TomTheGeek

All the geeky stuff that gets me hot.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

My first MythTV box

I finally set up my first MythTV box the other day and it's every bit as powerful as I thought it would be. MythTV is truly the all in one convergance box. It watches, records and streams TV, watches/rips DVDs, plays/rips CDs, plays games and displays pictures just to name a few things it can do.

The first thing I want to set up is encoding copies of everything it records into a smaller version for my phone. It's had finding video to load on my phone and this would be a never ending supply. I also have a large collection of NES Roms and a controller I'm going to hook up to play some games with. I'm planning on setting up at least one front end for it also in my living room (the main box is in my bedroom) so I can utilize it's power in the living room.

Mythdora is the particular distro I loaded my box with, Knoppmyth is also a very good distro but it didn't work for me the first time I tried it. I actually thought I would like knoppmyth better since it's based on Debian (my distro of choice) but after trying Mythdora I decided to stick with it since it installs a slightly newer version of MythTV and I thought it might be good for me to branch out a little in the OS department. For the record, Mythdora didn't work the first time either, I had to re-install it a second time. FYI: make sure you disable SELinux when going through the setup and everything will go smoothly.