Here is a good place to get started: http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/
Kevin Rose and the guys have a 45 min video about how to get a MythTV box running. Not completely in depth, but a good starting point. Knoppmyth tends to be the easiest distro. It is a Linux Live CD - you pop it in, reboot, and boom it does all the work itself. A little configuration and it is up and running. Kevin uses it and there is a link on the systm page to it. Personally I don't use MythTV or MCE to do PVR right now. I use my HTPC simply for playback of DVDs and Xvid files. This is because I use Satellite and there isnt a really good solution for doing PVR of that just yet. I have found that the beefiness of the hardware required is directly related to the res of the video. The higher resolution the video and the higher the compression, the more CPU power you will need. HDTV playback using WMV9 or H.264 needs a 3Ghz P4 to run really smoothly. But, MPEG-2 compression and playback (what TIVO uses and DVDs) works just fine. But then you have 1GB per hour of video as opposed to 350MB for MPEG-4. My box is a nForce 2 mobo with a 1.6Ghz Tbird and 512MB of DDR. I am using an Geforce4 Ti4400 for video playback and have a 1.5 TB RAID 5 array for storage. On 1/18/06, Stan Zaske <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hey guys, I've recently been reading a lot about MythTV and how you can > take relatively old and obsolete PC components and build a PVR that will > time shift your favorite programs so you can watch them @ your > convenience. Many people seem to have successfully built MythTV boxes > with little more than old Celerons and Durons with inexpensive PVR 150's > and such. > > Has anybody on the list done this as I would be interested in your > hardware setup and the Linux distro you used and the hoops you had to > jump through to get it up and running. Some people have actually taken > old Xbox's and gotten Myth to work that way. Its really cool what some > people have succeeded in using to record and view SDTV @ home in their > living rooms. Appreciate your feedback. @:D> > -- Brian
