User:Gkmac

Background

My MythTV box was first built in mid-2007 after I moved to West Sussex and bought a TV with VGA and HDMI inputs. It originally had just a twin DVB-T tuner card, as I wanted the ability to record two channels at once.

I unexpectedly moved again a year later to a property that had worse terrestrial reception, but had a Sky dish. So I added a DVB-S2 tuner card and gave that highest recording priority, with the twin DVB-T card recording channels that are on Freeview but not on Freesat (e.g. Dave, Yesterday).

Current hardware setup

• Asus M3N78-VM motherboard with integrated nVidia GeForce 8200 graphics

Chosen mainly for the onboard graphics, which gives good performance with VDPAU and is also fanless. nVidia was required for VDPAU and also for programming in custom 1360x768 screen mode for the TV.

• AMD Phenom II 720 CPU (tri-core)
• 2Gb RAM
• Western Digital 1Tb Caviar Green SATA hard drive
• "writemaster" 8x DVD writer
• Veris Multimedia Station Elite: IR remote control with 16x2 character VFD display
• Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-T-500 (twin DVB-T tuner)
• Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-HD-S2 (DVB-S2 tuner)
• KeySonic wireless keyboard & trackpad

Used for occasional maintenance through the shell.

• Sony Bravia KDL-26U2000 LCD TV

A now rather old "HD ready" TV with 1366x768 native resolution, connected using the analog VGA input. The single HDMI input cannot take 1080p, only 1080i (which noticably flickers) and 720p (which noticably looks jagged) so the VGA input actually looks better, albeit stuck at 60Hz.

Software setup

The box runs Gentoo Linux on the stable "amd64" profile. MythTV and its plugins are keyworded "~amd64" to get the testing versions (but not the hardmasked versions).

Currently I am on mythtv 0.23, as the latest 0.24 version is only available in github overlays at the moment.

My EPG is largely based on the "Freesat" EPG; I use the Freesat channel numbers to access both Freesat and Freeview versions of channels. Channels I don't record or watch I don't bother to tune in (so you won't find bid.tv for example). Additional numbers are mainly for the Freeview only channels and also some satellite channels that are on the Sky EPG but not Freesat's.

I use XMLTV with the Radio Times 14 day guide service for the bulk of the channels. A handful are not included in the Radio Times feed but do have Freesat EPG data broadcast on the air, I use EIT collection to populate those channels. One or two do not have EPG data at all but I rarely watch those.