video card from the FX5200 to the present will work.

[3] Westinghouse LVM-47W1. Under $2500 from Crutchfield for 1080p LCD goodness.

[4] MythTV tells me that I have "242 programs, using 1.7 TB (427 hrs 33 mins) out of 1.8 TB (54 GB fr

High Def, huh? That's cool, but all you've gotta do for a high-def DVR is get the hd-3000 card (http://www.pchdtv.com/) , with Linux compatibility pretty much off the box and a special vendor build of xine supplied that's compatible with high def, and then build a mythtv box & you are good to go.

http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/album_page.php?pic _id=11
http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/album_page.php?pic _id=10


Easy as pie (well, not really, but if you use something like knoppmyth from http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html in your dedicated box, or follow Jarod's Howto for Fedora on http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ , it isn't too difficult.)

oops! I clicked Submit instead of preview. Anyway that's the link to the myth hardware page (http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss 3.1). I would suggest going to at least 512M and to get a faster processor than you really think you need to allow for growth, addition of HDTV, etc. You will also probably want to reformat some of your recordings and that is happier on a faster processor. I use a athlon xp 2800+ and it is OK.

I think most people will want 2 capture devices--watching one thing and recording another is normal, right? That makes the Hauppaugge very attractive.

You will need more disk capacity than you imagine. Set up with LVM and it is easy to expand.

If you prefer Fedora to Knoppix, look here: http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

I would have agreed with the difficult part 3 days ago, but then I watched my buddy set one up from scratch in only a few hours. And that was on cheap, dated hardware. It works well and looks beautiful, here is the guide he used.

Did he use FC4, the excellent instructions at http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php, and Axel's excellent RPMs? It does take some time. It probably took me about 10-12 hours to get everything set up the first time.

MythTV can be installed and setup very easily using the KnoppMyth distribution, and then customised after that (all I've done is install libdvdcss). Otherwise there is Jarod's detailed setup guide, and the mythtv-users mailing list is very busy, and people on there are very helpful.

If you're in New Zealand, we have a localt mythtvnz list.

Rob :)

I've tryed installing and configuring mythtv on a few occasions some of those occassions lasting weeks at a time. I have not given up. Knopmyth would not utilize the three hds I had purchased. I had an 80 gig hd for the os, programs, and mp3s and two larger hds 120 and 200 gigs for the drv storage and it wouldn't use them. It also wouldn't connect to my lan to get showtimes. (knopmyth the quickest and easiest to try tho so I recommend trying it if you have a burner and the bandwidth maybe you'll get lucky like Mr. Personality)

I got new equipment because a few flavors of linux said something like "kernal panic: failed test to see if hardware was made after 2000" and wouldn't boot. wth was that about anyway?

The last install seems to be suscessfull. I used Fedora 4 on dvd. I was hung up a long time on a bad public key that I couldn't update. But I found that on a forum.

Of all the websites about mythtv this one has the most exhaustive howto I have seen. http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/

What do you use for a remote?

My biggest reluctance to moving away from TiVo is it's got the most usefully laid out remote I've ever used for watching video.

I'd have to say that I agree with others here. Pretty much anyone who built a MythTV box once can build one for you... but why? If it broke, who would you call to fix it? I know I for one wouldn't want to be on-call for people with problems with Myth unless I was making a good living at it.

Try Knoppmyth, or go to The Fedora Myth(TV)ology site for the excellent Fedora guide which I followed myself and built a very good and stable Mythbox. So far going on 7 months and two major revisions of MythTV (0.16 to the current 0.18.1) without a hitch... and even better my wife and kids can use it without problems. Hell, only occasionally does a problem surface.

However, the problems ARE the problem. When problems do occur, it would be better if you'd had the experience building the box... that way you know where your problems might lie. Similarly, some Linux experience might be advantageous. It's really not hard building a good Myth box... but I also stuck pretty closely with standard, recognized hardware (PVR-250, Geforce2MX, Athlon 800) that would do the trick rather than try some of the more "out there" configurations. Of course, I also had a nice ATX case for hi-fi component matching (an old Gateway Destination PC) that matched my Harmon Kardon sound system perfectly.

