Installing Fedora Core 4 & MythTV, Part 1

So I recently decided to create my own MythTV machine. I don't watch much TV, but the idea of zapping commercials and automatically recording shows is kind of appealing, plus, at the end of the day, setting of MythTV is probably more fun than actually using it.

If you are considering building MythTV, IT WILL BE A LONG PROCESS. If you are not a system administrator for Linux (and I am most definitely not), you're in for a long ride. Like every open source project, there are millions of web postings, HOWTOs, forums, etc dedicated to installing, setting up and configuring MythTV. And like every open source project, 95% of this documentation is incomplete, confusing, contradicting, etc.

You may want to consider using BeyondTV or other windows-based projects if you are not comfortable with Linux. It will be time consuming and it will be frustrating.

So the first step, is to get the necessary hardware for MythTV, which is mostly a computer and video capture card. I took it one step furter, and bought a card that has on-board MPEG encoding, which means that I do not need a really powerful computer, as the card will do a lot of the heavy video processing, leaving the computer/CPU free for other tasks.

I bought the Hauppage WinTV PVR 350, as it seems to be well supported for Linux, and it has a video out. However, if you are using Windows as your PVR/media center, I would recommend getting the WinTV PVR 150/250 and a different video card that can output to your TV. It turns out that you cannot output the desktop (ie, your computer screen) to your TV with the PVR 350 in Windows, only video files that are being played back. Since I am not planning on using a monitor in my media center, trying to click on a file and open it up blindly before it anything appears on my TV screen was disappoing to find out. I thought I was saving money by getting the WinTV PVR 350 as it had the video out, but perhaps not. I'll see how it works in Linux.

So my media center computer has the following:
Intel Celeron 1.8 GHz
512MB RAM
40 GB hard drive (this is probably too little, but a good start for now - I'll discuss the issues this raises when partitioning the hard drive and being able to expand it later)
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 card
Hawkings Wireless PCI 802.11g card (I ordered this for this machine specifically because I heard it was Linux friendly - to be determined).

My next step was to determine what flavor/distribution of Linux to use. I realize that this can be an almost religious debate among compu-geeks. But for the guy who just wants to be able to watch the Daily Show whenever, and not be sys admin for my home network, I want something that is easy as possible.

The possibilities I considered were:

1. Knopp/KnoppMyth. This is the "out of the box, just install it and run MythTV" distribution. I did not try out Knopp, but I have tried MEPIS, which I believe is derived from Knopp. I really like MEPIS, but I did not choose KnoppMyth, as I heard it is OK to use for Myth, but if you ever want to use your machine for something else (a file server), it may not be great. Moreover, there is no such thing as an out of the box MythTV machine. At least not yet. Linux may be 1000x more stable, powerful, better designed than MS Windows, but when it comes to usability for an average person, Linux is years behind.
   
2. Gentoo. There are people who love Gentoo with MythTV. Basically the idea behind Gentoo is that you compile all your programs yourself. The upside is that you really gain a solid understanding of how everthing works in Linux. The downside is that you have to gain a really solid understanding of how everything works in Linux in order to use it properly. Great for the computerphiles. Not so good for me.
3. Fedora Core 4. This may sound like a silly reason, but the sole reason I chose Fedora Core 4 was that I thought it had the best documentation out there. A person named Jared Wilson created an excellent FAQ/guide on how to install and configure MythTV with Fedora Core 4. It can be found at http://wilsonet.com/mythtv

So, thus I began my road to installing Fedora Core 4 on machine. In Part 2, I explain how to install Fedora Core 4, and add some tips that are missing on Jared Wilson's FAQ.