Last month I picked up a book on "Hacking MythTV" and it inspired me to rebuild my MythTV box. Well, let me start at the beginning.
Two years ago I decided to take advantage of the free cable I was hardly watching by using a digital video recorder. But TiVo's subscription model was kind of lame. But when I heard about the open-source project "MythTV", which promised not only to turn moderate-to-low class hardware into your own personal (and subscription-free) DVR, I jumped at the chance to do it myself and have some fun messing around with Linux (which is what it runs on.)
The first time around, I ran into a lot of problems. I had some spare hardware, but I picked up a giant hard drive on sale from Best Buy and a Hauppauge PVR-150 tv tuner card from Newegg.com, and installed them into a PC small enough to fit under my TV.
Back in those days, nobody had put together a unified install, so I spent a few days downloading and burning install discs for Fedora Core 4 Linux, from Red Hat, which I was somewhat familiar with from college. Then I downloaded MythTV and installed it using a package manager called "yum", and that got me all the assorted packages and elements than MythTV depends on. (Yum downloads dependencies so you don't have to.)
I ran into a problem using a wireless ethernet card (the idea being so that I wouldn't have to run a network cable out to the living room.) No one had yet developed a native Linux driver for the model of card I bought (should have checked that beforehand instead of just looking for the best deal.) In the end I used a program called "ndiswrapper" to employ the Windows driver that shipped with the card. That occupied the bulk of three weeks, getting that to work.
In the end I had a barely-functioning system that seemed to only hold together if I didn't touch it. Every 10 days or so I would have to reboot the box to make the wireless card work again (never understood why). Of course, any time I went out of town for more than three days, it would stop working in the middle of that and record nothing at all.
Recently, armed with a new book out on MythTV boxes, I decided to take another crack at it. Rather than lose the database records of what I had set up to record (about 35 different shows, set up by different priorities), I was able to back up the database to another computer.
Then I got ready to rebuild it. I swapped out the old processor for a faster one that had become available from upgrades to another machine (there's like 4-5 computers in my apartment) and dropped in some more memory and some quieter fans.
By this time, several groups were offering Linux distros specially geared for MythTV installation, and a
recent article found that MythDora was the most full-featured and easiest to install. It's based on Fedora Core 6 (and one of the authors of the book I got is a contributor to the project.) Installation was very simple. By now, native drivers were available for my network card so I was able to avoid the nightmare of ndiswrapper.
All in all, it was done in two days. Plus, with the help of my book and an expanded MythTV community, I was able to extend my box with new features. I was able to connect it to DVD's stored on my workstation's hard drives, and it plays an array of classic Super Nintendo games via emulation, thanks to a 20-dollar Logitech gamepad.
Anybody else have MythTV war stories? Or have an interest in time-shifting television but haven't taken the plunge? I get more enjoyment out of my MythTV box (which I affectionately call "Caliban") than any other computer I've built.
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