O'Reilly Builds a MythTV Box

enrico_suave writes "While the Broadcast Flag battle continues, it's still legal to put together your own HDTV PC HTPC/PVR. O'Reilly has posted part 1 in a series of articles describing the ins and outs of Building a MythTV Box" From the article: "For now, the good news is that it is still legal to put together your own home-theater PC. Parts are now cheap enough that it is no longer ridiculous to build a PC specifically to handle TV for you, much like the VCR in Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency..."

I'm too lazy

[udderly]

Given the good enough performance and price ($5/month) of my Tivo, I just can't justify the time and effort. My brother-in-law (aka the King of DIY) made one and he is constantly wrenching that thing.

Systm's Video How To

[Noksagt]

Systm had a video how-to [systm.org] of building a MythTV box. Having seen the short segment (and having assembled a PVR before it), I am surprised that the article is "Part 1."

It is just you...with quote

[Noksagt]

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Douglas Adams is definitely fair-game for geek-speak. His writings are even well-read by non-geeks.

Very odd coincidence...

[millennial]

I'm currently building a MythTV system on a P4 1.5GHz. I've got it running pretty well so far in Gentoo under EvilWM. The instructions I'm trying to follow are here [gentoo-wiki.com]. They're pretty complete, and even though they don't match my setup exactly, I've only run into a couple hiccups so far. It involves using Zap2It or XMLTV to download the listings, setting up your IR remote, configuring X, and more. I highly suggest using it if you want to set up your own MythTV box.

KnoppMyth

[Anonymous Coward]

For those impatient, there is KnoppMyth - a Knoppix based Live CD that runs MythTV. Link here [mysettopbox.tv] It looks good, but it doesn't run so well on my P3 450 Mhz. ;-)

Re:Encryption anyone?

[Bruha]

And current federal law requires cable companies to provide at request a receiver with a firewire port that allows you to receive the encrypted video.

Re:Systm's Video How To

[enrico_suave]

" There is a link to Zap2it, but wasn't there a slashdot article not too long ago about Zap2it beginning to block users due to high traffic etc. Something like changing their format would render MythTv useless? I am really curious to know if it's possible."
Have a link?

Unless I'm mistaken (or there was a 2nd incident), Zap2it had an open letter to the community about some certain commercial (shareware?) PVR software makers abusing the free datadirect service they were providing to freeware and OSS projects.

In addition if someone was THAT concerned about the future of their listings could check out LxMSuites [lxmsuite.com] is offering robust EPG data tailored for MythTV as a subscription where some of the profits are re-invested in to the MythTV project.

e.

DIY vs. Buy

[Noksagt]

I have built PVRs. I still watch TV through my Matrox G400TV quite frequently. However, I am happy with my ReplayTV. Mainly because:

1)Uses less power than most PC solutions.

2)Cheaper. I got it for $250 with lifetime subscription. Admittedly, the MSRP is much higher. But it still isn't as much as putting together a system, even if you get one of the $200 Dells to start it.

3)It just works. No messing with drivers, LIRC, etc.

Now, some of your points for DIY just don't hold.

1)I hate monthly fees.

You can purchase PVRs with lifetime subscriptions. You can't rely on Zap2It to always give you free listings for MythTV!

3)No comercials- Tivo is playing with adding commercials. My number 1 reason for buying one would be to kill commercials.

My ReplayTV 5040 still has Commercial Advance. Newer models don't, but they have "Show|Nav." You press a single button & it skips the commercials.

4)More (and easily expandable) storage.

Ditto most PVRs. You can network them & pull content onto a computer or you can drop in a larger harddrive or two.

7)The ability to network it and add a file server. You may now watch your movie collection anywhere.

Both ReplayTV and Tivo have this.

8)The ability to use 1 program for all media- music, video, and images.

ReplayTVs store images. You can upload video. It is space-inefficient, but you can upload audio encoded as video with whatever moving images you want.

9)No loss of features- you won't see disappearing features like 30 second skip.

This is a good point. But I think the bottom-line is that features may become illegal (which could take them out of the project's trunk). You can also prevent firmware upgrades on PVRs you buy.

The bottom-line is that we need to promote legislation to keep the features we want LEGAL.

Re:Cost?

[bitdamaged]

Actually you don't need that hi end a processor. All the encoding is done on the card. I just built a Myth box from scratch and it cost about $600 all told. I could have kept the cost down a bit using an older processor and a cheaper case (I got a nicer case because this is in my living room).

Re:Myth firewire DTV support

[rogabean]

The support is fine with MythTV itself (MythTv user myself for a long time now).

The issue of it working solely resides with your cable provider. Alot of them cripple that port.

Re:Encryption anyone?

[DaHat]

I think you have confused a law with a mandate from the FCC. Just because there is law authorizing them to act in certain ways does not mean that their decrees are inherently law.

Anyway, this mandate, you are of course referring to: FCC 03-225 [fcc.gov] around page 50. There is something not specified here though, the cable box is not required to give you over firewire the high-def stream that you are viewing, it just has to supply a stream, and it doesn't take much for such a unit to take a pristine 1080i (or better yet, 1080p) video and dither it down to a nice low bitrate 480i, exactly what many boxes are known to do at the mandate of the cable operator.