The essentials;

Facebook – Gives you that direct link to this popular service, see status updates, provide likes and comment, upload photo’s.

Google Mobile App – A suite of tools, some of which simple link to the safari browser to run, but from here your email, calendar, latitude and more can be easily accessed.

eBuddy – Links to most of the major Instant Messaging clients, MSN, Yahoo, Google and others with a single app.

Skype – For all those free calls, does not allow VOIP over the 3G so you can’t get off totally free, but near a wifi spot, then call Skype-to-skype for free.

Camera Plus – Enhances your picture taking with a few special features.

Mill Colour – Adjust the tones and colours of your pictures, clean up your snaps.

Getting around;

Free Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Finder – These will show the closest locations of wifi hotspots if your 3G data limit is near, save money by finding a free wifi spot close buy.

Metlink & Tramtracker – Both great to have if you use publish transport, check timetables and find out the location or next tram.

Show the loo – Maps public toilets that are close bye to you, right now, when you need it the most, right now. Even shows the fancy ones in hotels and all that you may otherwise miss out on.

Shopping;

Getprice – will give you a list of the best prices for almost any products. Check what price that new game is going for in the real world before you buy at a store, saves you real $’s

eBay – Check some great auctions and get notified as it’s about to close, even if your out and about you can put in that final bid.

Paypal – Send money instantly, check your balance (if you have one)

ShopLister – Not just another shopping list, well it is, but it does do categories/groupings or ShopShop for a simpler one.

Shazam – A very useful item that you never need but can impress your friends with. It will listen to music (on your radio perhaps) and tell you what the track title is in seconds, so cool.

Now Playing – List the movies showing and where they are close to you, it’s easy and quick and links off to review sites and everything you need to know.

Domain – Buying, selling or renting a place to live, don’t go hunting without it.

Work related ideas to keep the boss happy;

Wordpress 2 – Access your blog (like this one) and release comments, change settings write posts to any wordpress blog or site.

GoDaddy – Check your domain registration, scan for new ones when you think of cool names or in business meetings.

Analytics (lite) – Check your web sites analytics views and bounce rates

WebRanker – Shows a domain names web popularity, how is your blog ranked?

Speed Test – Checks your network link speed. Web site seems slow, test your network.

LinkedIn – Connect with your business network

Please note: some of these may have been free at the time of listing and may have changed since this blog was posted.

One final application I also recommend checking out is BargainBin which will find you some cheap and discounted applications currently on sale, but you can run ‘watches’ to notify you if an app goes on sale.

Of course customisations are just that, a personal selection of changes that you, the individual might want to make so this list is by no means definitive of what you must have, but commonly, for web surfers, I expect these will be of benefit to you.

X-Marks (Formerly Foxmarks)

This bookmark add-on provides a great array of features for when you bookmark a site. My biggest problem is that I bookmark a site at work and then don’t have that available when I get on my computer at home, this is the solution.

It allows you to submit your bookmarks and even user/form data up to a server to synchronise across multiple machines. You could use it in an organisation to collect group bookmarks or as a personal service like myself, where I like to have my bookmarks on all my computers. Better yet, the new service even allows you to log into their web site and access them from any PC, you don’t need to install the add-on to get your information.

It adds a lot of search and tagging functions to the bookmarks as they are created making them easier to find later and it provide various levels of opt-in and security settings to keep things private.

Download Statusbar

Although this may seem a simple module I find it very useful as it removes the need for a pop-up download manager and extra screens that get in the way.

This add-on puts an easily visible status of any downloads down in the footer of the main screen of your browser showing the download rates and the overall percentage of file remaining.

Don’t underestimate it’s power, it then lets you easily double-click and activate the download or right-click open folder to go straight to the file. There are a few more option and settings this small app allows, but with a simple and default install I make it a requirement on all my setups.

IE View or IE View Lite

I am not going to lie to you, I hate the fact that I need to have this plug-in. I don’t want it, I shouldn’t need it but the people at ye ‘ol Microsoft make it necessary.

Now this is the case both as a web developer and also just as a general web surfer. I use Hotmail (or now Live) and I also have MS Exchange used at work for web based email. You only get the full functionality when your access them with IE so this is the tool to solve those problems. You can set it to activate on sites by name (live.com) or just switch with the click of a mouse when you want to switch over allowing you to test things in both views. It’s handy and it maintains your Firefox tabs while giving you the full IE experience these ‘special’ web sites require.

Google Gears

This may not be for everybody, but if you do use Google services including Gmail then I recommend it.

It provides a link between your browser apps and your desktop, bringing some of the web functionality into an environment within your browser and by doing this it can increase the ability of the program and also it’s performance.

