DVR (3 of 3): Software

In this first two parts of this communiqué covered the hardware and operating system I used on my custom DVR or media PC. This final installment about building my DVR will cover the software I used and configured to create the DVR functionality. You can probably look forward to one final communiqué about my media PC to wrap things up and to show off some pictures of the final configuration.

Software

When looking into Linux software that performed DVR functions, I found that MythTV seemed to be the most actively developed and supported. In the first part of this communiqué you can check out some links to good resources.

TV

MythTV is really more of a media PC platform rather than just plain DVR software. The primary features of MythTV include watching, pausing, rewinding and fast forwarding TV. In addition there is a nice program guide that pulls program information off of the internet. There are some pretty neat convenience factors to MythTV too. If you want to watch a show that starts at 9pm, but don't get home until 9:15, you can start watching the show when you get home, and even fast forward through commercials. With a dual TV tuner (like the one I have), you can either record two shows happening at the same time, or record one and watch another. You can also set up Picture-In-Picture. Due to the client-server architecture of the MythTV system, you could set up your master system with multiple dual tuner cards, and then have remote frontends throughout the house that are connected via a wireless network. Hopefully sometime later this winter I will be setting up a remote frontend for the system I have.

In addition to TV, there are also standard plugins for music management, video management, weather information, news feeds, phonebook, Netflix management, game emulators, picture galleries and much more. I will explain some of the neat features about the plugins I use next, however you may need to compile a recent SVN (subversion) build of MythTV to get some features.

Videos/DVDs

The MythVideo plugin for MythTV allows for complete management of a video library. It provides a simple tool for ripping DVDs onto your hard drive, either in native vob format (MPEG2 encoded) or transcoding to xvid encoded avi format. In addition, you can select a menu item and grab all of the metadata for a video from the IMDB. This works surprisingly well and even grabs a poster of the video or movie if available. Although I have never used it, MythVideo also allows you to rip VCDs. One of the neat features of MythTV is that you can have it monitor your CD/DVD drive an automatically switch to the appropriate plugin when a disc is entered. When you pop a DVD into my media PC, it takes you to the DVD menu where you can watch or rip the DVD. It is also possible to set it up to automatically start playing a DVD. This feature also work for audio CDs. Actual video playback is not performed via MythTV (it only plays back recorded TV shows), but through a separate video player. My personal favorite is Xine.

Music

The MythMusic plugin allows you to play all of your mp3s, oggs, flacs, aacs, and audio cds. It reads id3 and vorbis tags, allowing it to neatly categorize all of your music. MythMusic also includes a utility to import your music, either in aac, ogg, mp3, or flac formats. It also includes a visualization option if you are a fan of "watching" your music. Right now I have all of my music on my media PC, and I am in the process of importing all of my wife's CDs. Both my wife and I have CDs that are quite old, and have seen better days, but I have found that the Skip DR series of disc repair tools work very well.

Photos

The MythGallery plugin is a full featured photo gallery plugin for MythTV. You just point it to a directory that contains all of your photos and it will parse through it and catalog everything. MythGallery reads EXIF metadata from photos, and will even let you do simple operations such as rotating photos. It provides a number of different views, and also does a nice slideshow.

Weather

The MythWeather plugin grabs weather data for your local zipcode from weather.com and even pulls down the most recent animated doppler graphic. It includes a couple of screens of data including three day forecast and detailed forecast.

Miscellaneous

Those are the plugins I use on a regular basis, however I still have hopes of playing around with the emulation plugin (MythGame) and some others. The only other major part of setting up MythTV was getting my remote work consistently and logically across all of the plugins and Xine. I found a nice template of the ATI Remote Wonder online from someone else who was mapping their remote out, so I took that and I am currently in the process of finishing the manual for the media PC. The process of setting up the remote was a little tedious, however MythTV is very flexible with custom commands for everything. I went through and set the commands for each key on the remote and then manually mapped them to all of the functions on MythTV and Xine. So far it seems to have worked fairly well, and my wife has been able to figure most of it out without much help.

If you have any questions about my set up, or are interested in any of the configurations I have used, feel free to post a comment and I can probably help you out. Hopefully some day before the end of this year I will take all of the information in these communiqués and create a section of wbond.net to hold them all. Until then, keep a look out for an upcoming communiqué with some pictures and screenshots from my MythTV project.