MythTV presented by Andrew Lynch
Monday, March 6 at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio No charge.    Please bring a friend.    Guests welcome. Please join us Monday night, March 6, 2006 for this free presentation in Room 109 Oelman Hall, Wright State University. We'll begin at 7:30 p.m. Bring a friend. Please note that we're meeting at Oelman Hall Room 109, Wright State University tonight! by Dave Lundy

This meeting was originally postponed six days to accommodate a special out-of-town speaker, but those plans didn't work out. This month we'll have a short presentation by our Gaming SIG, and possibly other SIGs, then Andrew Lynch will give a presentation on MythTV. Andrew is a DMA member and an active member of our Linux SIG. He started the Greater Dayton Ohio MythTV User Group about about a year ago and recently started the A.M.I.C.U.S. project on sourceforge.net. He gave a very well received MythTV presentation at our February 2005 Linux SIG meeting.

MythTV is a free, open source program to watch and record TV on your computer, which runs on Linux. It's a lot like TiVo, but doesn't require a subscription. It's also similar to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, but is free, rather than about $140, and doesn't require you to install an analog tuner card before you can install an HDTV tuner. There are several free plugin modules to include additional features, such as DVD player, music player, picture viewer, game player, news via RSS feeds, weather info / forecast, etc., and there are some themes to change how it looks. In other words, MythTV is the mythical home-media convergence box that was predicted for so long. You can build a MythTV system yourself, or buy the Dragon, already configured, from StormLogic LLC.

The cost will vary from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars, depending on how fancy you want to get. For a single NTSC (analog) tuner without hardware MPEG-2 encoding system that you use to record or watch TV, but not both at once, you can use a fairly low power (PIII/750MHz) PC. If you use a tuner with hardware MPEG-2 encoding, such as a Hauppauge PVR-150/250/350 or similar, you can get by with even less CPU horsepower. For recording from multiple tuners simultaneously, or recording and watching live TV at the same time, you will need more horsepower. To record or watch HDTV, you will need a fairly substantial (P4 2.4GHz or better) PC. In all cases, you will need a large, fast, hard drive to record the video. HDTV uses even more disk space - about 6GB per hour! If you use the photos and music features very much, you can use substantially more disk space. To conserve disk space, older, or lower priority programs can automatically be deleted as needed.

MythTV includes many ways to schedule programs, starting with an on-screen program guide, and including scheduling by time, by channel, by daily or weekly time slot, by searching for text, new vs. rerun, etc. You can also set different recording priorities based on several parameters.

I will bring my MythTV system with a single ancient NTSC tuner in an old Athlon XP2000+ PC to demonstrate MythTV. It was installed from KnoppMyth, one of several ways to set up a MythTV system. The next step will be getting it to work with a pcHDTV HD-3000 HDTV tuner I bought used from another DMA member a few months ago, but I'll need to use a faster CPU for that. Our Linux SIG expects to hold an Installfest in March or April and Andrew and others will be glad to help you configure your own MythTV system.

The slides Andrew used for tonight's presentation are available here in either PowerPoint or PDF format.

All are welcome. The meetings start at 7:30 p.m. Guests are always welcome. Directions are here.

Parking

WSU has agreed to issue temporary parking permits for the regular meetings in January, February, and March. These permits cost two dollars each and are good for the entire winter term. In other words, two bucks gets you a parking pass for all meetings in January, February, and March. The alternative is to take a chance and park illegally.

• For the February meeting (held March 6), write "DMA" prominently on an ordinary 8½ X 11" sheet of paper. Stick it in your windshield wiper.
• When you get to the meeting, fill out an application at the desk outside of Room 109 in Oelman Hall when you pick up your raffle ticket. Pay your $2 at that time. We'll have hang tags for you.
• You cannot get the permit if you are a WSU student, faculty, or staff member! You should have your own parking pass. All applications will be checked against the WSU student and employee data base.
• If UD is unavailable in the spring and we continue meeting at WSU, you'll need to spend $2 for another temporary permit.

Although parking regulations are not enforced as stringently after 5:00 P.M., there is some enforcement. Two dollars is cheap insurance.

After the meeting, we'll enjoy pizza and conversation at the CiCi's Pizza in Beavercreek, behind Chili's and next to OfficeMax on the southeast corner of the intersection of North Fairfield and New Germany Trebein roads. See this map for approximate location. The Beavercreek CiCi's number is 427-2433.

George Gibbs, Editor pro tem
The DataBus
editor@dma.org

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