The big thing is the ability to decode digital television signals and turn them into a picture or recording. This is done with set-top-boxes, digital DVD recorders, Tivo, Foxtel IQ’s and everything in that line. The limitation is always that you want to watch one and record another, and for this you would need two decoders.

My TV has a built in decoder, but only one at a time, it doesn’t let me do much with the picture-in-picture ability because that would require two decoders. Even back in the day of a simple video recorder, one channel at a time, and always it seems two good movies were on the same night so neighbour or family friend to help out and coordinate and swap tapes later.

This can even get a little more involved. What if one show finishes at 8:30 and the next one starts on a different station at 8:30? Do you think you will get your recoding times right, will the stations be dead on and not run overtime, fat chance.

To solve this I have three (yes 3) decoder cards in my Myth TV box. Not only could I record up to three things at once (which did happen occasionally) but also I can set a show to record from 7:30-8:30 and have a 9 minute over-run, and while that’s happening start a new one from (a little before) 8:30 and not miss anything.

So having three decoder cards almost filling the slots in my PC is enough right? Well no, it’ still happened that with this overlapping and all the new digital stations here in Aus now that there was still conflict.

This can be helped a little with priorities. When setting a recording you can set a priority so in preference to others, some are ‘not-to-miss’ +50, some are ‘don’t-care’ –50 and all levels in between. If a conflict occurs then the lowest priorities are just not recorded… Not good enough

The solution now is that decoder cards may actually record more than one thing at a time.

MythTV now allows for multiplexing. This means that two channels from the same carrier (like 7, 7HD and 7Two) all work on the same basic signal elements and can each be decoded on one card at the same time.

When you setup the decoding card info in the ‘back-end’ there is a ‘recoding options’ button and you can bump up the ‘number of simultaneous’ recordings above the default 1. I probably suggest only setting this two 2 in the first test. But now with each of my cards set to 2 I have 6 decoder cards listed. Yes, there are some limitations but Myth works this out as to what can be allocated to each of the virtual decoder cards at the same time, what will work and what wont.

My first test included two shows running inline. I like ‘Big Bang Theory’ and they show runs of these and Seinfeld etc on channel GO! Marathon sessions, or in this case at least two in a row.

On a video I would set and record the two one hour shows from 7:30 – 9:30, simple. With these systems however, they go by the TV guide and set each shows start and end time separately, thus two recordings, with padding, in a row. Normally this would take two decoder cards, during the transition, to handle the overlap.

Now with multiplexing, it recorded the overlap simply with the one card and left the other two free for other shows and movies on at the same time, which happens.

Just a quick note for now, to let you know some cool tricks, I will look at writing up my minor issues soon.

Seriously, with a decent PC attached to a TV and a Digital Decoder Card it will provide you with digital TV viewing, recording and many other multi-media features.

But is it that simple?

The reality is no. It takes a bit of tinkering and fiddling to get the setup right and have everything working the way that you want it to.

But are those issues unexpected?
Also the answer is no. If a buy a Tivo I would expect to bring it home, plug it in and turn it on and play with all the menus to set it up. Usually this would just be easy and work, I would be slightly disappointed with the options available to me, the limitations and restrictions placed on the system, knowing that it could allow more if they let me. I would be pushed toward buying and pay-per-view add-ons, all those things that would make me shrug my shoulders and say, well at least the family can use it and it’s recording/playing stuff and I have another remote control on the coffee table now.

However I am a techie-tinkerer and I know there are better things out there, and there is.

MythTV is a constantly developing piece of software that runs on Linux (a unix operating system, which is not windows or mac) and does all these things and more. I have a dedicated PC next to my TV setup and running just for this purpose.

Is it good value?
My PC probably would cost me about $800 today to build from scratch and you can get a Tivo for about the same price (plus some subscription costs) but one is easy (tivo) and one is flexible (mythtv)

Most of my system (the motherboard) is one I used to have in my main desktop pc and then on upgrading that, I had this one left over. I got a special media-case, did some selections on an appropriate video card, a big hard disk and the important part, a digital decoder. So you don’t need exclusive new hardware to do this, you may be able to get something going for practically nothing using off-cast items from older pc’s.

How is it flexible beyond a Tivo?
MythTV is a tv decoder/recorder in the same way a Tivo is, but it also will store and catalogue Photo’s, Music, DVD’s and much more, so it does all the wonderful media basics, of course.

