One part of the installation was also a module called mythweb and this results in delivering your back-end services and all the TV guide in a web accessible format. I use this all the time either from my notebook I have set on the coffee table I can view the  guide for what is showing and easily select programs and assign more recordings.

Also from here I find that the configuration part of this provides a much easier channel editor list. You can more easily select the channels you want disabled and alter their titles easily but beware, this can lead to tricky config items that you should not touch.

You can also see the recorded programs in here and it shows some wonderful information. Even a regular 1 hour show takes around 3 Gig of drive space, but here it shows that there is an auto-expiry on most of these recordings meaning that when the drive gets full, new programs will push off the oldest programs as required.

Also, I have allowed this to be available externally which allows me to make changes to my schedule from work or even from my web-enabled mobile phone.

When selecting shows for recording you have access to many options. Some of those I like to use is to extend recordings automatically to start 2 mins early and finish about 7 mins late ensuring that the station doesn’t make my shows get cut-off. This is normally great but it also means I need two capture cards as they often overlap. You can set priorities on shows so regular items like reruns of Seinfeld I may put on a low priority that get bumped if there is a conflict.

When you have two cards (and if your not recording anything) you can even do PIP (or picture-in-picture) where one channel is shown full screen and a secondary one is shown in a smaller window.

To get to this and many other options, while viewing a channel hit the ‘m’ key for a menu. In here you can change the picture mode and adjust audio syncing if your having any issues with that. You can even view the TV guide while watching TV, it’s all very easy to access and try.

NEXT: References for more help

The MythTV back-end setup program is mainly focused around configuration of the DTV card and the station channels that are linked to it. Once this is done then there is little reason to go back to this area of the program. This also contains the on-screen settings for the theme displayed while in playback/viewing mode.

Most of the setup options though are available from within the front-end program itself, and there are many to consider. Feel free to try out other themes that are installed, particularly wide-screen ones and others that may be to your liking.

There are a lot of options and things you can change, but do be careful with what you play with and do things your unsure about one change at a time before your try them.

If this is your first real venture into linux like me you may find a few areas that you need to develop your skills on, as mentioned before, access to the terminal program and navigating around is a new experience. Compiling and installing fixes and changes can be an experience, but I have found that if you hunt around a bit, many of the helpful people who provide answers to these questions usually asked before, or perhaps sought by you are good in providing step-by-step answers, some of which I point to in the reference section later on.

Personally I am very happy with the basic installation, addition of the DTV cards, TV Guide data as described and a nice theme is basically the main things I have configured. From there it’s a matter of using it and getting the most out of you media experience.

NEXT: Enjoying the experience

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 to 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

This is an open-sourced program that runs on a Linux operating system and a PC based computer. I am not a linux expert or guru but with a basic system knowledge and some time you can get this program running with a TV and a DTV card to watch and record television with some other TIVO like features and more.

So what are the benefits of watching TV using a computer?

You can record programs to a hard disk and watch them later (skipping the commercials), pause live TV (if you get a phone call), archive recordings to DVD and so much more.

TIVO is a very popular US device that provides many of these type of features, however additionally to the above Mythtv is open-source so people have made additional plug-in options. Some of these include modules to view the local weather, browse the web, get news and other feeds, store and play music and even use voip phones like skype through the system and it’s network connection. It truly becomes a flexible media system

You can also link multiple systems together on a home network and watch various things in different places in your house and share media to your family home through the system.

Probably more than you need to know at the moment, the reason your here is to get the easiest way to make your own PVR (Personal Video Recorder)

MythTV works in two main parts, the back-end and front-end.

• The Back-end is the engine that does recording and storage of the programs and holds all the data. It could be called a server as it provides all the back-end-services to the system.
• The Front-end is the controlling systems and viewing portal to the media and services. This part lets you flag programs to record, play and watch live and recorded programs and interact with the system.

For a big home system you may want to run this on multiple computers on a network, even having multiple front-ends to do that task in various places at the same time. This can be extended and done later, for this example I am going to deliver MythTV on one decent computer and running both the Back-end system and Front-end services at a reasonable price and as simple as possible.

MythTV and all of the information about it can be found at MythTV.org but for most people you will find it confusing to say the least. This is a program that requires a computer, extra hardware and it runs on a Linux operating system.

Linux comes in a variety of flavors and versions, like Windows has 98, XP, Vista etc, so does Linux have Red Hat, Free BSD and many many others. If you know linux you probably wont get much from my article, but you will know which you may prefer to use for this project, for the rest of you however we are going to select Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a version of linux that is quite user friendly and installs easily. You can get it and a lot of information from here if you want to start from scratch if course, but I have one more trick up my sleeve before we begin.

MythBuntu is a pre-configured version of the two, an Operating system with a ready-to-go version of Mythtv. It comes as a complete file download ready to put on a CD and use as a boot disk to start and configure a new computer.

We will be getting the Mythbuntu from here as an ISO image, a ready to make into a CD image that most computers can download and create.

Yes, we already are on the weird-naming of things and it may be getting confusing so to recap.

We are going to setup a blank/new computer to run MythTV on a Linux operating system called Ubuntu, and it will be good, and hopefully (maybe 7 days) we can rest and enjoy, and it will be called Mythbuntu.

Next Article: Selecting the Hardware