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.

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