Two things set MythTV apart…

The capacity: You can put in as many hard discs as you want. I have 1Tb storing up to 440 hours of tv! (do that Tivo)

Duplication: You can have multiple front-ends, more players around the house to manage and view your media content elsewhere on your network.

Ok, maybe that sells it for you, but I now have to warn you, it’s a fair bit to understand fully and make it all work right and be happy with it. Then you have to teach the family how (and why) to use it, which is harder than a Tivo because the documentation is terrible.

That is always going to be the problem, the documentation for this and the complexity of the systems involved is the stumbling block. Technical people (beyond my abilities) have been playing with this for years ad they can make magic happen. I can’t get my wife to really be confident to use it and watch recorded stuff when I am not there to help out.

If I haven’t turned you off it though, I now bring good news. New versions of the software make the basic setup and go process fairly straight forward. If you have installed windows or mac os’s a few times and if you have got your toes wet with linux before then you are probably ok to give this a try.

Get Mythbuntu
This is available as an all-in-one package from mythbuntu.org and it includes the Ubuntu version of linux with the MythTV application and makes the installation complete and as easy as it could perhaps be. From this site you get an ISO from which you can make an install disc, just like when you buy windows.

Put the disc in your new pc and turn it on.
This boot disc will give you the option to install the software onto a clean pc. It asks you basic questions about your language and location (time zone).

Then it may get tricky.

Machine name and User accounts.
All operating systems require this stuff, a pre-set computer name, username and password. I set a generic name like ‘mediapc’ and a simple password to start with. Don’t make this complicated or too personal (like using my name for a login)

The video card.
I have an NVIDIA card in my pc, one that does not have a fan (to reduce noise form the box) and this type of card is one of the best supported. The option I was presented with was open-source or NVIDIA, and I chose the latter. I have this connected directly from the main DVI connector through a cable going to the HDMI of my TV.

Audio.
My motherboard has audio out (like most) and in my case I also have the SPDIF optical output which I attach to my amplifier directly. This should be detected and setup during the install, nothing tricky here (yet)

The hard disc.
For a new install let it format and use the whole hard drive.

Frontend, backend or both.
Mythtv comes in two parts. A backend to store and manage all the media, and the frontend to play, view and control what the backend does. For single systems using the first option of ‘both back and front end’ would be the right choice but if your planning to use multiple front ends and have an abundance of systems and hardware at your disposal, then the other options are up to you.

TV Guide.
Like the Tivo, mythtv depends on getting information about the upcoming programs that you may want to watch or record. By default it lets you register and select from a US based source for this information, but I am in Australia and things are a bit harder here, so for now I skipped this option as I am to establish my guide data services later using ‘shepherd’.

That is about it for now, after this the software will format the drive (which can take a while with 1TB) and go about copying files, installing the applications and setting itself all up.

After about 20 minutes the system will ask you to remove the CD and reboot. If you got your display settings (the video card) right you should get a display going and the MythTV frontend will load. We are not done getting this configured yet though, so far this is a basic install and there is more to do to make it work.

Digital TV.
Most tv or set-top-boxes handle this already. They get the analog tv signal sent over the airwaves, though your aerial and decode that indo a digital stream containing the pictures and sound for your tv. MythTV requires the same thing as part of the PC to allow it to see and manage the pictures all around us sent from our local tv stations. A single decoder can tune into a single tv station and send the pictures and sound into the computer for Myth to record and display. In my pc, I have three decoders so I am able to record up to three different programs at once but at least two would be a big advantage over a single one. To get started though you only need one, and make sure your get a compatible video capture card referring to this list before you buy. You can get them for satellite pictures, but for me I am just happy with the terrestrial (land based) signals. Hauppage are popular but I have some Twinhans ones myself which are getting a bit rare. Be very careful of the models and chipsets identified on this, there are so many that don’t work.

The TV guide.
Myth needs to know what programs are on and when so it can start recording the right channels for you. The US provides some easily available sources of this, but in Australia different laws make this a very limited and restricted commodity. Companies like IceTV actually provide a pay-per-download service, but I like free and cheap and more recently ‘shepherd’ has risen to the challenge to provide this support.

