So I finally got around to setting up a mythtv box. I’ve wanted to do it for years but I had a hard time finding good information about hardware. I could never really find many pages where people would actually list all the hardware they were using and whether or not it worked. So that’s what I’m going to do here. This is not the end all be all system or anything like that. Just an example of some hardware that works. I ordered everything new and it all seems to be working good so far. so anyway here we go…
Hardware
I ordered everything from newegg. I’m sure most places will have all of the same stuff but I’ve had good luck with newegg and they are normally pretty cheap.
- Asus P1-AH2 barebones system: $159.99
- AMD Athlon 64X2 4200+: $62.50
- A-Data 2GB DDR2 800: $45.99
- Western Digital 500GB SATA Drive: $99.99
- Asus 18X DVD+RW: $32.99
- Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500 MCE: $169.99
Total Cost: $571.45 (not including shipping)
It all went together pretty well with the exception of the PVR-500. It’s a pretty big card and it was not easy to get in such a tiny case. I managed to get it but it was a pain. If you are scared of pushing cards around to the verge of breaking you might want to consider either getting another tuner card or a larger case. I am no expert though and I managed to get it in there. I’ll try to update this with exactly what I had to do with some pics one of these days…
Software
I went with mythbuntu for my distro because it seemed like the simplest way to get everything installed and I’m most comfortable with ubuntu these days.
Install
The install was pretty painless. Pretty much just accepted all the defaults. I really knew nothing about installing or setting up mythtv and I made it through fine. I will try to come back and make a detailed post of the install process one of these days…
Issues
Nothing serious so far. A couple of minor things though
- I am not getting any channels above 99 though… I only get 2 anyway so that’s not a huge issue for me but I would like to try to figure out what the problem is with that (possibly because I am not using the cable box?).
- The remote seems to be working although I’m not sure about how the buttons function. I don’t think there is anything wrong but I’ll say it’s less than intuitive. You can remap the buttons I believe but that’s for another day.
Notes:
I have suddenlink cable service and no HD channels. I am not using their cable box. I just plugged the coax cable straight from the wall into the PVR-500.
I hooked the box to my tv with a vga cable. My tv had a vga input on it so it’s just strait from the video card to the tv.
I’ve been using some old computer speakers for sound already so that was easy for me. Just plugged them into the sound card. There is an optical out though so you may be able to go from that to your stereo receiver which would probably be much better for most people. I haven’t tried that though so I have no idea if it works.
I guess that’s about it… If you have any specific question let me know and I will see if I can answer them. Hopefully this will help somebody like me get started though. I’m loving myth so far!