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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?"
I'm not sure what I can add to the subject
"Get a Mac Mini and Elgato EyeTV"
The Mac Mini is small, quiet, uses very little power and the Elgato products are fantastic.
Scrap your Intel box and Gentoo
I know I really shouldn't be taking the bait, but...
I just re-built my Myth box from scratch. Gentoo stage3, PVR-250 (ivtv), 400G LVM (3 physical drives), etc etc, and the entire install and setup only took about 4 hours. It was extremely painless and I did not encounter any road blocks. Guess I just want others to realize it isn't as bad as some people make it seem.
Note: I have been running Gentoo and MythTV for a few years, so, I know my hardware and installation process pretty well by now.
Shiney!
.mkv wrapper stuff, maybe .m4a playback compatibility) and Samba. For bonus points you might want to make sure you had a decent CLI bittorrent client, and some nice way to get torrent linkies to all your favorite fansub sites. :)
I'd just make sure that you got all the codecs you could think of for mplayer (things like the AAC plugins for Xvid, the
The most compelling reason, to me, for having a myth box is the ability to play back absolutely *anything* - so I'd seek to maximise that by going nuts on the codecs.
-EvilMagnus
In the installation information for Myth, it mentions workarounds for digital cable boxes. As I remember it, you can use an IR Blaster, which is basically an IR transmitter that sends the channel changing commands to the receiver. The other option is to control it with a serial cable. Apparently, the cable companies developed that possibility for Tivo, and it's been hacked into Myth. I would think that whatever tech the cable companies use, they will make sure it works with Tivo. Then someone out there will hopefully make that work with Myth. I have no idea how well any of these work though, as I don't have digital cable.