Up till a few days ago I had a computer running Windows and TVedia in the living room (to record shows, time shift viewing, that kind of stuff). I finally got around to switching over to Linux and MythTv. The main reason I stuck to Windows for so long, was that I had a X-Card (hardware DivX and DVD decoder) for which there are no drivers for Linux. Well, I finally ripped that piece of hardware out of the PC, and am replacing it with a stock graphics card (passive heatsink) for video out.

Anyway, here are some of my experiences with MythTv to date. Installation was easy since I used a distribution pre built for MythTv (Mythbuntu). The concept of mythtv is to have a backend that records stuff, has the database with all the vids and so on; and a frontend with a nice gui that displays everything. Not that important for me right now since I have both running on the same PC (except that I had to wrap my mind around “what has to be configured where”). Lots of cute plugins, some useful (like the interface to audio and video streaming services like shoutcast, youtube, apple,…) some not so useful. I have a Hauppauge 350 as a video input device and needed some fiddling to get it up and running. Would have saved me about an hour if the default theme wouldn’t have chopped off the hint telling me NOT to enter a default channel. Took me about another hour or two to get EPG data automatically imported. On the other hand, the remote control worked like a charm, compared to Windows it was zero work to get that set up.

The first additional software I installed was phpmyadmin. Good lord the software stores everything in a mysql database and gives you no user friendly way to access it (mysqladmin ont the command line does not count as “user friendly”). And I fear it may take me a few more days to get my wireless lan up and running since the chipset is more or less not supported.