[mythtv-users] Has anyone made a MythTV distro?

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Fri Apr 25 18:02:36 UTC 2003


I've seen this topic come up here from time to time, even in the short time 
I've been on the list. I think the general consensus (or at least the 
consensus of the people with the needed skills)  has been that creating and 
maintaining a complete distribution would be a lot of work, work that would 
divert energy from the main focus of developing MythTV itself.

Among the things a complete distro would have to do are:

1. Stay up to date on security problems and fixes (since even a 
"stand-alone" MythTV host requires a network connection, at a minimum to 
get TV listings).

2. Be easily configurable for the variety of equipment used and usable with 
MythTV. Since this requirement extends to the need for patched kernels (to 
handle TV-out on Matrox cards, for example), unofficial mods to XFree86 (to 
handle TV-out on ATI cards, for example), and inintegrated kernel modules 
(ALSA, LIRC, maybe wlan-ng if the system uses prism-based WiFi), it is 
fairly demanding.

If someone were to release a pre-configured ISO image, I'd expect it to be 
designed to work with a particular subset of the possible hardware .. for 
example, only bttv-based vidcap cards, only Nvidia TV-out cards, only sound 
via the sound card (no btaudio). only a particular hard-disk partitioning 
setup, only 802.3 Ethernet (no WiFi), only a particular LIRC-based remote 
setup ... you get the idea. There is really a lot of non-Myth-specific 
Linux stuff that a working Myth system includes, and a Myth ISO would have 
to handle all of it somehow.

Even doing something this restricted in scope would be a lot of work ... 
the security issue still remains, for example. I do not expect to see it 
any time soon.

What we do have, though, is prepackaged versions of MythTV for some of the 
big-name Linux distros. Properly packaged rpms or debs or whatever 
accomplish much of what you want, I think. This doesn't get you the latest 
fixes from CVS, of course ... but neither would a MythTV ISO, unless it 
were updated amazingly often.

WIthout advocating any particular distribution ... all the big-name distros 
do a lot of work for you that application developers don't really want to 
have to redo.

At 04:31 PM 4/25/2003 +0000, Matthew Crowe wrote:
>Hello -- relatively new user, first posting.
>
>I've been reading the MythTV discussion archives for part of the day today 
>and there
>is a lot of discussion about this distro or that distro and getting things 
>to work
>with XYZ, etc.
>
>I was wondering if anyone had considered putting together a MythTV distro that
>installs onto a machine with as much info pre-configured as possible?
>
>I'm sure that many people, myself included, are thinking of using Myth as a
>stand-alone PVR solution.  It would be wonderful to have an ISO image that 
>I can
>plop onto a machine and have most of the installation and compilation done 
>ahead of
>time by an experienced professional.  (Or someone who got it working well 
>enough. :)
>
>There could be three flavors:  MythFull which contains the frontend, 
>backend, and
>database and is a "complete" solution, MythFront which would contain the 
>front end
>and be positioned as a "player-only" set-top box image, and MythBack which 
>would
>contain the back-end programs necessary to serve video out to the players.
>
>Any thoughts?  Has there been any previous discussion of this topic that a 
>newbie
>such as myself may have missed?
>
>Thanks in advance...





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