Introduction
This series of articles will walk through the steps needed to install, configure and use MythTV on a VIA EPIA powered system. For those that don't know, MythTV is one of the leading Linux PVR applications.
Like most things Linux, MythTV is an open source application and is licensed under the GPL. This means you are free to use and modify the application as you wish. You can read about MythTV on their website.
The VIA EPIA mainboard is a compact (170cm x 170cm), x86 platform optimized for multimedia applications. We will use the M-series board with a 1 ghz C3-Nehemiah CPU. This board features an embedded MPEG2 accelerator for improved DVD and video playback. There is hardware support for 5.1 surround sound. It also has onboard LAN and TV-Out connectors. All in all it is well suited for a project of this type.
We plan to use Gentoo Linux as the operating system. Gentoo gives us the ability to customize and optimize the OS for our specific hardware and application requirements.
The series will consist of 7 parts.
The purpose of this tutorial is more than just installing MythTV. We also want to see if we can utilize all of the features of the VIA EPIA mainboard like embedded MPEG2 acceleration and 5.1 surround sound. We also want to see how well the board performs.
In keeping with the overall theme of this website, we'll focus on a few best-of-breed technologies in this project and make them work as well as possible. We'll keep the options limited so we can go deep in our understanding.
Enjoy!
Next: Part 2 – Hardware
| History |
| 9 Feb 2005 | Initial Publication |
| 16 May 2005 | Added links to table of contents, removed reference to Part 8. Published Part 7. |
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