The Birmingham Area Linux Users
Presentation Meeting: Myth TV (and mini organizational meeting
UAB: Campbell Hall: RM 435
3p-5p
Presentation
- Myth TV - Presented by a conglomerate of people
Topics to be discussed
- Officers
- Member growth and Retention
- Projects
- Group content
- Linux Advocacy
Meeting Notes
I counted 15 people in attendance at Saturday's meeting. I was about the last one to arrive at around 3:05p, though someone did sneak in around 3:30p.
Jeff Roberts demoed MythTV on his PC. He started by discussing his hardware setup. Having left his new PVR500 at home, he was using a Hauppauge winTVgo capture card.
Though he recommends one of the Hauppauge PVR models which offloads much of the processing to the capture card, allowing the use of an older PC for the Myth backend.
Jeff stepped us through the card setup and we asked lots of questions about disk usage, capture cards, installation, and streaming video across Wi-fi (No problem, says Mark Dillavou).
For video out, an nVidia card or PVR350 was recommended, though I'm still hoping to hear about anyone's experiences using an Xbox as a Myth frontend.
Jeff discussed the web interface and how he has no problems playing captured video on a windows box over the network using the Myth web interface.
We didn't have a cable connection, so Jeff wasn't able to pause a live video feed. He demoed some video he had previously captured, sans commercials. He also discussed xmltv and the Zap2it subscription to automatically grab local TV schedules by zip code. He also discussed lots more details of MythTV which I didn't make notes on.
Jeff did an admirable job of presenting MythTV, especially considering the short notice. It was kind of hard to see his computer screen from the audience. A projector for the video output would be a valuable addition to any presentation. Hopefully, we can obtain one for future meetings.
After Jeff's presentation, I displayed my hacked one-time-use CVScam. The details on how to make the cable are covered at the Make magazine blog.
The Linux software to download the CVScam videos (ops for linux) to your computer is at SourceForge.
About half of those in attendance hung around afterwards for some seriously geeky conversation. 
When I left Charles was still trying to boot his usb-stick Linux on Vincent's laptop. Overall, a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon. PatrickHill
Jeff's MythTv Links
http://mythtv.org/ - mythTV's home of course, the Documentation section.
http://mysettopbox.tv/ - home of knoppmyth, make sure and read the forums here after you get the iso.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/ - mythtv mailing list archive, your best friend
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ - the most complete HOWTO for mythtv, specifically for fedora but the concepts are the same regardless of distro