Linux smart homes for dummies - part 5 pps

Chapter 6

Building a Personal Video

Recorder with MythTV

In This Chapter

Building your personal video recorder (PVR)

Watching TV

Managing your recordings

Managing your media

One of the things I like about running Linux as my operating system is the

availability of a large number of open source, free programs. One such

program I use is MythTV; with it, I have converted an old, rarely used PC to

a personal video recorder (PVR), and now it’s one of the most used PCs in

my house.

Most people know what a PVR is, and many people have commercial versions

such as TiVo or proprietary PVRs supplied by the cable or satellite compa￾nies. With a PVR, you can pause live TV and record whatever you desire

whenever you desire. Typically, you have to pay a subscription fee to TiVo or

your cable or satellite provider for the privilege of using its PVR. But, if you

have an old PC, you can build your own PVR for little or no cost — and you

won’t have to pay a subscription fee either — by downloading and installing

MythTV. MythTV lets you build your own PVR, download TV programming

information, watch, pause, and record live TV, as well as schedule recordings.

But MythTV can do so much more: With MythTV, you can gain complete con￾trol of all your online media content and access the Internet for news and

weather information. This chapter shows you how to build your MythTV

system.

Note: The MythTV program is very complex and could fill an entire For

Dummies book alone. The information in this chapter tells you how to set up

and configure a basic MythTV system. I highly recommend that you do some

research on your own and explore the MythTV information that is available on

the Web. A good place to start is the MythTV official site at www.mythtv.org.

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Building Your MythTV PVR

In the following sections, you find out how to set up your PC hardware to use

with MythTV. You must meet some specific hardware requirements before

you can install and configure MythTV. After you configure your hardware, you

download, install, and configure MythTV.

Selecting the hardware

The first consideration for using MythTV is choosing and configuring the hard￾ware that the system will use. Your hardware must meet some basic require￾ments, and I include a list of required hardware items and their purposes.

You can set up MythTV in several different configurations by using one PC as

the master backend unit (not connected to the TV) and another as the front￾end unit (connected to the TV). Or, you can use one PC for both the backend

and frontend units. In this chapter, you find out about using one PC for both

the backend and frontend units. Just about any recent PC that is capable of

running Linux should have enough processing power to run MythTV. The fol￾lowing list shows the basics. Following the list of generic hardware types, I

list the specific hardware I used when I set up my system.

Generic hardware types

This list shows generic types of hardware that you need to set up your

system with MythTV:

CPU: Pentium II class or higher CPU. (This includes AMD CPUs, as well.)

RAM: A 256MB minimum.

Hard drive: Any ATA 66/100/133, 30GB or larger for storing video.

Sound card: An onboard or a PCI card. (Nearly any card will work.)

Video card: An onboard or a PCI/AGP card. (The card must have a TV

out port to connect to TV.)

Optical drive: Required only if you want to play or record CD/DVDs.

Video capture card: Used to get the video into your PC. MythTV sup￾ports many kinds.

Because it isn’t possible for me to discuss every type of hardware that might

work with MythTV in this section, I recommend that you check out http://

mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1 (to find more detailed

information about hardware requirements) and http://pvrhw.goldfish.

org/tiki-pvrhwdb.php (to find a list of many hardware configurations

known to work with MythTV). You can save yourself a lot of time and aggra￾vation if you configure your system with hardware that is known to work with

MythTV.

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I followed my own advice and made sure that my hardware would work

before I downloaded, installed, and configured MythTV.

My system-specific hardware

Here’s the specific hardware I am using on my system:

Motherboard: Shuttle AK32A

CPU: AMD Athlon 1800

RAM: 1GB pc133

Hard drive: Seagate 7200rpm ATA100 80GB

Sound card: onboard AC97

Video card: XFX GeForce FX 256mb TV/DVI AGP

Video capture: Plextor PX-M402U

Optical drive: Generic DVD+/-RW, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, CD-ROM

NIC: onboard Realtek

Regardless of which hardware you decide to use, be sure to properly install

and configure it before you begin to install and configure MythTV. I can’t

know what hardware you’re using, so I leave it to you to be sure it’s working

properly. I can only repeat; be sure you select hardware that is known to

work with MythTV!

Installing MythTV

When you have hardware that is compatible with MythTV and you know it

is properly configured, you’re ready to install MythTV. My instructions are

based on using Fedora Core 4 (FC4) as the Linux distribution, but you can

also run MythTV with SUSE or Debian and Debian-based distributions such

as Knoppix or Linspire.

Note: If you’re running FC4 or SUSE, you can follow the instructions here

using yum for the installation. If you’re running Debian or a Debian-based dis￾tribution, you can use the apt-get command instead of yum to do your

installation.

Before you begin the installation, you have some prep work to do:

Install the drivers required by your specific hardware and be sure

your hardware is working properly. You are using hardware supported

by MythTV, aren’t you?

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