Myth TV
What is Myth TV?
Myth TV is a collection of software and hardware serves for multimedia applications and more importantly works as a PVR (personal video recorder) or
DVR (digital video recorder). Moreover it is open source software and any one can make changes according to his/her desires.
Myth TV Features
- Myth TV provides all TV functionalities and serves as personal video recorder (PVR) with play, pause, forward, rewind the live TV as well as recorded programs.
- The free of cost Myth TV’s Electronic Program Guide (EPG) keeps you up to date about the future programs as well as allows you to manage channels.
- Program finder feature allows you to search a particular program based on actor, keyword, sport name, etcetera and schedule recording accordingly.
- Recording can be set to skip commercials and also the compressing and editing capabilities for recorded programs are available.
- Myth TV supports multiple TV cards allowing watching and recording multiple programs simultaneously with picture in picture functionality.
- The distributed architecture (Front-end and Back-end) allows Myth TV network where the recordings can be shared.
Besides TV functionalities Myth TV also supports:
- Myth DVD feature provides you DVD player giving complete on-screen information about DVD.
- By Myth music feature you can create your music library and listen your favorite play-lists.
- Myth Gallery allows you to organize and categorize your photos.
- Myth Music allows you to rip, play, categorize or visualize MP3, ogg, FLAC or CD audio files.
- Myth Game provides emulator supports for MAME, NES, SNES, and generic PC.
- Myth Weather keeps you up to date with the weather information.
Building Myth TV
More you spend the money more cool your Myth TV will develop. To build a Myth TV first thing you need is a Microprocessor like an AMD Athelon XP 1800+ utilizes 40-60% CPU to provide a high quality software encoded live TV show (640x480). Generally 800MHz to 1500MHz microprocessor works. Among other things you need:
- Video Capture Card. The card enables you to watch and record live TV show. You require as many of these as many shows you want to record simultaneously. Also you need at least one for watching so with two cards you can watch and record simultaneously with pause and playback features.
- Video Cards. The selection of these cards depends upon what display you are using whether it is Normal TV, Projector, Monitor, HDTV or any other display suites you. For normal TVs you can have NTSC standards and for an HDTV setup you require a PCHDTV card along with 1,3GHz or more Microprocessor.
- Sound Cards. Require only when you don’t have on-board sound digitizer often provided with video capture cards.
- More over a TV tuner card according to the services available to you, a 256-512MB Ram (can be more if you like), and a hard disk of 60GB or more according to user’s storage requirements.
Myth TV Software
Hardware is nothing without software so you need software to operate all the setup. Myth TV software runs on LINUX Operating system so you need to install Linux first. But also:- MySql: to keep database of Myth TV.
- XmlTV: to use EPG (electronic Program Guide)
- LiRc: to use remote control
- HDTV (ATSC): in case you have HDTV setup
- Freetype: for font display
Myth Front and Back ends
The complete Myth TV setup can be regarded as front end and backend. Myth front-end is concerned with user interactive activities and provides a graphic user interface to access Myth TV services and media applications such as watch and record live TV shows. The interfaces include remote control, keyboard or mouse. Myth backend deals with the activities that have nothing to do with user interface but are essential for Myth TV setup such as video capture cards, schedulers, Myth databases or other Hardware.
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