Mythtv

Andy and I have started our Mythtv project, if you came to the last meeting you would already know about this.

Our system specs

Shuttle like case

3.0Ghz Intel Pentium 4

512MB mem

Nvidia AGP 128MB card

40GB IDE drive

Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T PCI

What we have tried so far:
1. mythedition-0.5
download from: http://www.tlm-project.org:6969/stats.html?info_hash=123c313667a5444fcaa1cefd8c34855891261c24

This is a PCLinuxOS .93 modified distro for Mythtv 0.19, it has all the major plugins for mythtv.

This was very easy to load, just put in the CD, install on the HD via the 'install to HD' button on the background then we loaded the driver for the TV card.

# modprobe cx88_dvb

add cx88_dvb to your /etc/modules file so it loads this driver on startup.

The problem we had with this distro is that it took 6 seconds to switch between TV channels. We think this is due to some errors.

2. LinuxMCE on Ubuntu Edgy 6.10

LinuxMCE is huge it includes everything from mythtv to home automation. Also there is asterisk on there.

We couldn't install this as it crashed out when trying to install the home automation packages, so we gave up quickly on this.


3. Ubuntu 7.04 from Scratch

We install Ubuntu from scratch and installed the packages for mythtv. Nothing needed to be compiled, and this was quick and easy going.

We followed these instructions:
http://www.parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

The problem with this is the drivers for the TV card were terrible and we couldn't watch the picture as it had to much noise in the picture. This was tested side by side with mythedition which worked very well, but was slow. Same hardware, same place, same antenna.


Next we will try PCLinuxOS 2007 from scratch, as I believe this will be the best combo, due to the fact the drivers under PCLinuxOS have been the most successful and if we build our own it should be fast enough switching channels.