MythTV, the heart of our MediaBox

« HOWTO: Home-brew IR receiver for LIRC Part 1

May 21

MythTV, the heart of our MediaBox

Well as you can probably guess from the title, I have decided to go with MythTV for our MediaBox. I have chosen this wonderful piece of software for the following reasons

Follow up:

It has all the functionality we need
It's extensible if we need extra functionality at a later date
And best of all, it's free, keeping in theme with goal 2 (see Welcome To MediaBox!)

By using MythTV we are tied into using a Linux distro. Not that this is a problem, as generally I prefer Linux to Windows, after all, it's free. But the only concern that I do have is that currently there are no ATI HD3200 Linux video drivers that support the UVD extensions.

UVD (Universal Video Decode) is basically hardware acceleration that decodes parts of a video stream on the GPU itself, which means you have much less CPU overhead when playing HD content. SD content doesn't bother me, as I know the CPU will be able to handle that no problem.

Now, back to Linux. The distro that I have decided to use is Ubuntu. Mainly because it's the distro I have been using for the last 2 years and I know my way around it relatively well. But recently I have seen a new Ubuntu flavour called Mythbuntu which looks promising.

Now to complete our goals for MediaBox and have all the functionality that we require these are the other pieces of software that is needed for the first stage.

Lirc - (Linux Infra-red Remote Control)
xmame - Arcade Game Emulator
Medibuntu packages - Will allow us to play CSS DVD's and proprietary video formats

So that's it for now. Next, I plan on getting the IR receiver working with Lirc, so you can expect a detailed technical post (not for the faint of heart!).

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2 comments

§ Maxei said on : 27/06/08 @ 21:21

My mobo is a Gigabyte with the integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics chipset. With Debian etch, I have terrible CPU use by xorg (Close to 100%) everytime I start any program. Playing DVDs is jerky and unbearable. Firefox scrolling is slow, etc.
The new ATI catalyst driver 8.6 does not seem to fix this problem, at least not in my case. It's good that you raise the point on lack of hardware acceleration support by ATI in Linux. They should do something, after all, we are their custumers, whether using Windows, Linux or any other OS.
§ admin® said on : 28/06/08 @ 10:31

They should do something, after all, we are their custumers, whether using Windows, Linux or any other OS

Yes I totally agree. With AMD's current open source efforts with the radeonhd driver hopefully we will see something soon in respects to UVD.

Lets just cross our fingers and hope.