MythTV gets “Thumbs UP!”
I have friends who swear by their Tivos. “You’ll never watch TV the same again,” they say. And frankly, I’ve been jealous of those friends. Well, I’m jealous no longer.
No, I didn’t get a Tivo. I built a MythTV. I’m still not quite done with it, but I absolutely love what I’ve got.
What do I have? I have a PVR-250 tuner card and an ATI Radeon 9250 graphics card plugged into a three year old AMD Athlon +1800 XP box with 512M of memory running Fedora Core 3. Right now I’ve only got 65G of storage, but that’s enough as long as we’re not planning on archiving anything for the long term.
I got started by consulting Jarod Wilson’s HOWTO. Following his advice I used LVM to get my two 40G hard drives set up using XFS. My first big departure from his rather explicit directions came when it was time to set up the video card. Since I’m not using the nVidia cards that he is using it would have done me little good to get those installed and set up (besides, it’s a guide, not Holy Writ). This part took some doing as you really should use the ATI proprietary Linux driver. I couldn’t convince the Mesa driver that comes with XFree86 to do anything, but configuring the ATI driver didn’t take that long, although there was a bit of trial and error involved.
My biggest problem came in the form of the tuner card. I had originally spent $122 to get a Leadtek WinFast PVR2000. This card is one that I COULD NOT convince to work. I spent a week, literally a week, trying everything I could think of. The worst part of it was that the kernel could see the card but did not recognize it for what it was and all attempts to pass the card number (it was card #9 in the list) using insmod failed. I finally gave up and got the PVR-250 through an eBay auction. When it arrived I had the machine up and tuning within 20 minutes.
I still have some left to do. I don’t have an IR receiver so I have to use a keyboard to control things (and as it is a standard keyboard with a standard cord that’s a pretty short tether). That’s next on the list and has been ordered.
After that? Maybe some bigger hard drives.
MickC @ February 17, 2005