[TriLUG] Myth TV - need some pointers

James Brigman jbrigman at nc.rr.com
Fri Sep 21 15:09:29 EDT 2007


Maximum Greg;

On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 10:54 -0400, Greg Brown wrote:
....blah blah about outer banks that makes us all envious...:-)
> Other Myth questions:
> 
> 1. What distro is "best"?  Debian?  Redhat?  By best I'm looking for the one
> that "just works".  The Myth box will likely be a dedicated machine (perhaps
> a ssh and squid host as well, but that's about it).  Thoughts?

I tried to "build" Myth on Cent/RHEL. I got it to work, but Homer
Jeebus, it turned into an all expenses paid trip to Dependency Hell.
Since I don't regard dependency resolution as "Useful Knowledge", I
scrubbed that and went with pre-packaged, KnoppMyth. That's the way to
do it, get your money for nothing and your chicks...you know the rest.

I used KnoppMyth for a year or two and it's OK. Reely reely easy to
install and configure. (If you're the kind who has trouble with
KnoppMyth, turn in your man card and go back to WIndows Media
Edition....)

But...the "ease" comes with a price. It's been a buggy distro and the
revision schedule to fix those bugs has been dizzying. And there is no
pure upgrade path like there is with a Fedupdora or RHELeaseme. 

Amazingly, just as I was about to deep-six the annoying Slashdot
subscription, (I'm really sick and tired with the "cutesy-saying-dept"
stuff - someone gets PAID to do that?) they came to the rescue:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/161258

A review from lil' old linux.com. Praise be: o lordy did this one hit
the spot. Pitchures and all:

http://www.linux.com/feature/118668

Tasty goods! Fedupdora has one of those "every breath you take" release
schedules, but hey, it can't be any worse than KnoppMyth was....oh,
wait...MythDora is based on v6 Fedora and v7's out now...did I speak too
soon? Can't tell yet.

Note the amusing arguments posted after the review. Lots of negative
feedback about the review, but being a long-time KM user I really didn't
take it that way - when it comes to Myth-anything, any experienced
blurbage is welcome whether I agree or not. KnoppMyth has some very
mature forums and it's the dominant MythDistro. (flames to /dev/null
please)

> 2. I read somewhere that the TV listings were going away and this was going
> to affect Myth boxes.  Has this been addressed?

Yes, there used to be a free service available that is now for-pay. It's
cheap, but I don't remember how much, I'm still running off the free
sked. Yeah, I miss a show now and then. 

> 3. What kind of hardware am I looking at?  Being a dedicated machine I'd
> like something that looks like it belongs next to a television.  A fat disk
> is a must, but I have no need to burn content so an included DVD burner
> isn't necessary (besides I could hook one up via USB I suppose).  However if
> the thing already comes with a DVD burner that's cool.

I use a 3 year old moderate-strength 32bit system, 1GB RAM, Hauppauge
PVR-500 card. It's dual tuners are excellent and well worth the extra
money. Plenty of support for the card and it's built-in decoder ring. I
thought about HD but it's free software and I'm doing it on a budget and
I don't care about the whole big 'ol 8 channels you can get in HD....

JKB






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