Aww Dip

As you may remember, a while back I posted a shopping list for the MythTV system I was revamping. After almost two full weeks of tweaking, I finally have the full system built. It was an adventure, to say the least. Thankfully my wife was very understanding… I know she was getting frustrated watching me tinker with all these various machines without results for a while.

What is MythTV?

In short, MythTv is an open-source DVR system built for linux systems, with the ability it interface with Mac and Windows systems. It is a system that manages recorded television, movies, music, photos, and much more (with the use of additional plug-ins). A MythTV system will consist of at least two parts, a backend and a frontend. The backend is the server of the operation; it stores all the content, manages recordings, and makes everything go. The frontend is the part that you interact with; it displays lists of recordings & movies and plays back the content.

The Beginnings

When I first started messing around with MythTV, I was using my wife’s old pc tower. This was a computer put together in 2002, and when it had Windows on it, it would struggle to just start up. After moving all of her old content off the computer, I did a clean install of Ubuntu, as I had read it was the easiest Linux distro to get working with MythTV. I was far from succesful when I tried to install MythTV as a seperate package.. After some more research I decided to give Mythbuntu a try, since it is a special version of Ubuntu compiled specifically for MythTV use.

Hit the jump and we’ll start tinkering

With Mythbuntu on the old machine, things were running ok, but there were stability issues. Since this was to be the brains behind all of our media recordings, I really needed stability. There were hardware compatibility issues, recordings getting chopped off, a lack of power for streaming content, and no room to expand storage if needed. In short, I needed a new system.

The old system, ready to sacrifice itself for the greater good

Cramped, dusty, and on its last legs

The Parts

A MythTV backend only needs a few parts: a hard drive, video capture card, video output card, sound card, cd drive, and network card (wired or wireless). I knew my hard drives, video capture cards, cd drive and network card were all up to snuff, so my parts list consisted of:

• Case
• Fans
• Motherboard (needed HDMI out)
• RAM
• Processor
• Power Supply

So I ran off to MicroCenter and lucked out. The person helping me was very familiar with MythTV and pointed me towards parts that would work with linux, have the power I needed, and not break the bank.

The processor. Allegedly this has an extra two cores which can be unlocked via some hacking, but I am not willing to mess with it.

The body

A nice beefy power supply

Motherboard. I wanted one with an integrated HDMI out to cut down on parts needed.

More RAM = more gooder

More fans = more gooder (Double true)

The Build

When I got home, I realized I had never put a system together from scratch before, and was a little worried about messing everything up. I knew where basic things like the processor and RAM should go, but I had no clue where all the leads form the power supply needed to be connected, or where to plug in the lead from the cd drive to the MoBo. Thankfully, the board and power supply were both labeled rather well, and by taking everything one step at a time, I was able to get the system together without blowing up my house or ripping a hole in the universe.

The new case, ready to start taking parts

Slowly adding parts. The fact that the MoBo was labeled helped a lot.

The obligatory “close-up” shot

All together and ready for software.

Now that this new machine was together, I needed to start installing the software… which is Part 2 of the adventure.