Installing the Software

Download and make a CD from the Mythbuntu site. I am now using version 8 which is great and for some time was running the version 7 before it which was fine. Since I am using 64 bit hardware, particularly with an AMD processor I get the 64 bit software but many of you will just get the standard release for Intel 32 bit here as a large 530Mb ISO image ready to transfer and make into a bootable CD. You might use MagicISO to convert the download and cut it onto a writable disc.

Installing the Mythbuntu is fairly easy, the disc is ready to insert into a fresh machine and standard gui based options and questions will guide you through the process much like Windows or Mac OSX does.

You might find that linux (ubuntu) does things a little differently to windows, overall it’s a lot faster and it can format a clean hard drive in moments rather than minutes, the whole process should only take 10-15 minutes to complete.

Standard stuff about connecting to your LAN and selecting any other hardware options are par for the course and detailed in the installation guide.

The main area I have had difficulty with is video drivers. For three days no matter what I did, about 1 inch all around the screen was oversized and not visible on my TV. The top toolbar was just out of view and so many options I couldn’t quite get too. I sweated trying to get some nice nvidia drivers installed but eventually went to my TV remote and clicked the ‘mode’ button where it changed from 16:9 (widescreen) to ‘Just Scan’ and the picture retuned perfectly. It wasn’t the machines fault at all but a TV setting, darn these things. OK, even with that in mind you will probably want to install the best drivers you can for your video card. Ubuntu is pretty good with regular drivers but once you have things settled down this is a preferred option. Much of the Myth software menus are OpenGL and the performance will be improved by using the best drivers for the card you have, it may also help with TV viewing but not always.

Within this setup are some questions about the MytTV product. For me on a single machine, I selected to run as a back-end AND front-end system with all the basic options and themes.

You will also need to select (and remember) an account login and password.

The official Installation Manual goes into a lot more and I recommend you look at this before diving in and while going through the options but generally it’s all nice gui options with help links and mostly self explanatory.

At this point, the system should have rebooted, started and come up with the Mythbuntu system and then started MythTV.
You should see a frontend screen with these main options presented.

Installing this is the easy part, the difficult part is configuring your DTV card, TV guide and any other additional services (including add-on drives). Be assured however, that at this point you have all the required mpg encoders and codecs that you will ever need and they will all work very well. You are well on your way and more advanced at this point than I have ever managed to get windows.

Hit ESC and confirm ‘Yes to exit’ the MythTV software which will return you to the main Ubuntu desktop.

Up in the top-right next to your network connection you may see an icon that alerts you to updates, either here or through the menu/administration/update manager you will be able to select and install all the available updates and patches for the system and components you have on your system. Many of these install quickly and easily, some require restarts but rarely.

In the menu/system/package manager you can search and select from the many additional software packages and modules available. Choose from many games, browsers or other utilities here and install them easily.

A little point about linux and usernames and passwords.
Your login gives you limited access to things and this is used automatically by the user manager as the desktop login when started, but as we will find when doing changes to the system configurations and even perhaps with the tools above, you will be required to confirm yourself as a system administrator, or Super User (SU). When prompted for a password just use the same password again and that should get you through.

Many things in linux are done in a terminal window accessed from the menu. some quick commands to use here I have detailed on another page but many require super user privileges to do. From here you often have to ‘sudo command’ to make it happen properly. sudo is short for ‘Super User DO’ so when editing text files or running scripts that change the system, this will be required.

In the Menu/Administration/Myth Backend Setup some basic configuration and options are available to establish your DTV cards and your TV Guide data.

Go into General and change any options that require it, many others will be here but leave them as most wont need to be altered.

Go into Capture Cards and add a ‘New card’ and from in here select your model of card and it’s type. Most cards will be detected by the system and discovered as you add it, confirming that it’s essentially working at this point.

Adding the video source includes your guide data. Mythtv has many configuration scripts here for many countries around the world, so select yours and move on.

For us in Australia we have an issue. Guide data is not publically available so we have to obtain it through various other methods. For some time I have been subscribing at a small cost to IceTV who provide a module and instructions to include a localised tv schedule. They provide instructions on how to do this but it’s required to progress to the next step.

Once this is done and linked you should be able to scan for channels and actually see the capture card find and identify information delivered through the free to air TV services.

There are also some options to edit the channels and make other changes, downloading TV channel icons and all that are good options, but for now not necessary, we can come back to these later.

Complete the backend setup and exit.

When exiting out of the backend, the program presumes some changes were made and it asks to run the mythfilldatabase program. This is the script that gets the TV guide data and puts that information into the MythTV program. In most cases you would select yes and let this occur now.

Mythfilldatabase needs to be run fairly often to get new guide information, probably daily is a good idea and we will show ways of setting this soon. For now we should have some downloaded and set for your channels.

Return to the MythTV frontend from the menu/multimedia/MythTV

The first option here is to ‘WatchTV’ (press enter) which will start the process of getting the media through the card, buffering it to hard disk temporarily and then showing it to you on screen.

If this works without glitches and bumps and pauses of any kind then you have done really well. In reality you are like t
o encounter some problems.

You can use the up/down arrow keys to select channels and then Enter to activate/change to them

You can press ‘P’ to pause the live TV and then use the arrows (left and right) to scan through the video and catch up through the buffered content.

ESC to exit this back to the menu.

Well done, at this point you should have the very basics of the program and functionality installed and running.

Next: Making the configuration changes customisations