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This is not meant as a comprehensive set of hardware recommendations for MythTV. There are many other sites you can easily google to find that kind of information. This is soley focused on building a MythTV box on-the-cheap using Black Friday sales.

Introduction to MythTV

MythTV is a free open-source DVR package. In addition to the basic features such as pausing and rewinging live TV, MythTV does things that other more expensive DVR systems either don’t to or don’t do well. Here are some things MythTV can do for you:

• Pause Live TV
• Rewind Live TV
• Picture-in-Picture*
• Watch a show while recording another*
• Automatically skip commercials
• Back up your recorded TV onto DVD’s
• Enable any computer on your network to watch live TV
• Enable any computer on your network to watch recorded TV
• Listen to music
• View slideshows of your digital photos
• Browse the web
• Play vintage NES and other games
• Rip DVD’s to your hard drive for safe backup and later viewing
• Re-encode your LiveTV recordings to go on your iPod
• Let you schedule your recordings from a web interface
• Record HDTV signals
• Tons of other stuff

* depends on your tuner. you need two tuners to do things that involve two channels, or an HD input source for HD stuff

Building a MythTV Box using Black Friday Sales

The basic MythTV setup I’m going to recommend is one where you have a backend and a frontend on the same machine. There are other ways of setting up a backend, but this way is an easy way to get started.

Hardware requirements vary depending on what kind of video signals you are going to capture (hd or standard definition tv) and what you are going to use for a capture card. Some cards such as the popular Hauppauge PVR-150/250/350/500 series are hardware encoder cards that take very little CPU power to encode a signal straight into MPEG-2

First Purchase - a Tower to house the MythBox

For this, look for a Celeron D or high-Ghz Pentium 4. There are plenty of options this year in this category.

Option 1: Best Buy’s Box

Best Buy has an eMachines computer on sale for $200 that includes a 15″ LCD screen. This screen will not be of any use to you unless you have no TV already. The specs on the computer, however, are more than adequate for a good backend/frontend.

Option 2: Circuit City’s eMachines box

Circuit city has an almost-identical box for an almost-identical price. The difference is that in the Circuit City one you get a 17″ CRT screen. So the deciding factor here is which useless monitor you have more of a use for… or which store is closest to you. Chance are - you can give the monitor to some kind in the parking lot if you already have one at home you can use for initial setup.

Option 3: Wal-Mart’s “secret sale” item

Wal-mart has a “secret sale” listing a “Computer Tower with Keyboard and Mouse” for $150 (one per customer). The lack of any specs on the computer make it a crap shoot, but if it has a couple PCI slots and at least an AGP slot then it should work… 256 Megs of RAM will work, but 512 or 1 gig is certainly better.

Option 4: Comp USA’s $300 machine

CompUSA has a “$99″ machine that is really $300 unless you are feeling the urge to get a Motorola POZR V3 and a new cell phone contract. The CompUSA one has an AMD64 Althlon processor which makes it have more “curb appeal” to your average geek… but it isn’t really that much better than the other options. The benefit of this computer is that you can get a capture card in the same store at the same time.

Summary of CPU options any my recommendation

My recommendation to the gambler out there wanting to get things on-the-cheap is to go for the WalMart one and see if it is any good. You will then not be paying extra for a monitor you don’t need. My next-best-bet would be to go to Best Buy or Circuit City. (Whichever one has the shortest line at 5am would be the one I would pick)

Capture Cards

Digital Cable capture card

If you have digital cable, and your cable provider abides the US law - then you should have firewire out on your cable box. Check for that, and if you have it, then your “capture card” is just an old 1394 or “firewire” PCI card. If your motherboard has it, you are already set.

If you don’t have digital cable, there are a couple of options.

Standard-definition cable capture cards

Here, you have two options - hardware encoding or software encoding. Hardware encoding uses hardly any CPU power at all. Some cards, like the Hauppauge PVR-500, have dual tuners on a single PCI card. This is convenient if you want to add more tuners but save on PCI card space. (Nobody has a black friday sale on the PVR-500 though, so if you want that go froogle it or see if you can find what you want on eBay.

Option 1: PVR-150 from Amazon

Amazon.com has a black friday sale on the Hauppauge PVR-150 for $58.00 - which would give you a hardware encoder card. Buy two of them if you want dual tuners for PIP and recording two shows at once… etc.

Option 2: WinTV-Go PVR from CompUSA

This is a cheap deal for you. It’s only $15 for the card. It doesn’t do hardware encoding, but it does work in Linux using the bttv drivers.

Summary

Get the cheap card from CompUSA to get you started, and then get the hardware encoder ones once you get your feet wet with MythTV.

Other nice things

Wireles Keyboards are on sale all over the place. You can get a nice setup for around $20 on black friday. I recommend the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop for $20 at CompUSA. You probably want to check out the latest deals at CompUSA and see what else you might want to pick up when you are there.

TV-out

You also want a card that supports TV-out and XvMC. There are a few on sale, but the one I’d say is just grab the FX5200 from CompUSA for $50… If you shop on newegg you can find a cheaper card, but it’s not technically a black-friday deal so I can’t really suggest it here

Summary - the sub-$300 MythTV setup

Here’s the cheapest functional mythtv setup, (assuming Wal-mart’s computer doesn’t suck too bad)

• Computer from WalMart - $149
• Tuner card from CompUSA - $15
• FX5200 from CompUSA - $50
• Wireless keyboard and mouse $20

Total price: $235
Then go google “Fedora Mythology” and learn everything you need to know on how to actually get it all installed