MythTV progress report

Following on from Jono Bacon’s MythTV progress, I thought it was time to give a bit of a progress report of my own.

First of all, however, I thought it was probably time to give a bit of a introductory guide, for those not yet steeped in the MythTVology. Those of you who understand the meaning of PVR, Myth and that stuff can skip to section 2.

Section 1: Understanding it all

PVRs

In the beginning…… there were video recorders. And they were good. We could tape stuff, and watch it. And tape more stuff, and watch it. And…. well, you get the idea. We are just beginning to see DVD recorders come onto the market – these do the same as Video recorders, but with DVDs. With me so far?

A new development is in the works – the “PVR” or ‘Personal Video Recorders’. Probably the first big commercial one was the TiVo, but Sky now have their Sky+ box (which is also a PVR) and Telewest have one too now, I believe. Or you can buy them in the shops at rapidly decreasing prices. (There’s one in Aldi for £99.99 this week)

A PVR stores the stuff you record onto a harddrive, rather than onto a tape or disk. It’s rather like the video version of the MP3 player, in comparison to a personal stereo, or personal CD player. However, because of the speed and random access available on a harddrive, there are a number of features that PVRs have that you won’t find on a video recorder, and possibly not on a DVD recorder either:

• Play and record – now you can record EastEnders from tonight, while simultaneously watching the episode you recorded last night!
• Pause live TV – similar to the first option, if the phone rings while you’re watching the football live, simply hit “Pause” and your PVR will start to record. When the call is over, hit play and you start watching again, with your PVR recording ahead of you.
• Commercial skipping – many PVRs allow you to skip commercial breaks by “tagging” them as they record.
• Multiple records – Some PVRs come with multiple tuners, which means you can record 2 channels at once.
• Keep what you want, discard what you don’t – if it comes with a built in DVD recorder, you can burn off the things you want to keep – some even allow you to edit out the adverts from that film you wanted before you burn it.
• Intelligent recording – you can tell the PVR to record every program of a certain criteria on all channels – every episode of Friends could soon be yours; the TiVo even records things based on the types of programs you enjoy.

There’s probably tonnes of other stuff I forgot, but there you go – someone will keep me right, I’m sure.

MythTV

MythTV is a piece of software designed to turn an ordinary computer into a PVR. For the most part people generally set aside a dedicated computer for the purpose, but I believe it is possible to run it on an existing desktop. Myth does pretty much everything I mention above, and a whole lot more. An example of the extra features you get with your MythTV install are:

• Seperate front and back ends – all the data (ie recorded programmes) can be stored on a machine in the attic, but you can watch it on any computer equipped with the frontend software – a small computer plugged into the TV is fine.
• Web access – Myth contains a web server that allows you to set recordings up remotely. Imagine being at a friends for dinner and realising you’ve forgotten to set the video – just log on over the internet and tell your myth box to record. (I suspect that there is probably a WAP interface somewhere about, which means you only need your mobile phone!)
• Plugins – Myth has a plugin architecture which means that you can do a load of other things with your TV too – check your mail, surf the web, etc.

It should be noted that there are other pieces of software available that do similar jobs, but Myth was the one that I chose.

Hopefully that gives you a better understanding of what this is all about – now onto the nitty-gritty…..

Section 2: Getting mythy

Skip back to Section 1

I sat down on Thursday night at around 2100 with a copy of KnoppMyth ready to go. KnoppMyth is a version of the Knoppix bootable CD, designed for quickly installed MythTV on a dedicated machine.

The System

My install system is very meagre – Heathers old desktop, a Dell Optiplex machine that I got for free. Hardware is as follows:

• PentiumIII 800Mhz processor
• 128MB RAM
• 30GB Harddrive
• Onboard sound, video, and network
• The aforementioned Pinnacle TV card

The Install

The install went very well. My only regret was not setting up a Static IP to start with; my router doesn’t have a setup (that I can find) for specifying IPs for MAC addresses, and Dynamic IP is a bit of a PITA when it comes to trying to setup database connections….. However, all the hardware was detected fine, and everything installed brilliantly.

Setting up Myth was surprisingly easy, until it came to the point for setting up the channels – I’d got a bit of experience from setting up TVTime previously, but the Myth setup was still a bit confusing, and definitely not oriented to a UK user. With some settings from my old setup, and a bit of web searchery, I did eventually manage to get all the channels set up, and everything was done.

The Result

Considering the (ridiculous) spec of the box, the results are surprising. Watching TV in realtime is impossible with Myth, because of the amount of memory the frontend takes up. However, this can hopefully be resolved by running the front end on a different machine, which I plan to do, but have failed to manage so far, due to the aforementioned IP/database problems. Recording seems to work fine, although I forgot to plug the TV card output into the soundcard input, meaning that I have no sound on my recordings. Ooops. There doesn’t appear to be any lag in the recordings, which was surprising. The web frontend is excellent, and provides a lot of functionality, which I plan to test out later. Hopefully I can set a few recordings from work, and the suchlike.

The Future

I need more hardware. 128MB is too little memory, and the disk space is too small for extended recording – in the default NUV format (which is, AFAIK, not highly compressed, thus provides better quality on an older machine) takes up 3.5GB for every hour of recording. Thus on my drive, with 21GB left, I have about 6 hours of recording, which is not ideal. I could sent it to compress into a different format, but it would need to be at a time when it wasn’t recording I guess, to save processor cycles. I would also like a digital tv card, which would open me up to a) having 2 cards, and thus record 2 things at once (memory!), and b) lots more channels (without having to switch the box manually downstairs).

Thus the future is likely to be:

• Hardware required:
  • More memory – at least 256MB, £30-50
  • Bigger harddrive – £60 for 250GB
  • DVB-T Card – £30-£35 from eBay
• Get frontends working – may require re-setting up the entire box, but hopefully not
• Get sound working on recordings – need to grab a short minijack-to-minijack lead
• Get something to output onto the TV – that’s a whole new ballgame!
• Potentially get a DVD burner to burn the good stuff

So far I’ve spent exactly £0 on my MythTV box, and the functionality from £0 is quite amazing. However, to make it really amazing, I will probably need to spend a little bit more, which does beg the question of why I would when there are £99 boxes on the market, even though the functionality is a bit less.

mrBen