For a long time I've been wanting to setup the ultimate media center on one of my machines -- something that unifies serving video, music, and any other random whims that I might have. Obviously one option is the TiVo w/ HMO, but unfortunately DirecTV prefers to not release this feature. Besides, if I ever wanted to write my own plugins to the system, it's not nearly as hackable as an open source project would be.

Along comes MythTV -- A Linux-based open source PVR system. This thing is really developing quickly and is a really slick little system. I've been sort of on the bleeding edge with it the past couple of weeks by immediately buying a WinTV PVR250, which has both an alpha driver for linux and alpha support in MythTV. But personally, I didn't want to buy a sweet machine just to handle MPEG encoding/decoding. Well it turns out I chose wisely, because both the IVTV driver team and the MythTV team are moving very quickly wrt the PVR250.

Just thought I'd pass it along ... It has some serious potential.

http://www.mythtv.org -- for the MythTV page
http://ivtv.sourceforge.net -- for the PVR250 driver page

Looks very interesting. Do keep us posted on your experiences!

Ditto. I have had it running on an old test machine quite well, although I've just bought some decent hardware to allow higher res capturing. Quite a bit of mucking around to get it to work properly though. It's not a job for a newbie. Although commercial, I had a crack with ShowShifter and it's very easy to get going.

What OS are you using? I'm a bit of a redhat zealot and I'm trying RH9 on my new box.

I guess you are aware Isaac (the developer) has bought himself a PVR250? i.e. it will almost definitely work eventually since he has one.

Where did you get your PVR250 from? I'm still looking for a reasonably priced one - although I'll need a PAL one which will make it harder of course.

I was about to post a 'anyone tried this post' and here's one already

I've had a number of issues trying to get this to work - mainly want it for all the functions that arent PVR.

The Music/Picture store/games element with surfing is what I want to add to the TV, as in the UK SKY+ gives all the PVR stuff intergrated into the Direct Sat feed.

I'll retry my installation, but it barfs, any gotcha's you know of?

Im installing into Redhat 9.

Yeah -- I actually decided to buy the 250 because I saw he bought one... I got my 250 from Computers4Sure.com for $138.

I'm using a RH9 box as well.... My biggest problem right now is that I thing the motherboard I have has some incompatibilites with either the video card or my sound card, because I manage to get hard lockups pretty consistently.

One annoying thing with RH9 is getting ALSA to work properly -- there's an unresolved symbol in the snd.o driver, so I had to actually modify the source a little to get it to work (which could be my problem right there).

I definitely agree that trying to get this thing installed is not for the thin skinned ... it's definitely been a pain in the butt. But once it works, it's pretty cool

ms

I haven't done any of the mythmusic or other plugin stuff yet -- pretty much been focused on the PVR aspect. There are about 1000 gotchas waiting for you It's pretty much a must that you get on the mythtv mailing lists. There's a ton of good info the archives on there as well.

ms

Thanks for the heads up on the mailing list, subscribing now.

I've completely failed trying to get mythmusic and mythgame to install. But I moved on to those when MythTV didnt built its database properly.

Just tooooooooo eagre

I'm currently having issues with it not finding the files it recorded. I've narrowed it down to it getting a funky time from the database and since the files are named by time and channel, it can't find the file. I'm guessing you're not having this problem? No one else seems to have it either. Just me I guess. I have a feeling it _might_ be something to do with my dodgy program guide downloader.

I had the same prob with RH8 (I gave up quickly and decided to start from scratch with RH9) but 7.3 was OK.

I'm using a nForce board with little drama. I had to modify the audio drivers to work with the RH9 kernel though. I'm not using ALSA just whatever RH9 comes with as standard (OSS?) and it works (or worked with RH8) fine.

This stuff is brilliant! I've just bought a PVR-250 card and installed it in my server. In the short space of two days i've already decided to build a htpc, buy a couple of hundred gigs of space, a dtt card for freeview and I'm currently building a scan convertor. Combine this with XMLTV and the web interface (see the attached example) and I think I'm onto a winner!

To think I was going to buy a tivo! (no offence to tivo owners)

I've got a DirecTivo as well as Shuttle PC with an All-In-Wonder (terrestrial cable) in it. Plus regular satellite receiver that I'll be replacing with a PCI DVB-s card in the computer. I'll likely run MyHTPC as a front end to this or that TV softare. I've been running ony the ATI SW without a front-end media library program which just doesn't cut it to give that consumer interface. There's a ton of free-to-air content in the UK that you can pick up right away with something like a Hauppauge or Twinhan Vision Plus card (provided you have, or mount, a dish )

Bruno

I haven't had much time to dedicate to my MythTV since that original post, but even then it showed a lot of potential ... I will say that the overall polish on TiVo was way better (sort of classic Linux vs Commercial thing). But obviously there is a huge potential to do tons of cool stuff with the open source version. Keep us updated as you play around with it more ... I may just have to go back to it.

ms

Know of any other-the-air programming guides for us northerners?

