In the beginning ...

Ok, so many moons ago, I came across this fledgling project called MythTV, which as you will probably know is an open source attempt at a PVR. Having always been interested in emerging projects, especially around multimedia, I decided to give it a go.

Back then, I had an old P3, a Hauppauge Nova-t card (not even digital .. just analogue), and I threw it all together. It worked, after a fashion, but being that TV signal in my area is notoriously poor, the results were ... well, limited really.

So I put the idea away, and in the meantime ended up with a Sky+ box and all the trimmings. It worked well for what I wanted at the time, though there were always some things that I wanted to do that would have ended up buying more hardware etc ... not always the best way to go.

Then, last week, I checked the MythTV RSS feed, and my interest was rekindled. Looking around at the options, I decided to download Mythbuntu, being a Ubuntu kind of a guy, throw together some hardware and see what the results were.

First, I found an old compaq P4 small form factor desktop. It's reasonable quiet, and about the right size to fit in the TV rack without looking out of place. I then raided my old hardware and found a GeForce MX4000 AGP card that happily fitted in the low form factor socket on the Desktop. Being a mad kind of guy, I decided to skip the whole "install it on the desk, then put it in place" philosopy, and instead linked it straight to the TV to see what I would get.

And lo, there was picture!

So, in goes the Mythbuntu disk, select install, then everything goes black ... I wait ... still black ... So, a quick restart and selecting "Use safe graphical installer" option on the disk, I try again

And lo, there was more pictures!

The install went smoothly. Even down to picking up the card and enabling the nVidia driver for it, with the TV out. Within 30 minutes I had a working MythTV system, albeit very stand alone as I didn't have any network there. Another rummage around my stuff found an old Belkin 54g wireless USB dongle. In it goes, and surprisingly the network manager notices it, and gives me the option to install ... once I had found how to get to the application menu (ok, so I cheated a little and hit "alt-F2" to bring up the run dialog, which also then shows the system bar!).

Ok, so things are going well. So far I have a box that runs MythTV, connects to the wireless network, and that's about it. Next stage - looking for second hand cards on E-bay. A quick search and I find a Hauppauge Nova-S satellite card for the right price. That should be here soon, then I can give the whole freesat thing a go (remember - no aerial signal here).

So far, so good. Having a bit of a play and I find some issues that I have yet to deal with.

1. So far, the DVD player isn't working ... ok, so that's not entirely true. The DVD player plays the first track on the DVD (no menus) and then quits out. More research required on that methinks.
2. I made the mistake of password protecting the wireless setup ... which meant I had to allow it to connect each time the box booted up. Another play with the settings and I managed to sort that issue.
3. Annoyingly the music player doesn't seem to like linking to a secondary folder, unless of course you want to copy all the music over, but as I only have a 40Gb hard drive in there, I want to keep as much of that as possible for recording TV etc.

So more work required yet - but that's the joy of these projects. Also, depending on the test of the Satellite card, more hardware to be sourced and installed (a remote control for example), but so far it's been pretty smooth.