Mythfrontend

MythTV is complicated to setup.  MythTV only runs under Linux.  MythTV is only for people who like to tweak their setups all the time…These are some of the stereotypes surrounding MythTV.  While this may have been true at one point things have gotten much easier lately.  One of the things that has gotten a lot of recent attention is building and running MythTV on Windows.

For a number of years there have been ways to access MythTV recordings from Windows.  MythTV has a DLNA server built into it so any DLNA client can access the recordings.  The problem with this is that there is no way to access LiveTV, no automatic commercial skipping, no scheduling recordings, and other features are missing as well.  More recently, someone developed the MythTv Player which is able to talk to the MythTV backend using the MythTV protocol.  This brought along automatic commercial skipping, and in later releases, LiveTV capabilities.  Still, there was no program guide for scheduling recordings and no access to videos or music.

Most recently, a handful of real MythTV developers have taken it upon themselves to get the native MythTV frontend application working under Windows.  There have been a number of challenges along the way; not all of the features are functional yet and there are still some bugs to work out but it is now possible to run the MythTV frontend application natively in Windows.

There are a couple of reasons that having MythTV available on Windows is important.  First, I know that there are a lot of people who use MythTV under Linux (myself included) and have at least one system at their disposal that is running Windows.  It would be nice to be able to watch recordings on those systems from time to time.  The second reason is that, let's face it, there are a large number of Windows users out there who, until now, have not had access to MythTV.  MythTV is a great Home Theater PC software package that should be available to as many people as possible.

So now the big question is, how do you do it?  Well, there are two options.  While MythTV does not distribute precompiled binaries, it is possible for third parties to do exactly that.  All of my use of MythTV under Linux has been by way of third party packages (atrpms.net is what I use for Fedora/CentOS installs).  Similar work has been done for Windows and you can pick up an installer here or here.

The other option, and the one that I’m going to describe in more detail for you, is to build MythTV from source.  I do not want to duplicate all of the instructions that have already been written on the subject - links will be provided shortly.  Instead I want to augment those instructions with the modifications that I needed to make in order to get things to install on my computer.  You can build it from Linux, Mac OS, or Windows but this guide will detail only building from Windows.  To get started, there is a Wiki page on MythTV.org that describes pretty much how to do everything.  However, another MythTV user has helped us out by putting together a nice script that does pretty much all of the work for you and it can be found here.  In order to run this script there are two things that you will need: MSys and mingw32.  Both of these applications are linked to from the script’s website on the page Building MythTV on Windows.  What they will give you is an environment similar to the Linux command prompt, which you can use to build MythTV.