Cheers

It's a nova-t that i'm getting, I can't have the nova-s as SWMBO won't let me put a mini dish up. But the nova-t should give me 30 odd channels, plus I can record direct without lots of transcoding. I'm about to give the plastic a bashing at my friendly local computer store (who know me by my first name now).

Have you had a look at this one?- digital terrestial, I've had a few teething problems with reception, mainly not of their making, but they are nice people and the support is excellent, as is the development programme: http://www.nebula-electronics.com/, I went for the USB version, but I think that the PCI card is a better bet
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I read somewhere that the Nova-t doesn't have a recording scheduler.

The only solution for a Canadian guide that I know of at this time (that doesn't come bundled with an ATI All In Wonder product) is to scrape from zap2it and then convert to XML with XMLTV. Then display the guide with a front-end application that reads the XML data. There should be an assortment for Linux. The only acceptable Windows clients I know of are the built-in guide in MyHTPC, "TVHolic" a stand-alone guide developed for use with MyHTPC, and the guide that comes with Snapstream (need to convert the XML to their proprietary db format first).

Zap2it has channel info for cable and satellite, excluding PPV channels.

Otherwise, again for Windows, ATI's multimedia products come with the absolutely HORRIBLE GuidePlus from Gemstar. I've already mentioned in another thread that any other guide solution on a persnal computer violates Gemstar patents.

Bruno

The nova-t is supported under linux, which is what I need. The lack of scheduler isn't a problem as Myth does that all for you. I'll definately have a look, I have a feeling it probably uses the same chipset as the hauppauge ones anyway. There only appears to be a couple of different kinds.

Amen on the Gemstar comments. That guide program is horrid. Thanks for the other suggestions, as I'm using myHTPC all the time now to watch all my downloaded shows.

So, after all the hype about mythtv, i finally downloaded fedora, and setup a P4 2.4 (600+mb ram) with mythTv. I even purchased a PVR-250 after my PCTVrave card was looking like crap.

I'm formatted this box about a dozen times, finally have everything loaded correctly.
http://www.wilsonet.com/mythtv/ is the site i used to setup everything.

But, the mythtv frontend locks up while watching live tv, after maybe 10-15minutes of relaxing. The main error i see is over and over again is "Unable to write to client socket, as it's no longer there"

I'll see this error if i setup a program to record, it will record at max of 25mins before locking up.

If the backend is recording a show, and the frontend isn't even open, it usually will completely lockup fedora.

Below is the dump from my backend log of mythtv

Starting up as the master server.
2004-01-30 22:31:52 Enabled verbose msgs : important general
2004-01-30 22:31:54 Found changes in the todo list.
2004-01-30 22:32:08 MainServer::HandleAnnounce Playback
2004-01-30 22:32:08 adding: localhost.localdomain as a player 0
2004-01-30 22:32:08 MainServer::HandleAnnounce Playback
2004-01-30 22:32:08 adding: localhost.localdomain as a player 1
2004-01-30 22:32:08 MainServer::HandleAnnounce Playback
2004-01-30 22:32:08 adding: localhost.localdomain as a player 0
2004-01-30 22:32:08 MainServer::HandleAnnounce Playback
2004-01-30 22:32:08 adding: localhost.localdomain as a player 0
2004-01-30 22:32:08 adding: localhost.localdomain as a remote ringbuffer
2004-01-30 22:32:08 Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV
Couldn't read data from the capture card in 15 seconds. Game over, man.
Unable to write to client socket, as it's no longer there

I've already submitted pretty much the same thing to the myth list, but i'm thinking it may be an ivtv driver program, i'm pretty sure its a beta driver.

I've got two systems currently running myth one backend and one frontend. Both are gentoo builds are running 2.6 kernels using the CVS versions of Myth and dvb-kernel. I did encounter something similar but that was to do with Suse's broken Qt build and a much earlier version of myth (somewhere around .11). It does work, I've currently got PiP working using channels from different muxes, which is cool.

I have to say, I hardly ever use rpms or packages, although I use the emerge function in gentoo. I'd recommend you download the sources for myth and IVTV and build them yourself.