Hi everybody. For some time I have been using Windows program called Cyberlink PowerDVD because I haven't seen any PVRs yet in linux. After this thread, I am very excited on going home and download mythtv and see how it compares with the windows version. Hope I get it to install perfectly.

Thanks for the tip - MythTV.

yea, myth rocks... only prob with it is (and it's not really a myth prob) if your not using the pvr-250 card chances are you have to do software encoding which is resource heavy.

prakashjohn, I just read your post.

Well, if your driver is the bttv, then RH should have detected it automagically, and all you need to do is run Xvtv and you should just need to fine tune it and it should work just fine.
Repost if you have any problems.

zLinuxz

if you edit your modules.conf file with the tuner type you should not have to fine tune.

I'm building a machine right now that will basically have a 2ghz processor, 512mb of ram, and an 80gb hard drive.

What would be the recommended tv card to do some of this Myth'ing? I'm not too familiar with this type of hardware. Would I need a high end video card and high end sound card as well?

What hardware would you suggest for a machine like this?

PVR-250 rocks from what I hear does mpeg2 encoding and decoding on the card so your processor will do very little work. I don't have the cash to buy one right now but amazon.com has them for $134.

Join the myth email discussion it's a bounty of good info.

Official name of the card Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 250, but most just call it the pvr250.
It does not use the bttv driver, but I'm at work and don't remember the one it does use.


On my Athlon 900 w/mandy 9.1 customized kernel mythtv capturing @ 480x352 my cpu usage is about 90%, it's pretty taxing doing software capture of mpeg4 on my machine.
I tell you after running myth now for about a year I've no idea what I did without it. ;)

So I don't need a real good video card or sound card for it right? Basically I wanted to make my machine a tivo so that I could record things when I'm not home and play them back on my tv later.

Am I asking too much?

Your right on man.

you can setup a mythtv server with two tv cards and a big ol' hard drive and if you use the pvr-250 cards a older processor works.
Plus with LIRC you can have mythtv change the channels on your cable or satellite box.

I'd start reading up on it before making your final hardware decisions.

Read up on it here.

Hmm, I never really looked into mythtv that much, i knew it did fancy SDL stuff, never knew it had a web interface too... i'm halfway to finishing a much simpler web based system that schedules one off recordings.... but man that seems to do that even better already.. i so don't want to give up what i've already made... but myth looks great after all!

Muddy why would I need two tv cards? Doesn't each card have a tv in and tv out port?

I've been trying out different programs to record from VHS. I don't have cable or broadcast TV, so the whole PVR thing was not a priority.

After trying xawtv, motv, mythtv, vcr, nvrec, lavrec, transcode, mencoder, I finally settled on avicap which is part of the avifile package.

avicap is pretty simple, great for recording from VHS, and will capture with a variety of codecs.

What video card do you need for MythTv? Do they charge something?

The PVR-250 is the most popular model for getting the best results. Amazon.com has it for 135$ USD.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...onics&n=507846

Baldorg, mythtv does not charge anything.

Here is a mini howto I put together:

http://cmisip.home.insightbb.com/

FYI my system is currently broke. I think the power supply conked out. It couldn't handle the 160 gig I recently put in there. I am getting a replacement. So think twice about putting all those components in there. At least my slave mythtv is still working.

There's also a Knoppix CD customized with MythTV, called KnoppMyth: http://www.knoppix.net

On that site, you can also find a step-by-step MythTV installation guide on a Knoppix/Debian system, in the "Tips and Tricks" forum.