[LUAU] Re: Putting the UG back in LUG

[Eric Hattemer]

Matt Darnell wrote:
> On 2/2/06, Jim Thompson <jim at netgate.com> wrote:
>   
>> Maddog wrote:
>>
>>     
>>>
>>> Mythtv sounds like a winner too!
>>>       

I'm not in Hawaii anymore, but let me know if you get stuck with this. 
I have had a mythtv box setup for over a year now.  It's not terribly
hard.  I'm using Fedora 4.  It works great.  I do have to worry about
RedHat changing my udev configuration and stopping mythtv from finding
the TV card, but I just have to remember to play with the udev settings
after any major rpm upgrade. 

You may want to join the mythtv mailing list.  It's pretty chatty,
though.  But join it for a bit, and people will have interesting
suggestions (not as important now that you have your TV cards).  I have
a bttv card, which is somewhat low quality, doesn't have onboard
processing, but does come automatically in the kernel.  The ivtv based
cards are significantly trickier to get working on the kernel level.  I
do suggest a card with an onboard mpeg2 processor, though.  That will
significantly lower your overhead and let you tape more things
simultaneously while using the computer. 

The main page is at http://www.mythtv.org/ .  Now that they've added
plenty of functionality and worked out most of the bugs, I would stick
to the point (non-svn) versions.  The svn versions work fine too, but
you feel like you have to keep upgrading.  They are as step-by-step as
possible here: http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythInstall . 

I have literally never seen a linux project as refined and user-friendly
as mythtv.  Once it's compiled, you never really need to touch the
command line again (except to start the frontend).  All of the setup and
customization are through the cute little menus.  It's well documented,
and remarkably easy, unless you have some non-standard hardware. 

I downloaded the dsmyth filters http://dsmyth.sourceforge.net/ ,
installed mythweb, and stream my shows to my windows machine.  You can
even do live TV over your favorite Windows media player (except "Windows
Media Player TM").  I hear you need something just slightly faster/more
reliable than 802.11b to stream them.  I use gigabit ethernet, but I'm
pretty sure 802.11g or 100 Mbit ethernet would do it great. 

I haven't played with any of the mythplugins, except for the mythweb. 
But it seems that they install pretty cleanly. 

-Eric Hattemer