Specifications

www.linuxjournal.com august 2008 | 93
doing this unless you’re familiar with XFS. I’ve had some issues
with it—for example, it tends to become unmounted pretty
frequently, requiring me to remount it, which is pretty annoy-
ing when you’re trying to watch TV. The ext3 filesystem works
just fine, but you should enable slow delete in the back-end
settings (under General).
The next issue is connecting your MythTV box to the TV. If
you have a new TV (particularly an LCD TV), you may have a
VGA port in the back. If so, great—simply connect it as you
would a monitor. If not, you’ll need to connect the TV-out port
on your video card (or PVR-350 tuner card) to the TV using an
S-cable. You also need to add an entry to the
/etc/X11/xorg.conf file. You may become very familiar with this
file, particularly if you get a new TV or video card. Following
the install, I added the following Monitor entry:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Samsung"
DisplaySize 400 300
HorizSync 35 - 50
VertRefresh 60 - 60
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Your entry will depend on the make of TV you have. When
I got an LCD TV, I changed it to the following:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "LG 32LC7D"
UseModes "Modes[0]"
DisplaySize 1360 768
HorizSync 31.0 - 60.0
VertRefresh 60.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
I also had to add a new section:
Section "Modes"
Identifier "Modes[0]"
ModeLine "1360x768" 85.5 1360 1424 1536 1792 768 771 777 795
¯ +hsync +vsync
ModeLine "1216x684" 74.2 1216 1356 1396 1650 684 704 709 750
¯ +hsync +vsync
EndSection
If you installed Mythbuntu, you should be ready to go
at this point. If not, use the Synaptic package manager
to install MythTV and any plugins you want. Configuring
MythTV the first time can be a daunting task, due to the
large number of available options. You gradually will
become familiar with many of them, but I’ll walk you
through the basic initial setup next.
Setup
MythTV is made up of a front end and a back end. The back
end does most of the work: it records programs, resolves con-
flicts and controls access to the database. It always is running
in the background. If you have a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR tuner
card, recording programs takes very little effort by the proces-
sor, just a small percent. The front end is the interface for the
back end. You use it to schedule and watch programs, watch
and burn DVDs, play music and so on.
Figure 2. The Watch Recordings Screen of the MythTV Front End
When you install MythTV, you automatically are sent to the
back-end setup. You can access it at any time by running
mythtv-setup from a terminal. The first screen of the General
setup menu allows you to set IP addresses for the back end. I
recommend starting with one combined back-end/front-end
machine, so just leave these as is (both local and Master
should be set to 127.0.0.1 or localhost). You can skip the next
screen unless you have high-definition cable. You also can skip
the remaining screens for now.
Next, you need to set up your capture card. If you have a
Hauppauge card, simply select the card type that mentions
PVR-x50, and it should recognize the card automatically. Under
Video Sources, indicate from where it should download televi-
sion listings. The main one for open-source uses is Schedules
Direct. Visit the Web site to create an account and set up your
channel lineup.
Next, under Input connections, associate each tuner card
with a listings source. Under Storage Directories, you can