Additional Software for a Homemade PVR?

MankyD asks: "I'm almost done loading up a new Gentoo installation paired with MythTV and a hardware MPEG2 encoder. I'm looking forward to finishing but before I let it loose upon my television, I was wondering what else I should compile in. Samba File sharing? A webserver (for watching shows on the road)? A CPU/Memory monitor? An additional media player? Not to start a flamewar, but should I do KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, or some other window manager (especially when viewed on a TV screen)? What bells and whistles can I add to make my system that much more complete?"

Comments

Build Your Own PVR

[planetjay]

Everything you need to know is at Build Your Own Personal Video Recorder.

MythTV and Window Managers

[ratboy666]

Optimally, it would be nice to run MythTV with no Window Manager at all.

But... the application itself works fine, but when it invokes mplayer... focus won't change.

So, we try "twm". Very lightweight. With the appropriate init file, everything is good -- except there are problems focusing WITHIN windows created by qt (that is, the application setup windows).

Gnome is far too heavy, as is KDE. Generally, you really want the GUI to *be* MythTV. I use "mwm". Gets out of the way, and generally stays there.

Ratboy.

Are you using the right distro?

[EvilMagnus]

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing *wrong* withe Gentoo, but if you're going to use MythTV and your machine isn't some tiny embedded Cyrix chip, why not use Knoppmyth? It's a heck of a lot easier to install than Gentoo/Myth-from-source, and adding stuff post-facto is trivial, what with it being a branch of Debian. And if you want to dive under the hood and tweak stuff, you still can.

What capture card(s) did you settle on? What's your box's spec? Are you doing anything to mitigate heat/noise? Don't be a tease, give us the details! :)

Re:Are you using the right distro?

[MankyD]

It's a relatively powerful system for what it does. P4 2.53Ghz, Hauppauge PVR-350, 1Gig Ram, 300 GB sata drive, and a NVidia 6600GT (parts left over from upgrading my desktop to an amd64 PCI-e system.)

Keep it simple and minimal

[powdered toast dude]

I recommend keeping it as lightweight as you can. My MythTV system sports not much more than:

• Fluxbox (very very lightweight WM)
• xine (I prefer it to mplayer)
• various cdr/dvdr tools (e.g. cdrecord-prodvd, dvd+rw-tools)
• apache2 for mythweb (mythweb installs nicely under gentoo's webapp-config

and various dependencies of those. The fewer moving parts you have, the less likely you are to break something in the future.

Oh, and I almost forgot -- once it's working, STOP MESSING WITH IT. ;)

$0.02,
ptd

MythTV

[MadChicken]

I think you'll find MythTV is remarkably complete in itself. Another poster mentioned KnoppMyth, which includes MythPhone (A SIP videophone client), MythWeb (essential) MythGame, Samba, NFS, etc...

The only thing I'd add after is ProjectX for fixing buggy IVTV captures and DVDStyler for authoring discs.

I installed MythStreamTV which was cool but I never use it, so I don't know if it was worth the effort.

Systm/Revision3 guys did an episode on MythTV

[mTor]

Check out what Revision3 guys did with their box: http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/ You can download the whole episode off their site.

While you're there, they also have an episode on how to make your own HQ A/V cables: http://revision3.com/systm/avcabling/

Enjoy!

My advice...

[voxel]

First and foremost, don't run MythTV. Really, you are asking for headache after headache. I know I am going to get responses saying I'm the idiot etc, but really... If you want a PVR that WORKS, forget about MythTV. -OR- *Buy exactly what KnoppMythTV recommends for hardware*, no less, no more.

The problem really isn't MythTV. It's Linux driver support. For Hauppauge PVR150 cards (very popular, and great cards), you need the BETA ivtv drivers. After a solid week of tweaking this and that, getting a backend/frontend MythTV system working, I finally sat down and watched a show... Twenty minutes into it, the backend crashed. This is after putting in 40 hours easily into the setup. I got up, pulled the plug, went to bed. The next morning, I woke up, installed Windows 2000, and SageTV. Ever since then its been wonderful.

SageTV has two commercial skip packages, one stolen from MythTV land (comskip) and one ShowAnalyzer made specifically for Windows and all the various PVR applications (BeyondTV etc).

SageTV also has a web-server so you can do all the same things you can do with MythTV.

SageTV has a real show-progress bar where you can actually see how far you are in a show. It even shows the commercial areas on the progress bar.

SageTV even shows the TV video on the background (transparencies) of all the menus.

SageTV has REAL tuner management. In MythTV if you have 2 tuners, each recording a show, and you hit "Watch Live TV", you get the response "Sorry, all the tuners are busy, go away".. You then have to go to the videos list, find the recording show, then select it to watch. Then cancel the show if you want to watch live TV, then go back to the menu and hit Live TV again.

With SageTV, you hit LiveTV and its recording two shows, it will simply show you one of the tuners, if you try to change the channel, it will ask you, which of the two shows you want to cancel in order to change the channel. NICE!

Also, with MythTV, if you come home from work, turn on the TV, see your 4 hour ring buffer full and its in the middle of a movie, you hit RECORD and it wipes out the movie up to where you are now then starts recording, LAME! SageTV will tag the entire beginning of the show/movie to be part of the show/movie recording, so you get it all.

MythTV is limited to a SINGLE recording directory, you can use LVM to span your disks to join together hard disks, but you can't use network disks then. (Im sure theres some hacky way to do it though). With SageTV, I can use the hard disks all over my house in all my computers on the LAN. So I got my two 250gb cards in my server machine, a 160 gig disk on another machine and a 300 gig disk ona linux machine with a Samba server.. SageTV records to ALL of them.

SageTV has great HDTV support for ATI HDTV Wonder, AverMeda A180's ($80!!), and Fusion 5 HDTV cards! I'm doing pure HDTV now with an antenna picking up 36 stations in the bay area.

SageTV because its on Windows, you can use ATI Video cards for TV OUT.. With NVIDIA and ATI you can use Nvidia PureVideo decoders for PixelAdaptive hardware deinterlacing, features of new GeForce6 and ATI cards for kick-ass deinterlacing... With MythTV you get Software-Bob that eats 100% of your 2.6ghz CPU.. blah.

Best of all, its STABLE.

Now, mind you I am not talking about Sage v2, I am talking about Sage v3.0.11-PR11 Beta. http://sagetv.com/beta.html

Read the discussion forums, and try it out. I did, and love it. I could go on and on about why SageTV is better than MythTV... SageTV even has a MUCH better expansion API called SVT's, to totally create custom interfaces and features within the clients.

The only real downside is its $79.95 after your two week trial. I put 4 hours into SageTV and got further than 40 hours with MythTV, I have High Definition video, better support, drivers, etc, commercial skip, web interface yadda yadda yadda... 40 hours for $79.95 is $2/hour... my time is worth more th

WinMyth

[anglete]

If you have a windows machine around the house that you'd like to play your MythTV recorded shows on (with commercial skipping), you can try WinMyth.

WinMyth is a windows frontend to MythTv. It connects to your linux backend and acts just like any other mythfrontend.

What decade you living in? (ivtv)

[LordKazan]

All my expirience with mythTV has been: PVR-150 and PVR-500 are very stable on the ivtv drivers