The Myth of MythTV
I'm pondering MythTV as a future replacement for our DirecTivo. I'm concerned about the future of TiVo, but its a very nice system and creating as refined and well designed a system with either MythTV or Windows XP Media Center.
Stay tuned.
I believe my nephew Greg and I hit the wall last night trying to build a MythTV. MythTV is open source software that turns your PC into Tivo++.
KnoppMyth — MythTV that can run from a CD — didn't run because it didn't recognize the Linksys card in the computer. So then we spent the usual comical four hours trying to get to it to recognize the spare hard drive I'd installed. Ironically, the HD came out of our Tivo when I'd upgraded it. There's something funky about how Tivo formats its drives, though. Plus it helps if you notice in the KnoppMyth documentation where it says that the HD has to be the first drive in the system.
We (by which I mean Greg) then got the MythTV installed on the HD and booted the machine. We got a lovely graphical UI, but no TV. That's ok. We expected to have to spend another few hours poking around; the problem seems to be that mySQL isn't starting up properly.
But then I had an enormous D'oh Moment.
MythTV requires you to put a card into your machine that handles the video in and out. I installed a standard Hauppauge 250, so that shouldn't be a problem. ("Shouldn't be a problem" in linux-talk means that it requires only one Linux Day to get up and running, where a Linux Day equals 8 hours of hacking by someone who knows linux inside out (Greg), 12 hours of "helpful suggestions" from a Windows user, and two pizzas.) No, the D'oh Moment came when I realized that MythTV is TiVo for the bottom 125 channels that come through your cable and only if all those channels are unencoded. Our cable TV provider, RCN, starts the premimum channels at 165, and they're all encoded.
TiVo gets around this in a kludgy way by having you stick some IR-emitting plastic thingies in front of the IR receiver in your cable box. So, when TV wants to record the new episode of The O.C., it changes channels on the cable box by flashing the same IR signals you would have sent manually with the remote. MythTV takes the signal before it goes into your cable box because it has no way of changing channels on your cable box.
So, if we were able to get our MythTV working, we would still need our TiVo to record premium programs, such as The Sopranos and the commercial-free version of Police Academy VI.
Damn! MythTV is such a cool idea! Especially in light of the FCC's Broadcast Flag requirement. (Support the EFF!)
3 Comments:
I guess you guys really didn't dig into this too much, a simple google search would have yielded the answer.
Of course, the answer is to do it the way Tivo does. A hardware hack involving a device called a MyBlaster or an IRBlaster. It sits on the cable box and changes channels for you..the output from your cable box should be split in half (one 2 prong cable splitter, ask your local cable office for one) and one half goes to the mythtv input. It's really not that complicated and is well supported and documented.
If you are getting stuck loading mythtv then try the PVR Guide - How to guides and help for setting up MythTV
I hope you haven't given up yet (and please stop reading if you have heard this..) but there is some code now included with the mythtv distro that allows you to connect your Motorola DCT-2000 series cable box via serial cable to your machine and a small c program will change the channels for you, even turn the box on if it's not already! called dct-channel in the /contrib folder when you've extracted the mythtv tarball.
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