My MythTV PVR

I’m sure most everyone knows what a PVR (or DVR) is, but not everyone has heard of MythTV.  MythTv is an open source PVR that runs on Linux.  It does what most everything other PVR’s can do, and much more.  Since its open source, you can customize it to exactly what you want, and lots of people have added features and plugins to do a variety of things.  If your interested in more details, check out the official MythTV Wiki.

I have always liked the idea of PVR’s, but never really considered a Tivo because I didn’t like the idea of monthly fees (I’m cheap like that).  I have also never progressed past basic analog cable, so I would have to significantly upgrade my service to be a ble to use the cable companies DVR (plus I’d have to pay for it).  A few years ago I bought a TV tuner for my desktop computer, which we used occasionally to record TV shows, but it was far from an elegant solution.  Being a fan of open source software and having general nerdy intrest in such things,  I have been aware of MythTV for a while.  Finally this year I decided to take the plunge and do what I had been threatening for a while.  Actually build a custom PVR.

After a bunch of research and reading on the web, I decided to base my PVR on an Asus Pundit P1-AH2.  It fit most of my requirements.  Not to expensive, reasonably small and quiet, and built in TV-out.  This isn’t an original idea by me.  People have used Asus Pundits as MythTV boxes before.  In fact, there is a nice webpage describing using the same P1-AH2 as a MythTV box.  It has additional info if your interested.  As a TV tuner, I decided to go with a Hauppauge PVR-500.  Its a dual tuner card and is well supported in Linux and MythTV.  I was also able to find one locally on craigslist for a good price.  The rest of the stuff I needed I got new (mostly from Newgg.com).

Along with the Asus Pundit barebones, the hardware included a AMD Athlon X2 4000+ CPU, a 500 GB hard drive, and 2GB of RAM.  Because of space, I didn’t end up using the round IDE cable pictured above.  Not pictured are an old DVD drive I had and a Microsoft MCE remote and receiver.  It seems a little funny to be using a MS product for my Linux PVR, but it happens to be one of the best supported remotes for MythTV (and reasonably cheap).

The first problem I encountered was with my PVR-500 (the TV tuner card).  As I said, I got a good deal on it off craigslist.  In the end it worked with my P1-AH2, but I wouldn’t recommend it to others.  The PVR-500 is a reasonably large card, and the P1-AH2 is a pretty small case.  Here is what the case looks like opened up:

The second picture shows the enclosure for the DVD drive and hard drive removed.  The PCI cards fit into a card riser at the back left.  I got the PVR-500 to fit, but I think I took an hour or two fiddling.  As it is, the top of the card is up against the edge of the case, and it sticks out over the CPU fan a little.  As I said, it works but I don’t recommend it.  It was a royal pain to install.

After putting everything together, it looks nice and I like it a lot.  It pretty quiet.  We have it directly below our TV, and it doesn’t make any noticeable noise.  The fans a quiet, and I think the loudest thing occasional hard drive noise (but not anything I would consider bad).  It much quieter than my desktop or laptop.  The CPU fan doesn’t seem to put out much heat, but the power supply does more.  The hard drive seems to be the thing that gets the hottest.  It is packed in pretty tight below the DVD drive and doesn’t really have any good ventilation.  I added some little rubber feet to the side of the case and have it sitting sideways in our TV cart.  It doesn’t look bad or out of place.

The second picture is with the front access panel open.  Other than transferring things with a USB flash drive, I don’t use any of the connections much.  At some point down the road, I might think of trying out MythGame and use the front USB for a joystick or gamepad.  The IR receiver for the MCE remote is sitting on the upper right of the case above the DVD drive.  On a funny note, you might notice the light in the IR receiver.  That only lights up when it is receiving and IR signal.  My camera must put off an IR signal, maybe for range finding or something.

The next biggest step is getting MythTV installed.  I took the easy road, and chose linux distribution specifically for MythTV (as opposed to installing and compiling it separately).  This make it a lot easier to set up, since all the needed parts are there and mostly configured.  There are number of different distributions to chose from, but I am using Mythbuntu.  Its based off of Ubuntu (which I also use).  It was a breeze to install and get running.  Since my TV card and remote are quite common for MythTV, it pretty much ran out of the box.  The only thing needed was to get the channels and programming guide set up.

MythTV can get its programming guide data from a number of sources.  Most common I think in the US is Schedules Direct.  They are a non-profit created by members of the MythTV community and other open source PVR software, set up to provide scheduling data.  MythTV can easily be set up to use this scheduling data.  I don’t have a ethernet cord run to the area of my TV (and PVR), and I didn’t have a wireless card when I started out (more on that later).  Since I was going to have to get the data and transfer it to my PVR manually, I looked for another solution.  I found a nice little program called YApi2XML.  Its a little program that get the guide data from Yahoo and puts it in an XML format that MythTV can use.  After setting it to the correct cable provider and lineup, it gets me the guide data and I manually transfer it to my PVR.  I do this once a week.  It gives 2 weeks of data at a time, so I always have at least a weeks worth of guide data.    So far it has worked fine. I now use a program called mc2xml. It runs on linux, and can be easily set up as a cron job to automaticall update the schedule.

When I got my MythTV box set up, I didn’t not have a wireless card at first (or an ethernet connection in the area.  We just used it without a internet connection for quite a while.  That didn’t effect much except getting the guide data and the current weather.  When upgrading to the most recent Mythbuntu recently, I added a Netgear WG111v2 (usb wireless adapter).  It worked out of the box with my wireless network (WEP).  It seems ok, but does seem to drop the connection every once in a while and I have to reset the network.  I will have to get that worked out when I have time.

One of the other customization I have made to use two JP1 remotes in place of my MCE remote.  They are very customizable, and allow you to program macros into you remote among other things.  I will be adding a page about my JP1 remotes soon.