[clug] [Fwd: new Linux Media s/w]

[Paul Wayper]

Sunnz wrote:
> Hmmm I heard people talking about MythTV all the time...
>
> Can someone tell me what is a "MythTV"??? Thanks.

MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org) is a Programmable Video Recorder
application 'suite' designed to run on a computer connected to your TV. 
It downloads the channel programme guide each night (from
http://www.tvguide.org.au for us good people in Australia) and uses
whatever TV cards you have in your machine to record shows onto your
hard disk.  You can then play them whenever you want, and you can also
treat live TV as a recording - start watching, pause it to get a snack,
fast forward over the ads, rewind to hear the weather forecast again,
and so on.  Because shows are generally recorded by their name
('Mythbusters') and other metadata rather than their time ('7:30PM on
Saturday night'), it means that when a show stops its run or is
rescheduled you don't record stuff you don't want.  You can even bung in
multiple tuners to record more than one show simultaneously, and use it
from multiple front ends - I regularly watch TV on my laptop in bed
(over Wifi) while Kate is watching TV on the main system in the lounge.

It has a huge range of plugins to watch videos you've downloaded, I
mean, made yourself, listen to music, play DVDs, burn DVDs of recorded
programs, rip DVDs onto the machine, record podcast RSS feeds, use it
over the web, and more.  Most distros have it packaged up in some form,
but some take a bit more work to install than others - it's quite a
large application with a lot of dependencies (as every multimedia
package seems to have) and it takes some work to compile.  Setting it up
is also a task requiring a fair bit of preparation and knowledge, as is
the choice of hardware to run its back-ends and front-ends.  I, and
several other people on the CLUG list, have set up MythTV - Mikal Still
(a former Canberran now working for Google in San Jose, or Googopolis as
I hear they're renaming it) has written a book on it (plug:
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-MythTV-Building-Media-Center/dp/1590597796/ref=sr_1_1/104-6453250-7579155?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174971311&sr=1-1)

In short, it will totally revolutionise how you watch TV, and if you
don't watch TV before you will afterward ;-)

HTH,

Paul