I've been a long time Tivo user, but earlier this month once again became interested in building a MythTV box that could handle all the Tivo functionality, as well as DVD playback, DVD burning and music management. This page documents the effort to do so. It's a wiki, so please edit it if you follow these instructions and your experience is different. This page specifically documents the steps we took to build a MythTV box using Ubuntu Linux as the base operating system.
This document is based on the Myth on Breezy w/PVR-150 document, which provided an excellent framework. Unfortunately there are several places where it's now wrong. So this page corrects those issues, and attempts to flesh things out a bit.
Our Hardware Configuration
The goal was to build an inexpensive MythTV box that could function as a TiVo replacement. As a result, we based the machine on a used Dell Optiplex GX150 that was lying around. The GX150 has a Pentium III 933MHz processor and 256M of RAM. The processor seems to be fine, but we're upgrading the RAM to 512M to prevent swapping.
Our goal is cheap, so we're using the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150, a tuner card with built-in MPEG2 encoder. The presence of the hardware encoder significantly reduces the CPU requirements. The PVR-150 can be found for under $100; we found ours for $80 after rebate. If you have some extra scratch, you can get the PVR-350 which features a hardware MPEG decoder as well as encoder, as well as TV-out.
The GX 150 has an onboard VGA controller; for TV-out I added a Vision Tek Radeon 7K video card for $50. This card features DVI, VGA and TV out and is supported by the ati X driver.
In summary, we're using the following hardware configuration for our initial installation:
- Dell Optiplex GX 150
- Pentium III 933MHz
- 256 M RAM
- 20 G Hard Drive
- Hauppauge PVR-150
- Vision Tek Radeon 7K
- Ben Q DVD Reader/Writer
As stated above, we'll be upgrading the RAM to 768M when the new module arrives, as well as upgrading the hard drive to a 300G 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda.
Software Installation
Installing Ubuntu
You can perform as basic Ubuntu Breezy installation, with one important exception. When partitioning the hard drive, it is important to select a high performance file system which handles large files and deletions efficiently. According to the MythTV documentation (Filesystems section), XFS and JFS are good choices. We chose JFS and split the harddrive into two partitions: a swap partition and a single, large partition which filled the remaining space.
Installing the Prerequisites
Installing MythTV
Configuring MythTV
Resources