August 2004
Beginner
352 pages
13h 42m
English
Content preview from Building the Perfect PCBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Choosing Software
The traditional advice is to choose software before choosing the hardware to run it on, and that advice remains valid. The PVR and related software applications that will run on the HTPC are fundamental. So, before we made specific hardware selections, we had to decide which PVR software we’d run.
The working title of this chapter was Building a Linux-Based PVR System, as this was our original intention. It seemed reasonable at the time. TiVo is based on Linux, of course, and so we assumed Linux would be a good foundation for our PVR/HTPC system. As it turned out, such was not the case.
Linux PVR applications
The two primary Linux-based PVR applications, MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org) and Freevo(http://freevo.sourceforge.net ), are, like many Linux applications, a strange combination of crude and elegant, polished and rough, and powerful yet missing major functions. At the time we looked at it, for example, Freevo lacked such basic functions as TV Live Pause (time-shifting) and DVD menus.
Installing ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.