MythTV

I haven't been blogging for the last few weeks as my spare time (normally late at night) has been taken up with experimenting with MythTV. MythTV is a really neat collection of programs for turning a Linux computer into personal video recorder (PDR).

I've been playing around with Linux for a year or so, but I haven't found anything in particular that I could really test my Linux system with. About a month ago I saw a Linux magazine that featured Mythbuntu. This is a special release of Ubuntu with all the MythTV software bundled in. After reading the magazine, I thought I'd give it a go.

I installed the most recent release of Ubuntu 8.10, installed the MythTV software and bought a cheap Hauppage WinTV tuner card from EBay. As I have found with all things Linux, nothing is easy. I followed the helpful guide here to get going, but there are lots of annoying little details that need to be sorted out that you don't get told about. E.g. changing ownership of files and sorting out video card settings.

I have just about got it working the way I want to. I can schedule recordings and watch them back, watch (and pause) live TV and watch pre-recorded videos (with added IMDB meta data). There are a couple of things that I haven't quite figured out yet.

• Automatically stripping adverts from a recorded TV show


• Transcoding the standard MPEG2 format into DIVX (The standard format takes about 2GB an hour)


• Playing back through the TV

The first two of these are reasonably standard features, I just need to spend a little more time fiddling around. The third one is proving more difficult. I running Ubuntu on my old Toshiba laptop. My thinking was that, once I had recorded programs, I could take the laptop away and watch the programs at my convenience. Also, it makes it easier if I need to use a keyboard to enter data. The problem is that the laptop has a Trident Cyberblade video card and, as far as I can tell, Ubuntu only has decent support for nVidia and ATI video cards. There doesn't appear to be any way to get an output from my s-video output. I have found that I can get a VGA output working, so there may be a workaround with this bit of kit. I don't give up easily!

If I get all this working, the next thing will be to connect up a remote control and connect up my regular media player (previously my best ever gadget buy) to the MythTV setup as external storage for my movies.

As I normally do, I'll spend weeks of late nights playing around with some new gadget, then lose interest for a while. I think I'll keep at this one for a while though. We'll see...