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his book is about an open source personal video recorder (PVR) software suite called MythTV. This book presents you with a set of projects we implemented in our own living rooms with MythTV, the theory behind those projects, and the steps needed to make those projects happen. The hope is that this will provide a firm basis for your own MythTV projects, while still being practical enough to be an interesting read.

n this chapter, we cover the basics of aMythTV installation—from selecting hardware (a TV card, disks, and a CPU) to selecting some operating system configuration options (such as which file system to use) and installing the operating system. We’ll use Ubuntu Linux throughout this book, although MythTV should run on any recent Linux distribution. We selected Ubuntu because of its ease of installation, excellent packaging, and nice user interface consistency. We’ve also chosen Ubuntu 6.06 LTS instead of the more recent 6.10 version because it is a “long-term support” release and will be supported with security updates through 2011.

n this chapter, we will show how to install the dependencies for MythTV such as the MySQL database; lirc, which is the remote control driver; and then MythTV itself. We will show how to perform some basic configuration, and by the end of the chapter you should be able to watch Live TV, pause it, and change the channel. By now, you should have installed Ubuntu Linux, as detailed in the previous chapter, and done some basic checks that your hardware works.

ow that you have the hardware configured for your MythTV system and have the software installed, it’s time to start recording some TV. We have split the description of the TV-recording functionality in MythTV across this chapter and Chapter 5. This chapter will cover the basic aspects to get you up and running. Chapter 5 covers advanced topics such as how to detect commercials, how to automatically skip commercials, how to set the autoexpiry of video, and how to set the video playback options and transcoding. You’ll also learn more about editing recordings (using cut points) in Chapter 6, as well as lots of other MythTV functionality.

n Chapter 4 we discussed the basics of recording television with MythTV. Now that we have those basics covered, we’re ready to cover the more advanced aspects of recording television. These advanced aspects include the recording options we didn’t discuss in Chapter 4: setting up automated commercial detection and skipping, autoexpiring recordings to save on disk space, (converting video to other formats), automating transcoding, and adding user-defined jobs to MythTV.

n this chapter, we’ll give you an overview of the other useful MythTV features that are above and beyond the core functionality that we covered earlier in this book. MythTV offers lots of other useful features. Although we aren’t able to cover all of the features in this chapter we will cover what we believe to be the most commonly used extra functionality.

ike a lot of software today, MythTV is “themable.” In other words, you can choose from a variety of different looks as well as create your own. The default G.A.N.T. theme can be either exciting or boring depending on your point of view. MythTV also has themes optimized for wide-screen displays.

his chapter discusses how to build remote frontends for your MythTV installation. Up until now, we have shown how to run the MythTV frontend on the same machine as the backend, but you don’t have to set up your MythTV installation that way. In fact, you can have more than one frontend if you want. You might want a remote frontend for a variety of reasons. Perhaps your backend machine is too big or too loud to be in your living room. Perhaps you want to be playing more than one video at once in different parts of the house.

ythTV has an extensible architecture that allows for plug-ins to be written to provide functionality not implemented by the core team of MythTV developers. Also, an official download contains a good selection of plug-ins. In addition to the ones provided on the MythTV site, quite a few third-party plug-ins are available since the interface to write plug-ins is public.

ou can expand your MythTV setup in four ways. First, now that you’ve had MythTV for a while, you’ve probably discovered that a lot of shows on TV are worth watching. Not only that, but if you’ve introduced anybody else to MythTV, you’ve probably discovered that sometimes more than one program that you want to record is on at once. This is called a . Luckily, it’s relatively easy to add more TV tuners and more disks to aMythTV box to avoid this problem; we’ll show you how in this chapter.