I Finally have MythTV

March 2, 2007 by Oliver
Filed under: Computers, Entertainment, Technology 

After talking about for quite a bit, I finally have a computer setup running MythTV :)

I decided to go for MythDora. It has the advantage of being straight forward to use and still leaves me with a fully functional desktop computer (which KnoppMyth doesn’t really do. It did leave me one slight headache – I didn’t have a spare DVD drive (MythDora is 1.2GB) so I had to borrow the one from Windows desktop).

The hardware I have is pretty moderate (well, really low end for most applications – a Sempron 3200 and on board GeForce 6100 with a Hauppauge HVR 1300) but it runs as a combined backend/frontend without any problems, even when recording, transcoding and viewing TV (an “advantage” of living in a country where HDTV is still not an issue).

On the subject of transcoding, there was one stumbling point – specifically it just didn’t work at first (I got the illuminating error message “Failed with error code 0″). After posting the output to the MythTV-Users mailing list someone pointed out it was a MythDora packaging problem – libmp3lame hadn’t been installed.

The only thing that isn’t working now is the MCE IR blaster for controlling my Sky box (I’m just using Freeview though the DVB tuner on HVR 1300). lirc seems to be setup right since when I run irw and press buttons on my remotes (either the MCE remote that came with the HVR or the Sky remote) it detects them properly. Running irsend doesn’t do anything though (there’s not even an error). But at the moment I’m recording more than I can watch with just Freeview anyway…

Next time, less rambly :P

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Comments

9 Comments on I Finally have MythTV

  1. Mark on Thu, 8th Mar 2007 8:27 am

    2. Nice post … I’ve been thinking of playing around with MythTV for a while and being a Fedora nut your comments are encouraging.

  2. Oliver on Thu, 8th Mar 2007 9:40 am

    3. If you want to install Myth on a box already running Fedora then you should be able to get everything from http://www.atrpms.net/ . That’s what MythDora is mainly built from anyway…

  3. Chris on Thu, 22nd Mar 2007 1:15 pm

    4. Great post … sadly I have failed in getting my HVR-1300 to work under Ubuntu Feisty, how hard was it to get going under MythDora? Any links to resources you could provide would be excellent and most appreciated, thank you.

  4. Roger on Tue, 24th Apr 2007 6:20 pm

    5. So has anyone tried linuxmce.com yet? It combines MythTV, Asterisk and some house automation stuff with a professional GUI (commercial then GPL’ed). And it requires Ubuntu (6.10, I think)

    Apparently they are rewriting some proprietary scripts, in the hope that linuxmce will qualify for inclusion in ubuntu at some point..

  5. LinuxMCE 1.1 - Oliver Brown on Sat, 2nd Jun 2007 11:25 am

    6. [...] e LinuxMCE with KDE 4. The most important in my opinion however is better integration with MythTV. From what I’ve been reading on their forums it’s not mature en [...]

  6. LinuxMCE 0704 - Oliver Brown on Sun, 12th Aug 2007 12:50 pm

    7. [...] #8217;t installed it yet) it looks like a big improvement. The biggest factor is improved MythTV support (which to be honest I feel is the most important part of it). They [...]

  7. Matthew on Wed, 22nd Aug 2007 7:49 pm

    8. Did you ever get the MCE IR blaster working with MythDora?

  8. Oliver on Fri, 24th Aug 2007 8:55 am

    9. Unfortunately not. I have a new MythDora install so I’m going to try again though…

  9. Back to vanilla MythTV - Part 1: MythDora Rocks - Oliver Brown on Fri, 24th Aug 2007 9:40 am

    10. [...] at unless you have a specific reason otherwise, MythDora is definitely the way to go for a MythTV installation. It was really easy and actually worked (something that seems [...]