MythTV is a free Linux application which turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a network streaming digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or Home Theater Personal Computer. It can be considered as a free and open source alternative to Tivo or Windows Media Center. If you have an old computer laying around the house and maybe a TV tuner card, you need to take a look at MythTV. It’s a homebrew PVR project that has been under heavy development since April 2002, and is now quite usable and feature rich. Some of the features include:
- Basic ‘live-tv’ functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind “live” TV.
- Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
- Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
- Picture in picture support, if you have more than one tuner card.
- Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
- Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
- Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec).
- Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.
- Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder.
- Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
- Grabs program information using xmltv.
- A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.
The project is community supported and you can find tons of info on MythTV. You can even try MythTV out on your computer without installing it with distos like Mythbuntu.
I have been running the system for 2 years now and have been complety happy with MythTV. I use MythTV to store all my media, download all my podcasts and recorded all my TV. With the addition of Media sharing you can also share all your video and music to all your Windows media players. Why pay an extra $200 plus a month from your cable company for a DVR when you can do it for Free!
It sounds a little techy, but I will definitely check it out. If I can figure out how to work it, that will be great. I spend most of my time in my office, but my cable connection is not in my office. Therefore, all I can watch on my TV in the office are DVDs. Thanks for the info.
Kelli
It’s easy if you follow Brads instructions. Good luck!