TV and Video: Xine and Mplayer

Standard video cards let you see most video resources, as you would expect. What you may not know is that you can turn your monitor into a television screen to receive TV signals with a TV or TV/video combo card. This section describes a sampling of Linux software that works with these content types.

Make sure your cards are properly configured. (See Chapter 4 to configure your hardware cards with YaST and SaX. See Chapter 6, "Launching Your Desktop," for configuring X.)

TV and Video Hardware

Video support in Linux comes through the V4L (Video for Linux) API, or directly through the X Window System. Support for TV display from video cards with a TV-out jack is poor at this time. TV-only cards are well supported, but you must know the chipset name of your card, not the manufacturer's brand name. The most common chipset is the Brooktree Bt series; the Linux driver is called bttv.

YaST should recognize your card, if it is supported, and load drivers, whether the card is present at your initial SUSE Linux install or is added later. If this doesn't happen, you can always configure the card manually.

To configure the card, you need to identify the chipset. Check YaST. Go to Hardware, then Graphics Card and Monitor, or TV Card.

Building Your Own Personal Video Recorder

Personal video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV have changed the way people use television. The VCR introduced the idea of time-shifting broadcast television, but developed the reputation of being so complicated to program that nontechnical folks threw up their hands and gave up. Technical advances have made this easier, but the image of the "guy who can't program his VCR" persists. PVRs automate the hardest part of this task and make it a virtual no-brainer to record both analog and digital TV signals to a hard drive for later viewing.

TiVo itself runs Linux on a PowerPC processor to record shows on its hard drive.

Several open-source projects have been launched to create PVRs on Linux. The most successful of these is the MythTV project. The goal of MythTV is to bring the "mythical digital convergence box" to life, so it has the TiVo features, a web browser, an email client, games, and a music player.

Installing MythTV under SUSE Linux is not for the faint of heart, but it can be done. YaST will help along the way, dealing with various software dependency issues that might not be solved through compiling packages one by one.

Note

Another PVR package, Freevo, also runs under SUSE Linux.

Hardware Requirements

This is not a project to give your old Pentium II machine a new life. Processing TV signals requires a big and fast microprocessor chip and a good monitor. To make this work, you need modern equipment. Check the PVR Hardware Database at http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-pvrhwdb.php and compare these systems to the SUSE Hardware Database to pick the best PVR system for you. Hauppage, the maker of several popular TV cards, recommends a Pentium III processor at 733MHz (or 1.8GHz to make DivX video) for its PVR cards. You should also have a high-speed (DSL or cable modem) connection to the Internet to access TV schedule information. In addition, MythTV sets these guidelines:

• 256MB memory

• 40GB (or larger) hard drive

• XFS or JFS file system (which handles large files better than other file systems)

• A video card with a TV-out port

• A video capture card

You have two basic options for video capture: a "frame grabber" that is software driven or a more expensive MPEG encoder. The frame grabber does its encoding using the PC's resources, whereas the onboard encoder does it itself. The trade-off is that the IvyTV drivers needed for the encoder are somewhat troublesome to install.

If you have the right machine, let's start setting it up.

Setting Up Your PVR

Follow these steps to build your personal video recorder. Read the online MythTV installation guide before or during your setup. It will be very helpful. Find it at http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO.html.

Tip

These instructions make use of two online tools to update and install software on your SUSE Linux system: YaST Online Update and Apt. Find out more about these in Chapter 21, "Keeping Your System Current: Package Management."

1.	If you haven't already, install SUSE Linux. Make sure you have the qt3, qt3-devel, qt3-mysql, gcc, freetype2-devel, and mysql packages installed.
2.	Run YaST Online Update to confirm that everything's current.
3.	If apt is not yet installed, install it. See Chapter 20 for instructions.
4.	Open a shell or console and log in as SuperUser.
5.	Open /etc/apt/sources.list in a text editor and add this line: rpm http://folk.uio.no/oeysteio/apt suse/9.2-mythtv MythTV. This site contains MythTV RPMs for SUSE Linux v9.0, 9.1, and 9.2 (change the version number as necessary). If you have an MPEG encoder card, add this line as well: rpm http://folk.uio.no/oeysteio/apt suse/9.2-ivtv IvyTV for the IvyTV packages.
6.	Type apt install xmltv zap2it lame mythtv. This will install MythTV and any other necessary package. This will likely take some time.
7.	Setup the Myth MySQL database. Type mysql -u root < mc.sql at the shell.
8.	Go to http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO.html#toc5.4 and follow the instructions on setting up Zap2It DataDirect to handle your scheduling needs.
9.	Decide where in the file system you want to store your recorded video. By default, MythTV stores files in /mnt/store. You may have to create this directory; make sure that at least one user can write to that directory. You may also want to create a user mythtv to be that user. If you prefer to store the files elsewhere, you'll need to edit the MythTV configuration file later.
10.	Go to the MythTV setup directory and type ./setup. Follow the prompts to go through the initial configuration. Accepting the default settings should get you in no trouble.
11.	After you have completed the setup, it's time to go back to being an ordinary user. If you have created a separate user, mythtv, log out and log back in as mythtv (otherwise, just exit the SuperUser shell).
12.	Running MythTV is a two-step process. First, run mythbackend to open the database, and then run mythfrontend to view your content.

And so you have your own PVR, with no service to buy. There are lots of other options in setting up MythTV; read more about them in the MythTV manual.