Practical MythTV: Building a PVR and Media Center PC (Paperback)

~ Stewart Smith (Author), Michael Still (Author)
Key Phrases: funny bunnies, new partition, play settings, Network Control, North America, Media Settings (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

MythTV is a powerful open source personal video recorder (PVR) application that runs on Linux. Developed for several years by volunteers, it offers a stable and extensible platform for automating all of the things you would expect from a PVR, and much more.

Practical MythTV: Building a PVR and Media Center PC takes a project-based approach to implementing your own MythTV setup. You get to pick and choose the functionality you want to install for your PVR, and will learn the details of everything from selecting hardware to advanced customization.

You will learn how to record your favorite television shows, store your DVDs for later playback, create a music library out of your CD collection, and even use your PVR for Voice over IP. Your PVR wouldnt be complete without a remote control or the ability to play back content to other TVs in your home. Youll learn how to do both of these things in this book. Youll even learn to how to utilize your Xbox as a remote front end to play back content.

Beyond these basics, you will learn advanced techniques like commercial detection and skipping, auto-expiring content, creating your own themes for MythTV, and utilizing plug-ins to do things like display weather conditions, RSS feeds, and photo slide shows.

About the Author

Stewart Smith is an Australian and a software engineer working for MySQL AB on MySQL Cluster. He started being a serious Linux user in the days of MkLinux pre-DR3 and remembers being thrilled with the arrival of a driver for his floppy drive. In 2003, he first saw TiVo and realized that TV could be made not to suck. Stewart had MythTV running very soon after that and has enjoyed enlightenment ever since. He has always liked writing his own software and continues to enjoy doing so. He is also involved in the local LUG (LUV&emdash;Linux Users of Victoria) and has been on the board of Linux Australia from 2003 to the present.

Michael Still released his first open source project in July 2000 and has been actively developing ever since. He has had a variety of articles published by IBM DeveloperWorks, and once made a tux out of fairy lights! He is the author of the recently published The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Apress, 2005). Michael grew up in Canberra, Australia, and now works for Google and lives in the Silicon Valley with his wife and two kids. Michael is a past committee member of AUUG, Linux Australia, and the linux.conf.au 2005 committee.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Apress (May 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597796
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597798
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #292,021 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book - Buy It !, August 17, 2007

By	S. Johnson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book should be renamed "the MythTV / PVR Bible". It has everything you need to know about creating your own PVR using MythTV.

Ideally you should have a working knowledge of Unix to get the most out of the book. While the authors have included step-by-step instructions for installing Ubuntu, if you haven't used Linux before, most of it will be "over your head". However, the good news is that there are tonnes of gold nuggets to be found - even in the first two chapters. As such, the Microsoft "point and click" people should buy the book purely on the basis of a good sanity check - eg: have you considered all the available options relating to hardware?

Something that most authors leave out of books is the setup they use at home. Stewart and Michael (the authors) include their own hardware and cover in detail why they use it. If you combine this information with the lists of recommended hardware, you will avoid the most common mistakes that people make when creating a PVR.

While I've done a lot of research into building PVR's and have a Unix background, I managed to get a lot out of it. Expert users will find the information relating to plug-ins, advanced TV recording and expanding MythTV worth the read.

If you are thinking about building a PVR, do yourself a favor - stop everything you are doing and buy this book first.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Almost Completely Worthless, July 21, 2008

By	Blake Watson "===Blake===" (Winnetka, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Look, I'm not going to say that these guys didn't try, or that this is a cynically written attempt to cash in on something, but this book is as close to worthless as I can imagine.

Now, again, this is not entirely the authors' fault. MythTV is highly dynamic. What's true today isn't true tomorrow. I'm a journeyman MythTV builder, and a lot of what I've learned in the painful progress I've made simply does not apply any more.

That said, a lot of stuff =hasn't= changed, and it's here where the book falls apart. They should have started with the basics of content flow, i.e., where is the media coming from? Because that's the first thing you need to know before you even decide if MythTV is right for you. (Over the air content, for example, is easily handled by Myth, while controlling a set-top box from a cable, satellite or fiber optic company is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.)

While support has been added since this book was written, the stuff they actually did mention that has been part of MythTV since its incpetion is not well covered. For example, to set up your MythTV backend, you have to select from various capture card types. There are V4L, MPEG2, DVB, etc.--how about explaining what these are? No explanations is the norm, and when there is an explanation it's often simply restating the on-screen text without actually clarifying.

Six months of having this book and I've never once found an answer to a question I had. Now, I don't go looking for product specific stuff, because (as I said) there's no way they could cover that, but just basic joints and cogs and so on.

See, the thing about MythTV is that if you have just the right hardware and a simple enough setup, it might take you fifteen minutes to set up. If you don't, it could take you weeks to set up, or you might never be able to do it.

To be useful, this book really should have explored =how= to troubleshoot. They couldn't do the actual troubleshooting for you--there are too many things that can go wrong--but they could tell you about the utlities and hardware settings that allow you see where your problems lie.

Maybe they just didn't have the space. But, as I say above, it makes the book almost completely worthless.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great overview, July 25, 2007

By	Kevin Blanchard (Austin,TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I had been playing with Knoppmyth already to get a feel for MythTV and see if I wanted to use it to replace my TIVO. There are so many options and features that I was looking for a good book to cover an overview of MythTV and talk about install options/pitfalls etc. in more detail from a practical standpoint.

This book addressed many of my concerns and questions I had going into reading the book and helped me follow through and a make a fully educated decision in moving forward with building and installing my new MythTV box.

For anyone considering MythTV or looking for a good guide to get it up and running, I highly recommend this book.