Specifications

At my wedding, I received an important piece of advice
from a couple whose wedding we had attended a couple
years earlier: get a second TV. The idea is that while she’s
watching America’s Next Top Model, I can watch hockey or
mud wrestling or something. However, a much better solution
to that age-old problem (and many others) is to set up a DVR
system using Isaac Richards’ open-source MythTV software.
That way, we can watch whatever shows we want at any time.
The Basics
This article shows how to build a MythTV box on a budget
and how to avoid some common pitfalls. The following is the
hardware you’ll need:
I A computer: the first step is to get your hands on an old
computer. You already may have one gathering dust in the
basement. I bought one for $70 on Craigslist. I was cau-
tious and chose one with a 1.6GHz AMD Athlon processor.
You should be able to get by on much less by minimizing
the load on your processor. Price: $0–$70.
I Tuner card: you need a tuner card to take the digital or
analog television signal and turn it into something your
computer understands. The best ones for use with Linux
are the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR series; the PVR-150 is a
single tuner with a built-in MPEG encoder, the PVR-350 is
a single tuner with built-in MPEG encoder and decoder,
and the PVR-500 has two tuners with an MPEG encoder
only. I bought my first PVR-150 for $85 (in Canada),
including a remote and IR blaster (I’ll explain what that is
later). Regular prices in the US range to as low as $60. I
bought my second one on sale for $25. I recommend
starting with one PVR-150, and then buying another later
if you feel the need. Price: $25–$85.
I Hard drive: your computer likely already has a hard drive,
but it’s probably not larger than 8GB, and you’ll need a big-
ger one. The size depends on how much of a library you
plan to build. I bought a 250GB hard drive at first, then
picked up a 500GB external drive later on. Price: $60–$80
for 250GB; $90–$150 for 500GB.
I Video card: the choice of video card is very important, par-
ticularly if it’s an older model. You may need to buy a new
video card if your existing one doesn’t have a TV-out con-
nection. NVIDIA has the best Linux support, and you can
run into a lot of problems with an older ATI card, as they
haven’t released proprietary drivers for them. Price: $0–$60.
I DVD drive: if you want to watch DVDs or burn recorded
programs to DVD, you need a DVD-ROM or DVD-RW drive.
I definitely recommend this, as they are not too expensive
these days. Price: $35.
Installation
I like Ubuntu and use it on my other computers as well, so I
decided to install Mythbuntu—a MythTV-centered distribution
based on Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I had trouble installing both
Mythbuntu and Ubuntu itself—probably because of my RAM
limitations—so I installed Xubuntu (a lightweight Ubuntu run-
ning the Xfce desktop manager) instead. The install was quite
easy; however, one unexpected (but easily fixed) problem
emerged. I couldn’t boot after successfully installing the oper-
ating system. The GRUB bootloader would spit out “Error 18”.
The problem turned out to be that on older computers, the
BIOS can’t handle partitions larger than 8GB. So, you have to
partition the disk and create a boot partition (or root partition)
that is smaller than 8GB.
A word on filesystems: I used the ext3 filesystem in the ini-
tial install, but used XFS (which is better at deleting large files)
on an external drive that I bought later. I wouldn’t recommend
92 | august 2008 www.linuxjournal.com
INDEPTH
Build a MythTV Box without
Breaking the Bank
How to turn your old PC from a dust magnet into a state-of-the-art media center.
P. SURDAS MOHIT
Figure 1. My MythTV Setup