It’s a development and application environment so explaining it as more would be difficult. It has a lot of potential, like improving the performance of Gmail by having much of the functionality run in the host browser locally instead of online, while increasing functionality, like giving Google Calendar the ability to run locally and off-line entirely.

I also use it to improve the performance of Wordpress Administration and a few other sites that use it’s features. Nothing ventured, nothing gained… So if you use Google stuff then get it in your browser.

FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension)

There is nothing I hate more than rebuilding a computer, setting it up with all the programs you want (or recently had before a failure) and then only to find that you have to re-customise all the programs you were using.

The solution for Firefox is FEBE, it does regular scheduled backups of your Firefox environment, including your extensions and add-ons into re-installable files. You can synchronise Firefox environments over multiple computers by installing the backups on other systems, at home and work or for colleagues and staff or after a catastrophe to get your browser back to how you had it quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

Well that is the Five Features for Firefox and should set you up to enjoy the program a little more. Each of these listed above has a link to the site that provides a ‘download’ button. When clicked in Firefox will start the install of the .xpi application, then normally under the tools menu your can select it or attend to it’s settings.

Taking this a step further, I have some extra functions that I can not leave the home without, for web development they are a necessary inclusion in the toolkit but for general network related things that you might be doing with your site, your blog or work files, you find them handy too.

FireFTP

Puts the ‘F’ into FTP, File Transfer Protocol was one of the first ways the Internet moved files and it’s still used today to put files into web sites, upload attachments to emails and various other file moving requirements on the net.

This does it for you in a nice GUI way, within your browser. I am always using it to upload wordpress installations to the host, set permissions on files, change configurations in text files and so much more.

Firebug

All the wonderful code behind a web page can be checked and viewed and tested using Firebug. It splits your web page into parts that show you the code and style sheet information  you need to see to ensure your web pages are working properly, or where they are going wrong when not.

Web pages are getting all the more complicated to present, and if you writing a blog like this one to building templates and content management systems, this tool is a must.

Ubiquity

This is a strange one to explain, and even more so to get the most from. It’s a scripting platform that resides in the browser and acts on key commands rather than a gui interface.

The best feature I use of this is the ability to send web page content in an email.

The scenario: you see a great web page (Dilbert of course) and you want to pass it to a friend, you could;

1. Paste the link in the email – boring…
2. Save the picture as a file on your desktop, then insert it as an attachment in your work email – risky and too much work.
3. You select the image on the web page and ‘email selection to myfriend@…’ and click send. – easy!

It’s all context sensitive and text based, and you can add to or create more scripts for the system if your into that kind of thing. CTRL-SPACE brings up the window and as your typing commands it presents answers and results.

(select content) and Map these…, email to… wiki search…, twitter, digg, tinyurl shortcuts (and more) make it easy to move web page content into functional systems directly.

DropBox

Now this is more than an add-in, it’s a full program that runs on Windows, Mac or Linux but it’s well worth it. The program synchronises a folder and the files contained in it with your account on their host site.

For up to 2Gb it’s free and it’s been running like a charm for me for some months. The first benefit of course is that you have a backup folder, whatever is in your dropbox folder is also copied into your account in their cloud (internet) site so if your hard drive fails, you have a copy there.

The other benefit is that you can install the same program on your home pc as well as at work and on a linux based eepc, whatever, and you have a shared folder space all synchronised.

Put a doc into your dropbox and it will be on your pc at home ready for you to continue working on, even on your laptop on the train journey home, open, update and save and the new version is updated on your other machines.

You can pay for more space, and I may consider it soon as it’s really becoming a necessary place for me to use (and abuse) but aside from the above obvious examples use there a few more tricks this has been used for…

• It also provides a public folder space, you can share files through a URL for people to get files from your account. Put pictures, programs whatever you create and share, put a link on your web site with almost no limits to size and frequency they get downloaded and hosted for free.
• Use the FEBE program above and set your backup folder to save inside your dropbox folder, that way when FEBE does a backup of your Firefox configuration, it’s automatically copied to the cloud and you can’t loose it.
• I can’t run torrent downloaders at work, but I can search and get .torrent files, so a trick I have seen used is to save a torrent (at work) in a dropbox/torrent folder and at home your PC has a torrent program running looking at the mirrored dropbox/torrent folder for updates, as soon as your torrent is uploaded to your home machine it will start downloading the file over the peer-to-peer network. Tricky.

OK, that last one might be stretching it for you…

The above are all free and available extensions and programs at the time of writing, I hope you enjoy them as much as I rely on them daily for work and normal working on the net.

I am not affiliated with any of the programs or authors above (but I am willing to accept donations) however I am happy to provide my recommendations to programs that are useful and work well like those listed.

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