Just because it’s free doesn’t mean that it is going to be easy. As I read through this article about the attempts of getting MythTV working, I had to laugh. While reading about someone else’s frustrations in not a funny matter, the article describing it did sort of come off with a slap-stick comedy routine feel to it.

I believe my nephew Greg and I hit the wall last night trying to build a MythTV. MythTV is open source software that turns your PC into Tivo++.

KnoppMyth — MythTV that can run from a CD — didn’t run because it didn’t recognize the Linksys card in the computer. So then we spent the usual comical four hours trying to get to it to recognize the spare hard drive I’d installed. Ironically, the HD came out of our Tivo when I’d upgraded it. There’s something funky about how Tivo formats its drives, though. Plus it helps if you notice in the KnoppMyth documentation where it says that the HD has to be the first drive in the system.

We (by which I mean Greg) then got the MythTV installed on the HD and booted the machine. We got a lovely graphical UI, but no TV. That’s ok. We expected to have to spend another few hours poking around; the problem seems to be that mySQL isn’t starting up properly.

But then I had an enormous D’oh Moment.

MythTV requires you to put a card into your machine that handles the video in and out. I installed a standard Hauppauge 250, so that shouldn’t be a problem. (”Shouldn’t be a problem” in linux-talk means that it requires only one Linux Day to get up and running, where a Linux Day equals 8 hours of hacking by someone who knows linux inside out (Greg), 12 hours of “helpful suggestions” from a Windows user, and two pizzas.) No, the D’oh Moment came when I realized that MythTV is TiVo for the bottom 125 channels that come through your cable and only if all those channels are unencoded. Our cable TV provider, RCN, starts the premimum channels at 165, and they’re all encoded.