So You’re Thinking of Trying MythTV

We’ve been writing a lot about the new features of the latest release of MythTV, which has now been fully released. Assuming we, or the myriad of other enthusiasts have convinced you to try MythTV as the core of your HTPC(Home Theater PC) system, what should you think about?

Go HD – Don’t Even Bother with SD

In this modern world, even though SD is cheaper, why limit yourself? High Definition TV is the wave of the future, so you should plan for it, even if you aren’t yet ready for it.

You don’t even need a powerful computer anymore to do playback. Just a good graphics card. Under Linux, the best supported cards are the Nvidia line of graphics cards. The 8000 and 9000 series support VDPAU, the latest in offloading video playback from the CPU to the GPU. With one of these graphics processors, you can even use an inexpensive low-power processor like the Atom(common in Netbooks) to run your system.

Now, that is playback. As for recordings, hard drives are fairly straightforward. Get enough space. GBs are cheap now. Beyond that, you need a recording device.

Even with Over-The-Air broadcasts, you can get HD programming using a tuner card. After that, if you have cable or satellite, you can get some channels unencrypted on the cable line, usually local stations as well. Beyond that, you can take the output from the cable or satelite box and pipe it into computer for recording. If you are lucky, you can get channels over a firewire cable from the box(cable only), if not, you can use the HD-PVR 1212 to capture from the analog outputs.

After that, all you need is a remote to control it, and a TV or computer monitor to output it to, and you have the basics of a MythTV setup. Easy, huh?

More to come…

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