The outlining installation for shepherd (seen here) is all that you need to put the two together, it documents the need to setup your tuner cards in the MythTV backend configuration, setup the TV guide source, install the software where it will go and collect TV guide information and store it in a tvguide.xml file and then mythtv will import that through a function known as ‘mythfilldatabase’ to bring all this together as a viewable guide, and manageable index and a system for Myth to refer to for shows you want recorded.

These instructions are well written to guide you though all the steps, follow them to the letter and it will work.

When all that is done, the result is that ‘shepherd’ will gather information about the tv guide and programs from various places on the internet, this is imported into mythtv using ‘mythfilldatabase’ and then myth will provide the tv guide and select programs for recording at any time, day or night.

I am writing this because I have just got a new hard drive and re-installed the latest version, fresh and clean onto my old Myth box. The process above took me close to a week to get right, tweaking many options and switches to output digital tv to my plasma nicely and clean up the rough edges. It took me days to get the tv guide data stuff working.

However after this, my old Mytv system was working for a good 18 months without a glitch. It would record tv while I was on holidays, I could watch my favourite car shows when I wanted to, my wives gardening programs where there when she wanted to watch them and when the three major channels programmed three different comedy shows to be on at the same time and compete for my viewing attendance, I flipped them the bird and recorded all three to watch later. Best yet, I skipped the ads on each of them and enjoyed the show.

With this new version (and with some knowledge too of course) I had it setup on the new larger hard drive in under 1 day. there are a couple of minor backend things that are still not quite working right, and I am going to get a unix guru in to fix for me (perhaps) but overall I was recording shows by the days end and starting my collection.

What can go wrong.
Well what can go wrong probably will, this will put your patience to the test. Many of the parts are hard to figure out when they are not working, is the decoder working, why can’t I select it in the config. Why do I get no audio and many other possibilities of failure await you.

Most of the bugs and wrinkles have been ironed out now, but let me detail some of my experiences.

Location, location location.
Have your computer setup and connected the way that your going to leave it.
It is a good idea to setup this machine while being connected to the final equipment, tv’s and amplifiers etc. To do this in a workshop on a little lcd monitor etc is going to require a lot of re-configuring when you relocate it later.

Audio output.
I mentioned above that I use SPDIF (digital) audio output, which uses ALSA audio support in the system. For some reason this is all back-to-front and you need to go to the audio mixer and turn down the ALSA:{iec97} audio (yes, that’s a real tag) to zero to make it come on. Yes backwards.

Phone a friend.
Linux is not my strong point, so I am lucky to have friends around that can offer some advice here. Don’t let your nephew free to tinker, just limit fixes to the problems and don’t do it after three beers.

Even with this knowledge, the latest install took me three shots. The first I mucked up with a stupid video selection, the second the automatic updates killed my audio (which I still don’t understand) and the third ones was a charm.

If you decide to pursue this challenge, good luck and treasure awaits the brave.

Overall then I hope you find this information helpful. I hope to make some updates and additions in the near future. This is a big project and very detailed so be sure to do some searches and help and participate on many of the forum discussions about it, many people are involved.

So if you have some basic computer literate and technical ability this should not be a huge task, but give it some time to get through and be patient, I certainly feel that it’s worthwhile and because of this I have been able to enjoy the TV that I like, when I like.

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

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

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

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

My current Myth-Box PC is an AMD 64 processor (3000+) and 2 Gig of RAM. It’s fairly old by today’s standards but by no means lacking in performance. I would suggest that any dual-core Intels would be fine today for selection. Perhaps a bit more memory than 2 Gig could help but I don’t think it’s needed for this. Minimum requirements are here.

A video card is an important part of this, to output the displayed picture, controls and video to your screen(s) plays a big part in the success of the system. My recommendation would be to select an NVIDIA card, mine is a Geforce 6200 that also came without a fan. You are welcome to try others, Ubuntu supports many brands of cards and although even for NVIDIA the drivers are lacking in technical ability, this is the most widely used and supported type, and the most successful. My card has a nice heat sink and it still gets warm without the fan on it, but I prefer this as video card fans are often noisy and wear out. Keeping in mind that its going to be next to your TV, or at least in the same room and powered on a lot of the time, wear, tear, reliability and noise are all important factors.

You may also want to setup dual displays, a monitor on the side and an output connection to your TV. There are options for this, but I haven’t done it in MythTV myself. Most video cards have multi-output connections anyway so you can probably add this in if you need to later, for this I am sticking to the basics.

