Hacking MythTV (ExtremeTech)

Want control? Build your own MythTV PC.

You don′t do stuff like this to cut corners. You do it because you want what you want?and because it′s fun. And a personalized MythTV is so much more than a PVR. You can combine HDTV, DVD, all kinds of music, radio, photos, even a plug–in videophone module. All you need is a little Linux know–how, assorted software components and plug–ins, an adventurous nature, and this book to tell you how it all goes together. Voil?he entertainment hub of your dreams.

Learn to do all this and much more:

• Choose HD capture cards and sound drivers.
• Install and configure MythTV.
• Build your program guides.
• Use xine to add DVD menu support.
• Pass raw digital streams to an external decoder.
• Do cool things with your remote control.
• Hack your own themes.
• Export MythTV .nuv recordings to other formats.

A companion Web site provides even more of the know–how you need.

Visit www.wiley.com/go/extremetech for links, updates, news about recent developments in MythTV, and resources shared by other readers like you.

Jarod Wilson has been an avid Linux user since circa 1997, when he was first introduced to Red Hat Linux 4.2 in a UNIX Operating Systems course in college. One spring about three years ago, Jarod was between jobs and discovered the MythTV project, and loved it so much he decided to help try to make it accessible to as many people as possible, and thus was born his MythTV on Fedora HOW–TO, dubbed Fedora Myth(TV)ology, which he still maintains to this day (when time permits). Professionally, every job he’s held since college has incorporated daily use of Linux. Jarod recently left high–performance computing cluster vendor Linux Networx, where he was an on–site field service engineer for a large customer, for a job at the very company from whence his first taste of Linux came. Jarod currently works in Red Hat’s Enterprise Kernel Group as a senior software engineer, focused on kernel testing, but also contributes time and effort to Red Hat’s Fedora Core Linux community distribution.

Ed Tittel’s passion for media was kindled right out of undergraduate school, way back in 1973, when he had the extremely good fortune to be hired as a studio engineer at the Library of Congress. Not only did Bob Carneal and John Howell teach Ed the basics of good audio engineering and careful audition of the resulting sounds, they also taught him the importance of careful design and quality implementation. Since then, Ed has gone through numerous iterations of building a great entertainment center, and has really enjoyed learning how to meld a PC into that mix. Ed’s interest in media PCs began with his last ExtremeTech book on Windows Media Center PCs, but his excitement peaked when he realized that MythTV offered an open–ended, more flexible, and client–server based implementation of the kind of functionality that MCE offers, kicked up several notches. In working on this book, Ed refreshed his knowledge of the first real operating system he ever learned (the second Berkeley Software Distribution, aka 2BSD, circa 1979), and learned to appreciate how far Linux has come and how little UNIX has really changed.

Matt Wright is a longtime home theater PC (HTPC) enthusiast and computer fiend. He’s been working full–time in the industry for nearly five years, and is a regular contributor to (and resident expert at) HTPCnews.com, one of the most popular HTPC online destinations. Matt also contributed two chapters and chunks of several more to Wiley’s Building the Ultimate Home Theater PC (Wiley, 2005) and consults regularly with professional and individual clients on HTPC topics, hardware, and technology.

Justin Korelc, at six years of age, asked his father how he could learn to use a computer. Instead of being given an obvious or easy answer, Justin’s father sat him down at the console, handed him a copy of K&R’s classic The C Programming Language, and gave him a gentle introduction to basic shell input/output. This proved instrumental in Justin’s personal and professional growth, starting with a migration from BSD UNIX to Linux in his teenage years, which eventually led him to write about his experiences.Today, Justin works as a freelance author writing articles and occasional book chapters for a variety of online and traditional publishers. Although his primary focus targets Linux and open–source software, he is also quite knowledgeable in the areas of hardware, network protocols, and a variety of unusual programming concepts, most of which center around security topics.