MythTV is a home entertainment system that allows you to record TV programmes on your hard drive. It also includes modules for web-browsing, news feeds, weather information, and music. Forgot to record your favourite programme? You can simply log into your web site, click on the program in the schedule to set up the recording, and your MythTV box will record the program.

See more at http://www.mythtv.org

Hardware

You'll need

• A motherboard that works with Mandriva
  • I used a cheap ASRock K8 64 bit motherboard
• A TV Capture card
  • See mythtv info for a comprehensive list of compatible cards
  • I use a Nebula Electronics DigiTV PCI card (which uses the standard kernel modules Bt878 and Nxt6000) to capture digital TV in the UK, largely because Nebula went out of their way to help the Free Software community develop drivers for their card
• A graphics card that has TV-out
  • I use an nVidia GeForce FX 5200 because nVidia provide great Linux support.
• Quiet fans so that you can hear what's on the TV
  • 20 dB should be quiet enough
  • Zalman produce quiet fans
• CPU doesn't have to be fast, an AthlonXP 1600 should be fine
• A large-capacity, fast access hard drive
  • I got a 200 Gb Western Digital drive
• Plenty of RAM
  • I get by with 512 Mb
• A wireless card so you can avoid more cables at the back of your TV
  • Bought a Edimax EW-7128g Wi-Fi 802.11g PCI from OpenForEveryone who provide hardware guaranteed to be Linux compatible

Software

Prerequisites

Your favourite distro - Mandriva. I'm running the 64 bit version of 2005LE. During install activate the network computer options, including apache, and also the development options (so that you can compile mythtv).

Use the Source

In the past I used pre-compiled binaries created by Thac but this caused me some rpm headaches when the time came for an upgrade. In the long run, I've found that it's easier to compile mythtv from source.

Download mythtv from the mythtv website

You'll need mythtv-1.18.1.tar.bz2 and mythplugins-0.18.1.tar.bz2.

Read the online instructions at the mythtv site. There are good Mandrake-specific instructions that cover all you'll need to know. As you can imagine there are a slew of library dependencies, but this should give you most of the ones you'll need:

urpmi lib64lame0-static-devel lib64tiff3-devel lib64dvdread3-devel lib64Mesaglut3-devel lib64exif12-devel libtiff-devel libexif-devel libtiff-devel libfaad2_0-devel lib64cdaudio1-devel lib64cdda0-devel lib64oggflac1-devel lib64id3tag0-devel lib64SDL1.2-devel lib64cdda0-devel libfaad2_0-static-devel libfaad2_0-devel

There are probably some dependencies missing from this list, but when you see a compilation error like "could not find header file badger.h" just do a

urpmf badger.h

and install the module that the header file lives in, then recompile.