YMMV... but my advice is to check out that guide. If you want to build a good Myth box... follow it to the letter and you'll be good to go.

I mean, it's so easy. All you have to do is go to your linux box, preferably with a custom Knoppix installation optimized for mythTV, but a red hat installation will do, just make sure you rebuild the kernel issuing all the right mantras.... then set up your partitions (be sure to choose the right filesystem), download and configure the appropriate mythTV packages that you wish to install (check your hardware of course and be sure you have the right video drivers and take a look at the docs for your sound card). Obviously check dependencies on all the components and also you might want to edit the usual files for something like this such as /etc/modprobe.conf. Make sure you get all the MythTV components, there should be 94 packages if you're installing on redhat, and check the dependencies for each one. You'll probably want an IR receiver so you can use remote too; find, download, configure, and install those packages too; you might want to fiddle with /etc/udev/rules.d/lirc.rules. Of course you'll have to set up MySQL to run at startup and issue the usual commands, things like mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/mythtv-0.18.1/database/mc.sql to get things running; the rest will be handled after you set up mythTV. Then populate the database (check dependencies first!) and if all goes well, all you need to do is edit your crontab to take care of mythfilldatabase every night and then you can configure automatic startup. Configure whatever MythTV addons you want and you're done! It's that simple! Problems? Read the documentation! Then just think of all the many things you can buy with the $2 that you just saved with these simple steps.

I mean, it's so easy. All you have to do is go to your linux box, preferably with a custom Knoppix installation optimized for mythTV, but a red hat installation will do, just make sure you rebuild the kernel issuing all the right mantras.... then set up your partitions (be sure to choose the right filesystem), download and configure the appropriate mythTV packages that you wish to install (check your hardware of course and be sure you have the right video drivers and take a look at the docs for your sound card). Obviously check dependencies on all the components and also you might want to edit the usual files for something like this such as /etc/modprobe.conf. Make sure you get all the MythTV components, there should be 94 packages if you're installing on redhat, and check the dependencies for each one. You'll probably want an IR receiver so you can use remote too; find, download, configure, and install those packages too; you might want to fiddle with /etc/udev/rules.d/lirc.rules. Of course you'll have to set up MySQL to run at startup and issue the usual commands, things like mysql -u root -p documentation! Then just think of all the many things you can buy with the $2 that you just saved with these simple steps.

I just got my MythBox with a PVR-350 running. I'm pretty impressed so far. I was using Gentoo, but there was a lot of manual tweaking to be done. I installed Fedora Core 4, and I had the whole thing running in a few hours.

The TV-Out of the PVR-350 puts a really nice picture out. I've only had a couple of annoyances so far:

- it takes about 3 seconds to change channels
- a couple channels are coming in distorted (these same channels look great on my tivo)

The cable system in my condo is supposed to be old, but I've never had a problem before. Maybe the Tivo has a better receiver than the 350. I haven't had much time to mess with it yet.

If you are going to build one of these, I highly recommend using the Fedora Myth(TV)ology HOWTO.

I am running mythtv. If you follow a guide it is quite simple to get a basic installation going. I suggest using the FedoraMyth guide, it is the easiest I've seen. (http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/). Once you've got it running you can tweak the configurations to your hearts content. It's decently stable and there is so much you can do with it.

Out of curiousity, why would you want to switch? What does MythTV offer that you don't have with MCE? Also, what was the ease of use problem you ran into with MythTV? Did you try a CD based such as Knoppmyth, or try following a guide, such as Jarod's guide?

actually, knoppmyth has some built in support for epia via nemehmia C3 CPU mini-itx mobo's. (which kinda is a slower cyrix embeded chip, when you think about it, right?) ;)

But knoppmyth is a cool solution to getting mythtv running quickly without nearly the dependencies headaches/etc.

