Gabe has a computer that we’ve designated as the media server at our house to hold music, movies and other media files. I’ve always wanted to try to setup a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) to record TV, basically like a Tivo. I got a good deal on a Hauppauge Win-TV-250 TV tuner card and went about setting up the software. This proved more difficult than I thought. I always heard MythTV was cool so I downloaded Knoppmyth to try to get it running but didn’t have much luck. The TV signal didn’t come in and I don’t think there’s any way that it was gonna easily support the wireless internet card.
The server already had Windows XP on it, so I figured rather than trying to download a linux distro with good wireless support and then configuring MythTV I’d try finding some windows PVR software.
The first thing I tried was BeyondTV, which isn’t free but had a trial period. It worked great right out of the install, but it didn’t have a way to play music or other movies off the hard drive. You could configure the remote to control other programs like Winamp or Windows Media Player, but it wasn’t very slick.
So far I’ve settled on an open source piece of software for windows called Media Portal. So far it looks like it does almost everything I want well. It took a little while to get setup, but it looks like it’s under pretty heavy devolopment so I imagine it’s going to improve quickly. I think the hardest thing was getting the tv schedule using XMLTV, which you have to download and configure to use a Zap2it account. It seems a little buggy watching TV sometimes, but the music and movies interfaces are awesome.
I may still try to configure MythTV sometime on Fedora Core 4, but only if I find the time.