Mythtv - wow, why didn't I do that before?

MythTv.  I think most of us have heard about it, but have put if off since it sounded too difficult, or complicated or required a bunch of hardware we didn't have.

Well, this changed slightly for me once I had enough of a media library (don't ask me where I got it from) that it was just becoming silly to manage on one computer connected to the TV in the living room.  With some shows for the oldest son only, some shows for the wife only and then some shows that really should have all of us together in a room at one time, it was becoming too restrictive to tie the media to a dedicated machine, with single user and single space access.

So I dropped in mythtv.  Standard repo stuff from Ubuntu 10.04.  I added all the additional repos that looked interesting and that gave me the server "backend" and the player "frontend" on the house server which had all the media.  I then installed the frontend on 2 mac's, and 4 other Ubuntu systems.  And now everyone can connect and watch their shows without needing to be in the living room.

I had a few glitches, the mac binary frontends were the easiest to set up.  But once done, it's running great.  I will be taking the time to push over the photos and the music since that just makes since as well as it's working for video.

-- CafeNinja

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