Mythtv for Windows Port

I recently wrote an article about the various methods to get Mythtv on a Windows based system.  Today I’m writing a little bit more about my attempts at the Windows port of the actual Mythtv application.

 I have been working at getting the Mythtv for Windows port working on my system for about a year now, ever since I had heard about it.  It  has been a work in progress by numerous developers for quite a while now.  Here’s the wiki page on the Mythtv website dedicated to it.

The problem that I have been having with it is that the first time I heard about it I ran the scripts and everything just worked.  Wonderful.  I was happy.  The problem is that I tried to reproduce the results on another system about a week or two later so that I could document the procedure and make a little post here, and then the whole thing was broken again (probably because one of the tools was upgraded, but I don’t recall anymore).

Ever since that day, I have been trying off and on every couple of months to get it to build again.  I have been primarily working with getting the 0.21 fixes branch of code running because my server is running Mythtv 0.21 and it doesn’t work with a 0.22 frontend system.  Even as of a few days ago, I still run into issues in the build script and I haven’t been able to figure out where the issue is yet.  The build breaks for me before I even get as far as compiling the Mythtv code itself.

On the other hand, I decided to give the 0.22 code branch a shot to see how well it was working.  Sure enough, after launching the script I had a working 0.22 based Mythtv system on my laptop.  I can’t really say exactly how well it is working though because I can’t connect it to my server.

So the good news is that if you don’t have a Mythtv system setup, or if you have a system that is running 0.22, then you can easily (as of my last attempt) build a functional Windows-based frontend for it.  However, if you are like me and have a system running 0.21 and you don’t wish to upgrade it at the moment, there may still be bumps in the road ahead for you.  That is not to say that you will have trouble though.  It sounds like most users are not experiencing the problems that I am facing.  Most of the time it’s as simple as updating the build script to point to the current version of the applications.

I urge you all to take a shot at it.  If the script works for you, great!  If not, there are mailing lists that tend to be helpful for most people.  As for me, I will keep trying until I get it working and then let you guys know!