MythTV is a GPL licensed suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems.

MythTV has a number of capabilities. The television portion allows you to do the following:

• You may pause, fast-forward and rewind live Television.
• You may install multiple video capture cards to record more than one program at a time.
• You can have multiple servers, each with multiple capture cards in them. All servers are centrally managed and all programs are scheduled by the Master backend.
• You can have multiple clients (called "frontends" in MythTV parlance), each with a common view of all available programs. Any client can watch any program that was recorded by any of the servers, assuming that they have the hardware capabilities to view the content; a low-powered frontend will not be able to watch HDTV, for example. Clients can be diskless and controlled entirely by a remote control.
• You may use any combination of standard analog capture card, MPEG-2, MJPEG, DVB, HDTV, USB and firewire capture devices. With appropriate hardware, MythTV can control set top boxes, often found in digital cable and satellite TV systems.
• Program Guide Data in North America is downloaded from schedulesdirect.org, a non-profit organization which has licensed data from Tribune Media Services. This service provides almost two weeks of scheduling information. Program Guide Data in other countries is obtained using XMLTV. MythTV uses this information to create a schedule that maximizes the number of programs that can be recorded if you don't have enough tuners.
• MythTV implements a UPNP server, so a UPNP client should automatically see content from your MythTV system.

Other modules in MythTV include:

• MythArchive, a tool to create DVDs
• MythBrowser, a web browser
• MythControls, an application to configure your remote control
• MythDVD, a DVD viewer / ripper
• MythFlix, a Netflix module
• MythGallery, a picture-viewing application
• MythGame
• MythMusic, a music playing / ripping application which supports MP3 and FLAC
• MythNews, a RSS news grabber
• MythPhone, phone and videophone using SIP.
• MythVideo, a media-viewer for content not created within MythTV
• MythWeather
• MythWeb, which allows you to control your MythTV system using a web browser. With MythWeb, you can schedule and delete recordings, change keybindings and more. With proper security, you may even schedule a program over the Internet and have it immediately acted on by the scheduler.

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Keywords:
mythtv htpc pvr open source open source gpl