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My parents wanted to buy me something for graduation. I told them I didn't want anything, but they insisted. I saw this as a great opportunity to get a mythtv box up and going. Since I had about $700 to spend, I figured I could get some decent stuff together to have a really nice myth box that I could use to do general media center tasks, including tivo-type applications. I gave my dad a wishlist, and he pretty much came through on all of it. The box is as follows:

Cooler Master C541 Centurion Micro ATX Case
Intel Pentium 4 2.4A Prescott 533MHz FSB
MSI 661FM3-V Micro ATX Motherboard
Corsair ValueSelect 2x512mb PC3200 Ram
Western Digital Caviar SE WD3000JB 300GB 7200 RPM IDE
Hauppage Win-TV PVR-350

Pretty nice, right? I got the box on Christmas, put it together, all except the PVR which I was ordering from Insight.com due to my work getting decent pricing from them. I ordered that PVR a week later, and to my dismay, Insight was out of stock. However, yesterday, due to my boss being cool, he loaned me one of the two PVR-350's he picked up a week before I called. So I was all set.

Popped the PVR in last night, and installed KnoppMyth because of it's ease of use as well as the relatively painless install it does for MythTV and all it's plugins. It may not be the fastest (and I say may as I am 99% sure it's as fast as anything else doing these same tasks), but it surely works to the fullest of my expectations. However, things weren't as easy as I would have liked, and some extra configuration was required. First, since I wanted to use the PVR-350, which has S-video output, to do both the recording as well as the displaying to the TV, I had to run a script which reconfigures the XF86Config-4 file as well as recompiling the ivtv driver to support the PVR-350 for video out. That script can be found here . It is extremely well run, and does all the work for you. It may require some configuration, but nothing that is too terribly difficult. However, what this script does do is configure myth (and X) to run at 720x480. This is great if you are running a 16:9 viewing ratio, but for those of us running 4:3, it's a bit off. Since you really don't want to mess with the XF86Config-4 here (believe me, no good results come of it), you can set the width/height of myth and the offsets to produce a fullscreen looking front end. I am using the following:



Tv output is not effected by this, and plays fullscreen in mplayer. A second configuration that was needed was to the /etc/lircd.conf file so that my remote, which is not natively supported, would work. Another file, /home/mythtv/.lircrc also had to be modified, and mine is linked here .



Simple enough, right? So now the remote works, but it's not booting without me hitting CTRl-D and CTRl-C alot. A big issue is not being able to see all the boot output when you boot up after the video switches to the PVR's S-video out. This stinks, and was particularly a problem for me until I booted using a monitor to find that my boot was halting as a disk needed to be checked. So fixed that, re-modified the XF86Config-4 file, and was good to go. Everything is working now, and I'm pretty happy with it. I plan on looking into what I can do to customize the UI for both MythTV itself as well as making MythWeb more useful to me and my wife. More to come...

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