MythTV – First Encounter

Over the bank holiday weekend I’ve set myself up with MythTV. A Mythbuntu install to be precise. I’ve been quite impressed with it although its taken a little trial and error effort over the weekend but though no fault of Myth.

Firstly I had it setup on my laptop that is slowly dying. Using the laptop I wasn’t really impressed with the DVB-T adapter. I was using a AVerTV DVB-T Volar. That Wiki link helped a bit by suggesting to upgrade the firmware but I was only getting one channel. I was using the aerial on the roof in which I have a handy socket to connect to in my room (Although that’s what I thought!). I was only getting BBC parliament which was no good at all considering the amount of other channels I should be receiving.

I’ve now set it up on Tucker, a computer I use for random things. Tucker has an AMD AM2 X2 5000+ and 4GB which is a bit OTT for Myth but its what I have. I had popped in to town on Saturday and decided to spend an Argos gift voucher I had. I got an amplified indoor aerial. I hooked it all up and did a channel scan, made a cup of tea and to my surprise Myth had found a whole load of channels, BBC One, BBC Three and even some Radio channels if not all of them.

Maybe a cup of tea does solve everything. I didn’t expect much as every time I set-up the AverTV DVB-T Volar stick with Windows it would fail completely, the software isn’t the best in my opinion.

Anyway it was great I could watch live TV, pause it and rewind it I’ve even integrated XBMC so I can watch other TV Shows and Films.

I only downside so far is that I don’t get any channels on MUX2. That’s ITV, Five, etc. This isn’t surprising as according to ukfree.tv the rating for the local transmitter for MUX2 is quite low. I figure because I am using an indoor aerial and between the two is at least a house the signal must be getting blocked. I thought I’d check out why the roof aerial was performing badly. I have a nose outside and I find this…

The two cables should actually be connected. Not too much of an issue really, I plan to set this up properly when I move back to Stafford but its been a good little exercise so far and I hope to write up some more detail of my experiences with it on here.

Although I say that with a lot of things.