forget tivo…build a mythtv box

I’ve toyed around with the idea of having a DVR. It would be cool to have one. Everyone that I know that has one says that they love it and can’t live without it. I’m sure Laura would like it too.

I’m not a huge TV fan, but I like a good technical challenge, so I’m thinking about building a mythTV box. What is mythTV? It’s an open source project that allows you to build your own personal DVR. You supply the hardware (a computer with a TV capture card and a video card with TV out) and away you go.

I’ve been feeling the need lately to upgrade my current desktop machine. It’s a 3.0 GHz P4 with a gig of ram, 400GB of disk, a nice sound card and a 128 Mb video card. I’m thinking that I’ll buy a new HTPC (home theater-pc) case and transfer the guts of my computer over (sans video card), get a new video card with TV out and an HD capture card and I’ll be set.

If you are afraid of building the software yourself, you can set up mythDora instead…..a Fedora Core 6 install bundled with mythTV and all the goodies to go along with it.

As I get closer to building my box, i’ll post up more details including the exact hardware I’m using and any difficulties that I encountered.