You need a hard drive of course and I have a decent 200G Western Digital, my personal choice of manufacturer. It was one of the first SATA drives I got so I found it fast and it’s still running fine today. Anything bigger is fine but for some storage of TV and Music, I would say today that 200G would be a starting point. I recently got a 750G drive and threw that in too, now I have more than I need.

A DVD (RW) drive is pretty much a standard these days, don’t forget to include one. A floppy drive is not required The CD will be used to boot and install your software and also it can be used later to rip cds, dvds and archive files and videos to the DVD.

Most motherboards have a network interface in them and will be required. In my case I have added a wifi card which is enough for it to download TV guide data and updates, but no good if it’s being used as a media centre.

The computer case is a big part of what this will be. It’s going to sit in the lounge room and perhaps be seen, this component is also the most noisy part so you need to choose wisely. I ended up with a Thermaltake Media Lab case which I am pretty happy with. They have a few other nicer models now and they are a bit more expensive over normal cases as they include a remote control and a LED display. These things can be configured to work with MythTV but the main focus here is the noise. I avoided the low-profile cases as they are noisy and restricted with the drive/card space options. In here the ‘silent’ fan runs at 19dba with the other fans running at 19dba. It all adds up and like the biggest issue with the xbox 360 is the noise, if you get a noisy case then it will interrupt your viewing pleasure. By all means if you want to spend a bit more on thermal/liquid cooling then it could be a good option.

The other special part I have included in my unit is a wireless keyboard and mouse. The computer is over with the other equipment against the wall at a nice viewing distance and the coffee table in front of me is the ideal place for the controls, especially when setting and configuring it up. Check the range of any you select and some nice small/light keyboards are around now too. Basically most will work with Linux/ubuntu so for this you can go for it.

As I mentioned before, the MediaLab case comes with a remote control, and many of the DTV cards also come with remote controls and various IR receivers. Most of them work or can be configured to manage standard stuff within the MythTV software like menu selection, play/stop/pause etc, but also having a keyboard handy is very useful.

And the final piece of the puzzle is the DTV card.

Many cards out there on the market are widely available but only a select few work under linux. They need to have driver support and actually be what your are expecting and needing to get. There is a good list of Video Capture Cards and another list of ones that specifically have been tested, some are better than others and some require more setting up to get working.

Of these, I am mostly talking about HDTV or Terrestrial Capture Cards and you can have multiples of these in your PC. I don’t have any specific recommendation about which to get as they vary from country and location on availability and price, but I do suggest that you do your research, look up the types of cards in the links/sites above and be sure that you are getting the right one. If you can get a return policy from a store that may have some change-over option then all the better but you may be dropping $30-$50 on a card that wont work.

I have used mainly an older Twinhan DTV-T card, the one with the BT-878 chipset but now they have upgraded their model and these are not supported by drivers. I have also had some of these just fail over time, so I am running short of old stock but they are cheap when you can get them and they work well.

To function, these cards have a TV aerial connection in them, so when they are in the PC you also need to be able to connect your standard roof-mounted TV areal to them. You may need a splitter so you can connect your areal to the PC and still to your TV, better yet, power/amplified splitters might be an option, particularly if you are going to have multiple cards in the pc, all will need an aerial line to get a signal. And the signal needs to be of good quality, rabbit ears probably wont be good enough.

Finally, your TV is a big part of what your using this for. I now have a nice plasma and it’s wonderful. Originally I had a standard tube display and it was good. It required the old, single line composite output on my video card, but now with the new display, I have the DTV-I card directly connected to the HDMI input on the TV. The PC’s audio out is also directly connected to my amplifier for wonderful surround sound, but you may just connect this through standard audio cables to your TV like you would you DVD or Gaming console.

Just remember that whatever your options, it’s best to start simple and build up. I now use the optic-fiber audio connection out of my sound card to my amp, sounds better and less messy with fewer cables, but it took me two days to make that change and get it right.

This is also true when your building it and getting started. Build you PC and try it with a standard computer display to be sure it works, TV’s can be a bit weird when connecting and switching to a new device. If you see nothing on your TV when you power on the PC then it will take some guesswork to check out where you went wrong, if you use a working monitor then at least you know (perhaps) where the cause of any problems may be.

Build everything one step at a time and keep it simple. Of course to this point we haven’t installed any software or operating system, we are just focused on getting the computer built and beginning to boot up.

