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

I started off using old computers for this, normally ones of lesser power and capacity than my main desktop machine which I like to play games on anyway. Doing video work on a PC does take some processing power and memory, but as a dedicated machine, probably less than what you are currently using for many games or even what they would provide you at work as a current standard system would be enough.

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

For a number of years I have been playing with software and hardware combinations that convert or make a PC display and record live TV. These programs also add control options to the viewer so that like the TIVO, you can record and watch things later, pause and resume in real-time along with other features and tricks that makes the old ‘watching programmed TV’ fun again.

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…

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