Dr. Scott M. Baker

Scott’s Adventures in MythTv

Part 1: Creating a DVD Jukebox PC

I’ve recently setup a mythtv computer in my home audio / video system, and this section of the site is going to share my experiences with it — what worked, what didn’t work, things that could be improved on, etc.

The goal:

I have a small collection of DVDs (mostly music video and concert DVDs) that I like to watch from time-to-time. We’re not talking a large collection here. Let’s say about 25 DVDs, with room to grow. The DVDs that I have are an average size of 4 gigabytes. Swapping these DVDs in and out of my cheap DVD player was growing about tedious, and I was just about ready to run out and purchase a sony DVD changed. Something like the DCP-CX995V or a DVP-Cx777ES. Then I thought to myself … I really don’t need storage for 400 or more DVDs, when I only have a few dozen plus about 50 music CDs. So why go to the expense of the DVD changer, and why end up with some complicated contraption filled with a bunch of moving parts.

So, the idea I came up with was to take all of the DVDs and Music CDs and store them on a hard drive. At 4 GB per music disc, and 640 MB per CD, I can fit them all on a couple hundred gigs of hard drive space. The added bonus is there’s no complicated disc swap-in-swap-out mechanism and no delay switching between discs. I can build a PC and make it do what I want rather than being stuck with what sony wanted.

Options…

I looked around at some existing options. Fortunately, several people had already done what I wanted to. There was mythtv, freevo, and charmedquark (CQC). I looked into all of these, and it looked like mythtv — with the “mythvideo” and “mythmusic” modules would do exactly what I wanted. Mythtv is a linux-based solution, and frees me from the rather restrictive windows operating system.

Overkill?

Mythtv is designed to be a PVR (personal video recorder). It’s a DIY competitor to the popular Tivo product. Thus, it really does a great deal more than I want to, but it never hurts to have more capability than you require, and so I decided to give it a shot.

Assembling the hardware:

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  Antec 4U rackmount case
   

The first step was to put together some appropriate hardware for a home theater PC. Fortunately, I had a spare rackmount computer laying around that would work out just fine. The PC was equipped as follows: