On May 2, 2009, at 11:41 PM, Andy Arnold wrote:
What does your hardware setup look like?
It's a moving target and has been built up gradually for some years as cheap -- mostly free -- equipment turned up. Mine is pretty elaborate right now, but you can get away with far less.
The main center of the Myth system is a Linux server in the basement running Fedora Linux with the MythTV backend server program. Its job is to grab programs off the cable and store them to hard drives. Right now it has four Hauppauge tuners in PCI slots, so it can grab four programs at once. The Hauppauge tuners need about 2GB/hr to store their MPEG2 files. There are two drives in the box that add up to a terabyte, so it can store 500 hours of video off the cable.
To watch the video, we have three small computers networked elsewhere in the house -- kitchen, family room, master bedroom -- hooked to monitors or TVs. These are running minimal installations of Ubuntu Linux supporting the MythTV front end program, which is quite small, or Boxee, which also knows how to talk to a Myth server. All three front ends are independent and can be showing different programs as well as live TV from the server.
With the Boxee front end, they can stream from sites like Hulu. (The next big Hulu upgrade supposedly will allow Netflix streaming under Linux.)
In addition, the Mac in my basement office and my laptop can also watch the Myth stuff.
The networking is wired because when I first started this I quickly found that B and G wireless can't support several simultaneous video streams to the front ends.
The Myth system can do lots of stuff besides time shifting TV programs. You can rip DVDs into the system to store for later watching. Video on the server can be burned to DVD for archiving. It is also a music server so you can rip all your CDs onto the main system and listen to them on any front end. There are plugins for Internet radio. There is a plugin to make it run like a Slingbox. It can be set up to automatically strip most commercials. There's a Skype plugin.
Most of this stuff I've not installed.
Can you use a remote to easily control it?
I used to control them with standard remotes, but it has turned out that a wireless keyboard with a built in trackpad is more versatile because the machines can also run Firefox and Open Office. (It's fun to watch YouTube on the big screen television in the family room and the machine in the kitchen gets used a lot for writing disapproving letters to our beloved government representatives.) MythTV uses a standard Linux program called LIRC that lets you map the buttons of any remote in any way you want. In the kitchen, for a long time we used the recycled remote from a long-dead VCR.
Does your family find it easy to use?
Nobody's complaining. Even my mother, who's quite tech-phobic, got the hang of it after a few days.
One thing I did not mention above was that in order to install such a system, you need both a back end server and a front end on which to watch the stuff. They can both be on the same machine, but I've found is more practical to put a big noisy server box in the basement and scatter smaller quiet boxes near the TVs. The front end machines can be just about anything with a decent video card. The front end software runs on the original XBox and any recent vintage Mac as well as Linux and Windows machines. I'm thinking of buying a refurbished AppleTV to run as a front end with Boxee as the software.
The server back end need a little more horsepower, if you're going to run with more than a couple of tuners and remote front ends. Right now, mine is a home-brew AMD64x2/3GHz with 1GB of RAM, and this is certainly overkill. You can put together such a machine for well under $400, if you do sale shopping and eBay. I used to use an old Dell P4/1.7 GHz machine that I got for free. It died last summer and I had to throw together a replacement in a hurry because the family hates watching commercials.
You could run the server software on a Mac, but this is impractical because you're probably wasting a good Mac to be a dumb server and TV tuners for the Mac are too expensive.
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