How hard is it, really, to make a MythTV box?

[AZGamer]

Alright - I'm a CompTIA A+ certified tech, etc, etc... college student, etc.. I'm fairly knowledgeable. I have not, however, worked in depth with Linux, aside from playing around with it on some old systems, but I can follow instructions and website tutorials, which somehow makes me more competent then most people

I'm looking at setting up a Shuttle Box as a DVR to replace TIVO. Why? Why not. I'm not a huge fan of Tivo continually draining my wallet, and the inability to get the video onto my PC (don't even comment about the atrocitiy that is TivoToGo). I've been looking at some different solutions, BeyondTV, Windows Media Center Edition, Myth TV, etc...

A couple questions:
1) Which of these would be most functional for recording programs as "season passes" easily and then getting these videos on my laptop or main pc?

2) How hard is it really to set up a working install of MythPC? If I used it, I'd get the Hauppage card, as I understand it doesn't support the All In Wonder, otherwise I'd just get an older All In Wonder (7500 or 8500 generation).

Thanks for your time - I know it's a bevy of questions, but I think this is the best forum to post this in.

 

[TractionProblems]

Rolling your own PVR using MythTV ranges from real easy to geek heaven difficult. On the easy end of the scale is KnoppMYTH, you simply download the ISO, burn it to disk and install it on the new machine. This option requires fairly standard hardware (the $5 video capture card you bought in an EBAY closeout from the other side of the planet may not have driver support) and has a good deal of "extra" stuff in the distribution that you may not need or want.

The extreme end of the spectrum would have you build your own "distibution", build your custom kernel, and so on. This will definitely give you the cleanest most efficient environment but may take weeks/months to complete. The folks who go this route probably never finish, they will continue teaking and upgrading since its a good time.

The "standard" installation is probably on Fedora Core x (1,2,3). There is an excellent writeup on how to do this by a gent named Jarod. The bulk of the install is handled via aptget which will pull precompiled modules and install them. I went this route after embarking on the "extreme" end, because I grew weary of building kernels to get that last bit of performance (which I had not yet enjoyed). This was a good learning experience but being an eternal tweaker, I knew I would not finish for quite a while. Using Jarod's guide you can do all the work in an uninterrupted afternoon.

My myth box is set to record several shows anytime they are present. I currently have configured my myth box with 700G of storage and just grab shows over a wireless link, edit and burn on the PC. Moving these files is a pain, they are quite large, mythtv also has an option to reencode once captured to "compress" the files a bit more.

The hardware drivers are a big concern when thinking about anything linux based. Some manufacturers like NVidia provide reasonable driver support, ATI doesnt. Drivers that aren't supported by the manufacturer are often "reverse engineered" or have wrappers placed around them so that they will function in a linux envrionment. These kinds of fixes don't happen overnight and there can be a substantial lag between hardware release and linux functional drivers.

I went the route of choosing common equipment for the big pieces (Happauge 250 card, cheap Nvidia video card, ATA harddrives, standard ethernet card). I got crazy/experimental with HDTV output (a vga->component converter), different wireless stuff, wireless keyboard and control of my DirecTV box. The best thing about this is that you create the machine you want out of the parts you want/trust. Its hard not to walk into Fry's and think that I could just add one more drive and bring the myth box to 1TB, but I have decided that this is enough...for now ;-)

Good luck and get ready to learn. There is a huge base of DIYers that are more than happy to help you get this beast going.

See ya,
TractionProblems