If it’s all gone well to this point you will be seeing a BIOS boot up menu displayed when you power it on, hitting DEL as the ram tests will usually get you into the settings for the BIOS.

In here you want to check the settings. Some are very cryptic about ram and processor speed and timings, I would steer clear of that and leave them at their defaults.

Check your hard drives are being found and identified, also make sure the boot sequence has the CD/DVD in there at number 1 (at least until later).

You can turn off or disable all of the serial, parallel and other non-required options (this can help performance I am told) but generally, defaults here will basically do it and should be ok.

Notes:

If you don’t know how to build PC’s then get a friend to help you. Take care with the parts, double check that everything is plugged in the right way and most importantly, put in and tighten every screw that you can. A buzzing loose part is very annoying.

Next: Installing the software

TIVO has become really popular because it takes the ‘programming’ out of serial TV transmitting, life is more dynamic now, I want to be out having a late dinner at 8:30, not at home watching a movie then and there. I might be a shift-worker or busy on the internet, I want TV to be available when I want it, not when the station executives and their advertisers expect me to watch it.

For the last few years there has been an influx of add-in cards for PC’s that allow you to watch and record TV on your PC. Anything from $35 will get you one and they work. Many now operate using the full Digital TV transmitted by a land based tower, DTV-T (Digital Tele-Vision – Terrestrial) or DTV-S (Satellite). Either way, on your PC you can watch or record TV, but it’s a cute idea only, in practice you don’t want to watch TV on your PC much, your lounge chairs are in another room, the screen is too small, it’s just not right. But we do have a solution…

OK, so you get it working and your lucky enough to be in a one bedroom flat where your computer is next to your decent size TV and you plug it in there, isn’t that good enough? To start with yeah it will seem that way, but now the computer is barely more than a glorified video recorder, you can schedule some recordings, even convert those to DVD but there is no guide based schedule information and it’s noisy because your PC is on all the time, and it’s busy running the program so you can’t do much on your pc while your partner is watching last nights ‘prison break’. In practice it’s just not that nice.

I also found with this setup that after a while I wanted to ‘tinker’ with it a bit. The software that came with the card was limited in functionality and looking on the net there are a lot of other programs that offer so much more. In practice I found that these systems take a lot to get right and they cause you much more grief and hair pulling than I was prepared for.

One of the biggest mistakes I had was thinking that it can be done in Microsoft Windows. I love windows but for video work it sucks. For a long time I persevered with GB-PVR and the program is great, but the implementation of how it links with the internal Video and Audio drivers (also known as codecs, muxers and de-muxers) are appalling, and fixing these within windows is a nightmare. Many of these codecs need to be paid for or come as extras with other DVD/Video encoding programs like Nero, and there is no basic way to install the program on an OS and have it work.

I am not a Mac person, I don’t hate them and I understand for video work like this they are great, but I think the hardware and open-source software available for them to do this is also still very limited, so what are the other options?

MythTV is what I have settled on. It’s totally open-sourced, linux based software that does a great job, it is still being enhanced and it’s the most reliable choice, once you get it running, and like before it’s not cut and dried, it takes some work but it can be done.

In this series of articles and discussions or guides I am going to outline what I have done to get a great PVR system working with MythTV, what I run it on and some of the tricks that I have had to do to get it to work.

So why am I doing this?
It’s an opportunity to clear my head on the topic. Over the last 5 years or so that I have been playing and struggling with it I have learnt a lot and I still see today out there others doing much the same. I also need to de-clutter my head and get it down in writing so I can move on, it’s been a big learning process to get to this point so it will be good to release it.

What is my background, what makes me an expert?
Well I like TV, movies and video in general, I am also a bit of a geek/nerd that has been into computers for over 30 years now and I have seen and learnt about much of it, as a hobby of course. In my roles as a web engineer, project manager and software trainer I have developed skills that allow me to deliver information well to people, I hope to help others by putting this in writing in a way that it may help you. I am no expert and I am open to other ideas and ways of doing it, but on this topic I believe my eyes are fairly wide open to what’s out there and how it works and why.

So here it is, my experience and DIY guides to setting up your own PVR.

1. Introduction to MythTV
2. Selecting the Hardware
3. Installing the Software
4. Making the configuration changes and setting it up
5. Enjoying the experience, getting more out of it now that it’s running
6. References for more help

NEXT: Introduction to MythTV