This stuff is no longer valid, i guess I just left it here because maybe somebody would find it useful
Myth TV is great, I've been using it for the past few months..
There are plenty of features, but the ones that I have found most useful are:
The best feature no doubt is to be able to record TV, and play it back like a VCR, without having to use Tapes or DVDs or anything of the such.
Now, if your not familiar with Linux, then I guess you will buy a silly Microsoft based PVR , but if I was in such a position, I'd take this time to learn Linux, as when it comes to servers, nothing comes close. Granted it will be difficult, but it will be worth it. And the fact that your reading this means your willing to give it a go.
I used Debian/unstable as the Distro of choice... I use Debian for everything
I'm going to try and go through my setup because that's what I've got experience with.
Basically you need something relatively quick, with a big HDD, 200Gb is enough, but they are pretty cheap nowadays. Never had any issues with 256Mb RAM aswell, was always enough. I would like to up the HDD space to about 500Gb eventually.
Load on the machine right now is:
19:57:28 up 1 day, 23 min, 2 users, load average: 0.77, 0.76, 0.70
That's while watching a recording of Orange County (The MOVIE!), and not taping anything.. The load usually dosn't go above 4.
top reports:
Cpu(s): 18.6% us, 1.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 79.4% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 1.0% si
You don't want CPU usage to go too high, or you'll get choppy recordings, it generally stays below 40%
The 2 TV Cards give me a few options when recording:
I've found 2 cards to be enough, although at $130 per card, I have thought about getting another one, as you never know when u want to record 3 shows at once!!
I accidently chose the DVB-T (Digital TV Cards), I was just looking for anything that worked with Linux, and found them to be *incredibly* easy to setup! Lucky me! So I suggest you get yourself some too. They work *very* well..
Now, it was a while ago since I set up my Kernel, so I'm not quite sure what I did change to get it going.
But if memory serves me right, I didn't change anything at all, and the DVB-T cards worked out of the box with a 2.6.10 kernel. Anything less than 2.6.10 it wouldn't work, without doing more complicated stuff...
The only reason why I compiled the kernel was to get the remote controls working (They come with the AverMedia DVB-T cards). In the 2.6.10 kernel somebody commented a line out which didn't detect the Input device, so I uncommented it, and recompiled.. It then detected it fine..
I Uncommented line ~369 "case BTTV_AVDVBT_771:" in
vi /usr/src/linux/drivers/media/video/ir-kbd-gpio.c
Had big problems getting the Nvidia card to work with the 2.6.10 Kernel... There was a big catch 22 when trying to install this sucker.. And I had to find the easiest option.
I needed both to work so it was a matter of figuring out which would be easier to patch.. So I dropped back to the 6111 driver and applied a patch I found somewhere that would work with 2.6.10.. Eventually tv out would work, and so would DVB.
Note: Time of writing, Nvidia has released newer drivers than the 6629, which will probably work with 2.6.10 kernels.. But I havn't tried them. So no doubt using the latest driver you will be fine.
I just downloaded the latest stable from the Myth TV Website and compiled that using the usual qt compile method. Instructions are included in a MythTV HOWTO somewhere else no doubt.
When you compile, just remember to enable DVB in the config file.
Setting up Mythtv is easy now with the release of 0.17, DVB Channels are detected automatically in the config.
The most difficult part was finding a working version of tv_grab_au, but google is our friend here nowadays.
I've missed some notes on how to test the DVB card using dvbstream, but i found a howto on the net somewhere already for that, so no doubt you will to.
Well Good Luck!