What Is It?

Everybody has heard of TiVo: pause and rewind live TV, record shows for future viewing, manage all your recordings without having to shuffle VHS cassettes. Its a neat concept to say the least; some have even called it a revolution. And now manufacturers like Microsoft and various satellite and cable companies are throwing their hats in the ring hoping to get a piece of the PVR (Personal Video Recorder) business.

But do you really need to purchase a commercial off-the-shelf product? Do you really need to pay monthly fees to own your own modern day VCR? Well, not really.

Introducing MythTV, the open source alternative to TiVo. MythTV's features are incredible! First of all, like TiVo, you can pause, rewind, and fast forward live TV (as long as you don't try to fast forward into the future). You can also record TV (multiple shows at once if you have more than one TV tuner card). And MythTV will cut out the commercials for you! And now that you have taped your favorite show, why not use the basic video editing capabilities to splice together an entire season of the Simpsons?

So what do you want to watch? Using xmltv, MythTV will grab program information and give you a handy Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels or tag upcoming shows for recording. But wait, what happens if you try to record two shows at once and only have one tuner card? The MythTV intelligence will give you a warning about any programming conflicts.

MythTV isn't just a fancy VCR, though. You can play, rip, and visualize MP3s in complex playlists. You can play and rip DVD's. The DVD ripper can even transcode the movies into smaller file sizes, perfect for back ups. MythTV also has a built in image slideshow viewer, weather module, Super Nintendo Emulator and so much more!

Did I mention its free?

How Do I Do It?

To setup your own MythTV box, you'll need a reasonably fast computer and atleast one TV tuner card. For processing speed, you'll want something that is atleast 1 Ghz and about 256 Megs of RAM. If you want to record multiple programs at once or use the picture-in-picture feature, or if you want to watch one program while taping another, you'll need atleast two video capture cards. You'll also want a nice hard drive. With hard drives, you want to think not only about the size, but the speed and cache, as these will affect how fast you can write to the disk, and that will ultimately determine performance on records and playbacks.

Once you've got the hardware, all the software can be obtained online. The MythTV website even has a nice installation document that will guide you through the setup. The official MythTV website is at http://www.mythtv.org.