On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Jonathan McDowell wrote:

On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 12:17:46AM -0000, Robert wrote:

...

Now that i'm on the mailing list i wonder if anyone could help me.I'm looking to build a media centre pc around Linux and was wondering whether there was anything i should look out for e.g.tv cards etc?

DVB-T (ie Freeview) is the way forward; this means you'll get an mpeg2 stream rather than having to compress analogue TV yourself. I'm not sure what the card of choice is these days.

As for software, I like VDR (http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr/) - it doesn't look fancy, but it does the job nicely. If I wasn't using that I'd look at MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org/) which is very spiffy, but was a lot slower when I looked a couple of years ago. The other option is FreeVo (http://freevo.sourceforge.net/), which I discounted for reasons I can't remember.

The difficult bit is hooking it all up to a TV. If you just want to watch stuff on a monitor you're ok, otherwise you need a card with decent TV out and Linux support. Or if you're lucky enough to have a TFT/plasma TV then you can probably just hook VGA up to it directly. (I want this. When HDTV gets properly standardised I'm saving all my pennies for a TV that can do 1920x1080 natively. Yum.)

Hi,

I'm using MythTV with two Hauppauge Nova-T cards (Model Number 909, this is the newer version. older versions have a BT878 chip, but also work). It works very well, Mythweb is great for setting up recordings from work. Also you can install the frontend on a laptop and watch TV wirelessly in your garden (assuming G wireless network).

As for connecting to the TV, I bought a DVI->HDMI cable and plugged it straight into the HDMI input of my TV. You could also use SVIDEO out into your TV. I found using an NVIDIA card that you get a horisontal line moveing down the screen occasionaly. As for audio, I take the SPDIF from the soundcard and send it straight into the AMP.

Have a look at http://www.mythtv.org and http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/

That'll give you some idea of it's current state. The mythtv website says the last release was early last year. Version 0.19 is due out very soon, according to the dev list.

Hope that helps

Chris