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My MythTV System

My system is distributed across 2 machines. The ‘backend’, which contains the tuner cards and large capacity disks, is located upstairs and the ‘frontend’ is a relatively quiet diskless network boot system in the living room.

Backend

The backend is a Pentium II 233 MHz system with 192 MB of RAM and two Twinhan VisionPlus DVB-T cards. It is running Debian GNU/Linux (stable/sarge).

The Twinhan cards are supported by the default Debian 2.6.8 kernel and the MythTV packages are from Christian Marillat’s repository of unofficial Debian packages.

These packages have the EIT support enabled and so the programme guide is automatically updated using off-air information.

Frontend

The frontend is a VIA Epia ME6000 Mini-ITX system with 128 MB of RAM and is running MiniMyth (currently the 0.19-12 release). It is housed in a Travla C137 case, together with a Panasonic CW-8123-B drive (so I can use it to play DVDs) and a homebrew IR receiver which I built on some stripboard and mounted using one of the screws which hold the optical drive frame in place. The IR receiver is connected to the internal (COM 2) header and I use a Hauppauge “light grey” controller. You can have a look at photographs of the hardware.