Clever Tricks with MythTV

OK, so you are seriously looking at going with MythTV. But are you truly ready to dive into this project? One place to start off at is to read this article over and see if you have what it takes to get the Myth out of MythTV.

MythTV is one open source answer to TiVo. Its creator started the project because he thought that the TiVo was cheap enough, but having to sign up for subscriptions was a pain. MythTV allows you to record and play TV and skip ads; and with plugins, retrieve TV schedules, play DVDs, emulate a Nintendo, check weather forecasts, play Linux Games, read RSS feeds, play music, and more.

Beware that some stations are actively working to defeat ad skipping, so it doesn’t always work.
Putting It Together

While this series of thoughts is not about setting up MythTV, it’s probably not a bad idea to mention some of the easier ways of putting it all together. The easiest way if you’re starting from scratch is to use the Knoppmyth ISO, a 500MB bootable CD file that will set you up and get you ready (well, almost ready) to go. Note this is not a run-from-the-CD thing–it installs a special truncated Linux that has all of the necessary MythTV commands. If you want to add to the basic lot of apps, of course you can. Another easy way, with Gentoo, is to emerge mythtv. Debian and Red Hat have their own ways. Despite some people saying it’s a piece of cake, many people find the SuSE installation to be hard work. There isn’t even a MythTV package on the CD/DVD, which is a bit strange for a distro that used to be known for having practically everything on it. [Read the rest]