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From MythTV Book
| This book is about an open source personal video recorder (PVR) software suite called MythTV. This book presents you with a set of projects we implemented in our own living rooms with MythTV, the theory behind those projects, and the steps needed to make those projects happen. The hope is that this will provide a firm basis for your own MythTV projects, while still being practical enough to be an interesting read.
This book started life as a traditional paper book, which is still available on Amazon.com. However, since the publication of that book a new version of MythTV has been released, and it is time to update the book. Instead of a traditional publication, we have instead decided to put the book online in wiki form as an experiment. This book does not aim to be a complete reference to MythTV or a guide for how to develop plug-in modules for MythTV. Although we include a brief overview of the major features of MythTV, we explore only those parts of MythTV that are relevant to the projects in this book, which will include all the parts of MythTV that an average user will be interested in. It will also give you an excellent grounding for further projects with MythTV as well. This book is intended as a hobbyist’s project guide, providing suggestions about what sort of projects you could take on and how we went about implementing our own versions of those projects. Instead of including exhaustive coverage of features that few people use, we’ll provide pointers to how to find out about those features, and we’ll cover the 80 percent of MythTV’s functionality that everyone will find useful. That way, this book will be genuinely useful to people setting up MythTV, instead of being a boring reference manual. We discuss the projects we undertook using the components we selected. Where appropriate, we explain the alternatives available at the time of writing, why we chose the paths we did, whether we think that in hindsight these were the right decisions to make, and how to complete the projects using the same decisions we made. You are free to choose different components for your MythTV system, but it is impractical for us to document every possible combination of every possible component. We do provide as many pointers as possible to further information as we discuss particular points, and it is our intention to add future information to the book’s website when appropriate. There is a blog for announcements, at http://mythtvbook.com/blog. If you're interested in helping out, please visit the HelpWanted page. There is also a Credits page for people who have helped out with this project.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Defining What Personal Video Recorders Are, Understanding the Components of a PVR System, What PVR Systems Are Available, Why Use MythTV?, About Open Source version numbers.
Part One: Installation
Selecting Hardware
Starting Small, MythTV’s Architecture, Selecting a CPU, Graphics Card, Disk, CD/DVD Reader/Writer, Video Capture Cards, What the Authors Use
The Easy Way: Installing MythBuntu
Downloading MythBuntu, Running the LiveCD MythBuntu, Using MythBuntu as a Frontend to an Existing MythTV system, Installing MythBuntu
The Hard Way: Installing Ubuntu
Installing Ubuntu, Installing the Hardware Drivers, Verifying That Your Hardware Works
The Hard Way: Installing MythTV From Source
Downloading MythTV, Installing Prerequisites, Setting up Your Remote Control, Building MythTV
Part Two: Initial Setup
Verifying Your Hardware
Ensuring that all your video hardware works
Configuration
Configuring MythTV for the First Time, Configuring Input Connections, Setting Up the TV Channels, Starting the Backend, Starting the Frontend
Part Three: Using MythTV
Recording TV
Getting Guide Data, Mapping the Video Source to a Tuner, Getting Channel Listings, Scheduling Recordings, Setting Up Your Scheduling Options, Dealing with Conficts
Performing Advanced TV Recording
Exploring the Advanced Recording Options, Detecting and Skipping Commercials, Transcoding, Transcoding Automatically to Other Devices
Exploring MythTV Functionality
Using the Playback Menu, Using Channel Icon Maps (Giving TV Stations Icons)
Setting Up MythTV Themes
Choosing a Theme, Finding and Installing Other Themes, Creating Your Own Theme
Running Remote Frontends
Getting Ready for Other Frontends, Specific Types of Frontend, Other Remote Viewing Options
Installing Other Plug-Ins
Installing MythTV Plug-Ins, Exploring MythTV Plug-Ins
Expanding MythTV
Avoiding Expanding, Adding More Tuners, Adding More Disk Space, Using Network-Attached Storage, Adding Remote Backends
Using MythWeb: A Web Interface to MythTV
Installing MythWeb, Using MythWeb, Securing MythWeb
Working with DVDs
Playing DVDs and VCDs, Playing Region-Encoded DVDs, Import DVDs
Controlling MythTV over the Network and On-Screen Displays
Displaying On-Screen Text, Using Templates, Controlling a MythTV Frontend over a Network, Using MythBot, the IM Interface to MythTV, Using gtalkbot, the Modular IM Engine, Running gtalkbot with the MythBot Module, MythTV Module Command Reference
Using MythTV as a Video Aggregator
Downloading web content to MythTV
MythPhone: Using VoIP with MythTV
Getting a VoIP Account, Installing MythPhone, Setting Up MythPhone, Troubleshooting VoIP Calls, Further Fun: Using Asterisk
Joining the MythTV Community
Joining the Users' Mailing List, Chatting with Other MythTV Users, Helping Others, Running the Latest Version of the Code, Updating the Source Code, Things You Should Know While Running the Latest Version, Submitting Code
