Originally published July 25 2005
MythTV: Easy personal video recording with Linux
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
MythTV uses a client/server architecture that divides the application into two distinct parts: The front end, which provides the on-screen interface and the display of the media, and the back end, which deals with the recording of the shows and other background jobs. Many computer gurus are using a Linux box to create new user-oriented TiVo-like digital media systems that are much more cost effective.
MythTV lets users watch live TV and record shows, search TV listings, and burn recorded shows to a DVD.
MythTV uses a client/server architecture, which divides the application into two distinct parts: the front end, which provides the on-screen interface and the display of the media; and the back end, which deals with the recording of the shows and other background jobs.
There are ports for Windows and the Mac as well, but these only run the front end -- you'll still need a Linux box for the back end.
The downside of using MythTV is that there are still some things that you have to set up by hand, such as the MySQL database MythTV uses, TV-out, and Lirc, if you plan to use a remote with MythTV.
The DVD playback doesn't work by default as well, for legal reasons (but it's easy to enable, don't worry).
And since the plugins rely on external apps for their functionality (like MPlayer for video and DVD playback and Xmame for games), you also have to make sure that you have them installed.
If you want to use your box exclusively as a media center, try KnoppMyth, a Linux distro based on Knoppix, aimed solely at providing an out-of-the-box system optimized for MythTV.
If you need to install something, just fire up Synaptic or use apt-get install.
You can use a machine running at lower CPU speeds (a 700MHz AMD Duron, for instance); however, in that case you'll need a capture card that can do MPEG-1/2 hardware encoding and decoding, such as the Hauppauge PVR-350.
You'll probably want a DVD writer as well if you intend to make personal backups or copies of your recordings for friends and family.
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