More Mythtv!

This weekend my wife hosted a baby shower at our house, so we had a bunch of people over. I soon found myself removed from the family room and the computer room 'cause guys weren't allowed… So what's a guy to do with no HTPC?

Luckily for me, my brother was over and brought along his Mac . With time on my hands, and nothing better to do, we set out to get this on my Mythtv network. The most difficult part here was actually getting his laptop on my wireless network (128bit WEP, supressed SSID, MAC filtering). Once that was done, it was a simple matter of finding the correct binary for the Mac frontend (from here). With a quick config, which involved specifying the Master Backend IP Address, and username and password for the MYSQL database, we were up and running in litterally 5-10 minutes (from download to watching tv). It took us two tries to find a current binary to load – the first that we found didn't use the most up to date protocol that was being used on my server. Once that was all resolved, we had a full frontend on his Mac laptop. This included everything that you'd find on a Linux frontend such as LiveTV, Recordings, Videos, DVDs, Music, Images, etc etc. I wish there was an equivalent for Windows (right now, the best that I've found is an app that will connect to the server so that I can watch recordings with all the propper commercials flagged).

So now, any time that my brother comes to visit, he can bring his Mac over and watch tv with the rest of us if he wants (assuming I don't boot him from my network that is ).

As a side note, I will confirm my earlier notions that a Wireless G network can stream SDTV easily, but is not nearly fast enough for HDTV. When we tried that, we had major stuttering. Nothing new here (hopefully), just one more data point.

Hopefully someone found this interesting or worth reading. It's just amazing how expandable Mythtv is and how easy it really is to setup. What are you waiting for? Try it out!