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ythTV is a collection of soft-

ware tools for TV in Linux.

The MythTV website [1] calls

MythTV “a GPL-licensed suite of pro-

grams that allow you to build a mythi-

cal home media convergence box on

your own using Open Source software

and operating systems.” MythTV

provides an interface from your

computer to your cable or sat-

ellite television service. You can

use MythTV to pause, rewind,

or fast forward television pro-

grams. MythTV with a video

capture card lets you record TV

programs. And MythTV runs on

a network-ready Linux system,

so you can configure several

front-end devices in your house

to view and access a common set

of video resources.

At first glance, MythTV looks like

nothing more than a Open Source

clone of Tivo – a hard-disk-based video

recorder that’s basically a digital version

of a VCR. But MythTV offers much more

functionality than Tivo. Yes, it can re-

cord, pause, and playback your favor-

ite TV shows, but it also offers a huge

suite of add-on applications that can do

much more. Also, because MythTV is an

Open Source project, it is not feature-en-

cumbered like many of the commercial

DVR systems. For example, MythTV pro-

vides automatic commercial skipping.

On the other hand, although you used

to be able to hack your Tivo to skip

commercials, Tivo is now implementing

flash-based pop-up advertisements

that will display when the user is fast

forwarding.

The MythTV project was started by

Isaac Richards in 2002 and has devel-

oped into a very active community that

is constantly implementing new features

and add-ons. (See the box titled

“MythTV Add-ons.”) These features

make MythTV the first true home media

center. Best of all it, was developed and

implemented entirely on Linux. Ports of

MythTV also exist for Apple OSX and

FreeBSD.

Modular Design

The MythTV suite is modular in design.

The main application includes a front

end and a back end. The back end is

where the scheduling of recordings takes

place. A MySQL database houses pro-

gramming information and catalogs re-

cordings currently residing on the sys-

tem. A user interacts with the applica-

tion through the front-end GUI. The

front end may or may not reside on the

same computer as the back end data-

base. You could build one master

MythTV server that holds all of your dig-

ital media. Multiple clients could then

access the server over the network.

Some creative MythTV client set-

ups have included X-boxes and

bootstrapped diskless set top

devices.

You can set up a dedicated

MythTV server, or you can even

set up MythTV on your main

workstation and let it act as the

server portion of your home digi-

tal media center. You’ll find nu-

merous HowTo documents on

configuring MythTV with almost

all of the popular Linux distribu-

tions (Debian, Fedora, Gentoo,

Slackware, Suse, Ubuntu, etc.).

For this article, I will build a dedi-

cated MythTV box that will act as

both a client and server. For this pur-

pose, I will use a small, specialized

PC that will reside with the rest of the

audio/ video equipment inside of a

stereo component rack.

Getting the Hardware

The heart of a MythTV box is the TV

tuner card. MythTV is flexible enough to

use anything from raw video capture

cards (that do not encode the video) to

high definition cards. Although raw tun-

ers cards such as those based on the

BT878 chipset are the cheapest, they will

be the most taxing to your system. All

the encoding will be done by the CPU.

This may be an issue if you want to

watch a previously recorded show while

recording another program.

The solution to this problem is to use

a hardware-based encoder card that will

encode the captured video signal on the

fly to a standardized video format.

MythTV and its extensive ecosystem of add-ons let you turn your Linux computer into a full-featured home

media center.

BY PATRICK DAVILA

Building a home media center with MythTV

TV IN LINUX

Joachim Angeltun, Fotolia

MythTV

KNOW-HOW

ISSUE 71 OCTOBER 2006

W W W . L I N U X

M A G A Z I N E . C O M

1 2 3 4 5 6

TV IN LINUX 1
KNOW-HOW 2

Shrnutí obsahu

Strany 1 - TV IN LINUX

52MythTV is a collection of soft-ware tools for TV in Linux. The MythTV website [1] calls MythTV “a GPL-licensed suite of pro-grams that allow you to

Strany 2 - KNOW-HOW

53MPEG2 is the current standard video compression format used around the world. The biggest drawback of MPEG2 files is that they are quite large. 1 ho

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ment is 256 MB. One area where you shouldn’t hold back in spending is hard drive capacity. Basically, more is better. I recommend getting at least a 2

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australia-optus). The next couple of screens will have some back-end job options, such as if you want to use autostart and transcode after recording s

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thinking the user is changing the chan-nels via the receivers remote control. You can construct your own IR-blaster if you’re moderately handy with a

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your local weather forecast, along with screen captures of Doppler radar for your local region (Figure 4). (This fea-ture is based on an interface wit