Building a MythTV PVR

Introduction - the project

MythTV is a well known and powerful open source PVR suite running (mainly) on Linux. However, unlike its Windows competitors it is difficult to install and get going - though once going it is quite rewarding. This document summarises my experiences in getting a MythTV installation going. There are quite a lot of documents like this on the internet, but there are an awful lot of h/w - s/w combinations and they all have different challenges, so I thought I would add my experiences in the hope they might be useful to someone else following a similar route.

I have a lot of software development experience, but none at all with Linux. So my knowledge of how to do this has gone from absolute zero three to four weeks ago, to - well, still pretty close to zero - now. Therefore if reading this you think this guy just doesn't know what he's talking about with Linux, I wouldn't argue with you.

Nonetheless I have got it all to go, and this summarises how I did it - what worked, what didn't work, and how I got around it.

I ran into some pretty awkward problems along the way, and the worst of them were probably:

• Overscan on the (TV) monitor
• Getting shutdown / wakeup to work
• Lack of HD channels

Why MythTV?

I have a Topfield 5800 PVR which has been giving good service for some years. There is nothing really wrong with it (power supply capacitors - the Toppy achilles heel - having been replaced), but it only handles SD TV via DVB/T.

I'm in the UK and just receive Freeview from the Sandy Heath transmitter. However there are an increasing number of HD channels being transmitted using DVB/T2 which I cannot get with the Toppy. Some SD channels are now also DVB/T2. So, given the Toppy would need replacing at some point, I wanted something to receive HD. Plenty of options out there, but I also wanted to be able to keep backups of recordings occasionally, and the commercial HD recorders tend to encrypt the recorded stream so it can only be played back via themselves.

Another big benefit of a PC PVR system when compared to a dedicated box (eg Humax or similar) is that there is a split between back and front end, so one backend can service various frontend clients around the house via wifi. (At least in theory - see later).

So I looked at the various PVR packages for PCs. Initially I did this on Windows and after some trial and error ended up with a Windows 7 laptop with 2x PCTV 292e USB tuners and Argus TV as the backend software, Kodi as the frontend. It worked excellently (still does) but it does tie up a Windows laptop.

With the steady march of progress, I have the odd unused desktop system around, and therefore had the idea of turning one of these into a dedicated PVR backend system. Didn't want to waste a (costly) Windows licence, so decided to do it with Linux. Whilst these old desktops are not as powerful as some now, Linux is a lot less resource hungry than Windows.

Argus TV is an excellent piece of software, but since it is produced by a group specialising in Windows .NET applications, it didn't seem likely that it would ever appear as a Linux package. Not only that, development seems to have stopped at the moment.

Looking at the Linux alternatives, the main choices seemed to be TVHeadEnd and MythTV. The reason I decided on MythTV was that I think (could be wrong) that TVHeadEnd has no support for shutdown or standby. It seems to me essential that a PVR be able to sit in a low power state, wake up to record then go back to sleep. If I have maligned TVHeadEnd in this regard, my apologies, but either way, I decided to give MythTV a go.