MythTV is an open-source, Linux-based multimedia management system that supports
listening to and viewing sound, movies,TV, digital photos, and more. As an
open-source project, MythTV is by no means a one-man show, but MythTV’s originator,
Isaac Richards, describes his impetus for its development as follows:
I got tired of the rather low-quality cable box that AT&T Broadband provides with their
digital cable service. It’s slow to change channels, ridden with ads, and the program
guide is a joke. So, I figured it’d be fun to try and build a replacement. Yes, I could have
just bought a TiVo, but I wanted to have more than just a PVR—I want a web browser
built in, a mail client, maybe some games. Basically, I want the mythical convergence box
that’s been talked about for a few years now.
From the “Background” page at www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=
MythInfo.
Over time, his quest for “the mythical convergence box”—which really means a device that
combines TV, (DVD) movies, all kinds of music, radio, photographs, and other forms of entertainment
or lifestyle activities (MythTV even includes a plug-in to manage cooking recipes)—
has spawned a veritable do-it-yourself digital entertainment management tool that anyone
who’s somewhat Linux savvy can download and install at no charge, and then extend and customize
beyond belief. Though you’ll hear MythTV often described as a personal video recorder
(PVR), there’s really an awful lot more to it than that, particularly for those who seek to take
fullest advantage of its capabilities.
But MythTV is also very much a do-it-yourself phenomenon. This means people must be willing
to find and assemble the parts necessary to build a PC on which to run MythTV, and then
go out and grab all the software pieces and parts (of which there are more than a few) to install,
configure, and get MythTV set up and running. Then there’s the constant tinkering required to
make of it exactly what you want it to be. Sounds like work, doesn’t it?
In fact, you may be wondering why on earth anybody would want to go to that much trouble.
Well, for one thing, though you may run into a little trouble here or there, it’s really not that
difficult. In addition, some people actually revel in this kind of thing (including, obviously, this
book’s intrepid and interested authors).What you get at the end of the process is what really
makes the whole thing worthwhile: MythTV is every bit as capable (and in some ways, more
capable) than comparable products such as Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. And
you can take the base installation and customize it to your heart’s content, which makes it
infinitely better to those who care about such things.
All of this said, there is one potential gotcha about working with MythTV. It not only runs on
top of Linux, it uses the operating system both heavily and fully. Thus, if you want to work
with MythTV you should be reasonably familiar with Linux. In fact, you should be unafraid of
installing a big and feature-laden runtime environment—namely, MythTV and its constituent
elements, plus plug-ins, and add-ons—onto a Linux-based PC.
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