But if someone likes and is comfortable with gentoo there's no reason not to use the distro you like/comfortable with (well the only reason NOT to is that there's better mythtv specific documentation for x,y, or Z distro like )

But there are Gentoo guides out there Gentoo MythTV guide *Shrug*

What was the question again?

e.

I am currently running a mythtv box of my own. It really did not take very long at all to setup. If you already have basic linux knowledge you are already well on your way. There are a few quirks and will take some getting used to. As far as remotes go, the one that comes with it works great, I myself am using a universal remote from radio shack (the same one as the fedora myth guy). If you are curious as to the process of setting it up, check out the how to that the Fedora Myth guy setup. It is a quite simple guide to follow and should help you to have a box running in a day. http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/

knoppmyth as previously mentioned... also a Fedora Core version MythDora is cool new addition...

Jarrod wilson's mythtv fedora core guide is one of the better/easiest to follow if you want to roll mythtv by hand (as opposed to knoppmyth/mythdora installation)

I haven't heard of one, and without a lot of work put into refinement, I wouldn't want to be in that business.

These instructions are pretty decent though:
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

It would still take several hours. The problem I'm currently having is the system suddenly can't operate my tuner, particularly, channel control.

The problem I had before was that a program to test the tuner before going to the final Myth setup, xawtv, was hard to find, I did find packages for it though. Make sure you install Synaptic, that made finding the packages I wanted a lot easier.

You can try Knoppmyth, which is a Knoppix-based installer and bootable front end. Be aware, though, that MythTV requires some specific hardware, and if you try to run it with a lot of the stock MS MCE machines they're selling these days, you're going to run into problems.

To get a truly hassle-free setup, you need a Linux-compatible capture card with hardware encoding. These (the Hauppage PVR series are the best supported, particularly the PVR-250) do not come standard in cheap MCE machines. There are also issues with on-board video and with ATI cards. You'll need a good, supported graphics card like the nvidia gf or fx series, particularly if you plan on going out to a TV or to HD.

If everything is compatible and everything is plugged in just right, you can get Knoppmyth running within a couple hours.

In the long run, though, it's better if not to build it yourself than at least put the pieces together yourself. Many, many people have done this following Jarod Wilson's excellent guide for Fedora. If you do it this way, you have a much better idea how to fix things that go wrong (they will), and how to upgrade and extend functions when you want to (you will).

MythTV is not a simple thing to get running, and it is certainly not low maintenance. It is, though, the most powerful media engine on the planet at the moment, and is entirely open-source.

There is a business model for MythTV, with a subscription service available through LxM Suite -- they give you six months of TV listings data as well as other services for a $30 fee. The money, minus operating costs, goes in a pool to pay for bounties. Subscribers get a number of points to vote for what proposed features get funded -- i.e. paying somebody to do some of the more tedious coding, but the subscribers decide what code gets priority.

Running MythTV will take a lot more of your time than you might expect, particularly as you learn to use the CD and video archiving tools. But it is well worth the time. I've had my box running for over a year now, and can't imagine what I'd do without it.

What?! Last year I tried to set up mythTV on a fresh FC install. There is a more-or-less standard guide for doing this (http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php). *There were compile steps*.

Everyone eelse has and it worked for me.
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/

I'm using Fedora Core 2 at this point, but I just set up a friend's box (with a PVR-350) using FC3. I believe I'm using ivtv 0.1.10pre2, but I can't access the box at the moment to check for sure. I'm also using the ivtvdev X driver. I set things up using this guide for FC2/3.

If anyone is interested in a much better guide (under Fedora):

Jarod Wilson's Fedora Myth(TV)ology

He does a nice job of keeping this guide up to date and complete. Some people may not like the RPM he uses (Axel Thimm custom packages) but they've worked nicely for me.

Terry

Go knock yourself out.

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

Detailed instructions. Pre-compiled pre-configured everything. All you have to do is make sure you have the proper hardware and be able to download a OS off of the internet.