Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I gave a small talk at the CLUG meeting last Thursday about installing MythTV. Like installing MythTV itself, this fifteen minute talk went for a bit over an hour, partly because the other presenter's laptop was continuing to refuse to talk to the projectors, partly because people were asking questions about the process and various internal details about MythTV (some of which I could answer), but partly (I fear) because of a tendency of mine to ramble.

Coincidentally, my brother is wanting to install MythTV as a general mechanism to getting TV recorded. During a brief chat on Sunday night he pointed out that he and his partner could either visit us this year or 'buy a MythTV setup', but not both. I enquired as to what he meant by 'buy a MythTV setup', which apparently meant 'spend nearly $1000 on a home theatre PC for the living room'.

Nothing could be further from the truth; and this was something I tried to point out (repeatedly) during my talk: that it doesn't take a lot of money to set up MythTV. You can do it simply by installing a TV card in your current machine: then as long as you have the MythTV backend daemon running you will have shows recorded. It's like a stealth VCR - it's just sitting there recording shows whenever they come on, without interrupting your doing other things. You don't have to be running the front end all the time; when you want to watch TV, run the front end and you'll see which shows have been recorded - you can do what you want from there.

(You don't even have to have a TV card to install MythTV, of course: you can install MythVideo and get it to organise your collection of perfectly legally downloaded open source videos, for instance. I don't recommend using the MythMusic plugin to manage your music, unless you have an entire collection of music that is one genre only and you always only ever listen to that genre. It's too difficult to navigate around, otherwise, I've found. But apparently it's undergoing a major rewrite as part of Google's Summer Of Code - if only Google actually had some kind of reporting system for how these projects are going then I'd actually know how far along that was. Anyway.)

My recommended method of installing MythTV in your home these days is to just start with the one machine you have and install a tuner card in it. Then, as you and your family get used to this new functionality, maybe buy an extra tuner and some more hard disk space for show storage. When it gets inconvenient for everyone to cluster around your PC watching TV, invest in a set-top box - as little as $400 will see you set up with a completely silent VIA Epia box, booting off your network and connecting to your backend automatically. Hopefully the Summer Of Code project to revamp and rejuvenate the Windows version of the MythTV front end will mean that those people in your househould still shackled to the dominant proprietary operating system will someday soon be able to watch MythTV without rebooting; in the meantime you can either use the KnoppMyth installation or dual-boot their machine, as part of the inevitable process of converting them to the Light Side.

Either way, getting MythTV running in your home doesn't require massive expenditure or changing everyone all at once. It can, if you want to, though. It all depends on how much money you want to throw at it.