MythTV: Turning Linux Into a Digital Video Recorder: The Front End

“With the 0.21-19.fc11 packages from RPM Fusion installed,
watching TV should be as easy as telling the front end where the
database is stored, the user name and password to use to connect to
the database, and then selecting “Watch TV” from the interface. You
should be able to use the up and down arrow keys to change channels
and hit “r” to record the show you are currently viewing.

“As you probably noticed earlier, I wound up using a subversion
build of MythTV. Although I do enjoy a good compile as much as the
next man, I had a reason to go trawling the bleeding edge of
MythTV. The desktop machine I was using had an NVidia graphics card
in it and I’m using the binary drivers for it. One of the nice
things about the binary drivers is Video Decode and Presentation
API for Unix (VDPAU), which lets you use the GPU to perform
decoding, deinterlacing and display of video content.

“Unfortunately, if you are using the binary drivers and the
composite extension of X for pretty desktop effects, you can suffer
intermittent bright red screen flashes during video playback. I was
getting these flash artifacts with version x86_64-185.18.36 of the
NVidia drivers. These flashes go away for me when I either disable
the composite extension or use VDPAU to display video content.”

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