Could someone tell me if I will be able to share a drive on my MythTV machine with another computer that is running Windows OS or a MAC?

This may change my thoughts on creating a linux based DVR.

by sharing do you mean will a MAC and Windows computer have the ability to read/edit/delete/create files on you linux computer? If so the answer is yes. I have a MAC (OS X) windows XP, and a few linux computers and I've setup shares throughout... You'll want to look into samba.

by sharing do you mean will a MAC and Windows computer have the ability to read/edit/delete/create files on you linux computer? If so the answer is yes. I have a MAC (OS X) windows XP, and a few linux computers and I've setup shares throughout... You'll want to look into samba.


Yeah look into Samba so your windows box can get the files. Or NFS and some SFU(services for unix) action for the windows box. I'm hoping I can mount my videos from my mythbox onto my macbook so they show up in frontrow as if they were local on my laptop.

From your posting, it seems that you have yet to build the linux box. In which case, get Ubuntu 6.10 desktop. Installing Samba (windows networking shares) and NFS (real man's networking :) ) is drop dead painless. I happened to have a new ubuntu install and started the network sharing install/setup when I hit "reply". In the time it took to type the above message, it was installed and running.

Thanks for the all the info. I was planning on installing Ubuntu and then running MythTV on Ubuntu. This is all new to me...so let me know if I'm making a big mistake by thinking that I can install Ubuntu and then install and run MythTV on that machine.

I will most probably use Samba since I've heard good things about that and how its utlized to share drives/folders to windows or mac machines.

If you will only use the computer for MythTV and you've never installed MythTV before, you might want to try Knoppmyth, which is a simple installation CD that installs and configures quite easily. I did this with my sister recently and we couldn't believe how easy and painless it was.

Once you have the cature cards installed, network and any IR device plugged in, you just boot the CD, choose auto install and it works. If formats and installs Debian and Fluxbox.

You have to answer some questions, such as usernames and passwords, hostname, the type of remote you will use, whether or not you have an IR blaster. Most desired features are configured automatically, such as Mythweb and streaming.


Samba is configured as well but needs to be set up to autostart.

This is all documented on the Knoppmyth wiki.

Personally I think Knoppmyth is fine if you aren't going to do anything else. Ubuntu seems more full featured to me so I would go with that over Knoppmyth but setup of mythtv under Ubuntu is NOT trivial when compared to Knoppmyth. There are a number of manual steps you need to perform to complete the setup and on my system I ran into some permissions issues that prevented the backend from running correctly.

There are a number of how-tos on the net for setting up myth on Ubuntu. After that, you can setup samba which the standard way of getting Windows to access files on UNIX and UNIX like systems such as Linux. In short, Samba emulates windows file and print services so your computers will see the Linux machine as just another windows machine. The Mac will work the same way. I have this kind of setup at home and it does work nicely.

If you're new to linux, I strongly recommend Knoppmyth. I am an experienced linux user/admin and Knoppmyth was instrumental in getting me started. I eventually moved over to Suse for my myth box, but KM saved me a lot of time in learning how Myth goes together.

everyone has their opinions.. I liked learning on Fedora (red hat before that)

The answer is emphatically, enthusiastically, "YES"! I've got my MythTV video and music directories (but not recordings - tho it'd be trivial to add it) set up to show up in "My Documents" on my Windows box.

In other words, when you go to "My Documents >> My Music" you see the entire music collection - and either the Myth or Windows box can rip music into that directory and it's immediately viewable on the other system. "My Documents >> My Videos >> MythVideo" works the same way with the video system on Myth - rip a DVD in Myth, and you can see the ISO on Windows. Drop a downloaded show into the folder in Windows, and pop over to the TV and watch it in Myth.

This setup is a little more complicated, since Windows can't mount network drives inside the normal file system (I've got roaming profiles and a domain set up with Samba, and I did the mounts in the Linux filesystem), but you can trivially make any or all of your MythTV media available on a network mounted drive. The trickiest part is making sure the systems are set up so that file permissions are correct and everybody can do what they need to do.

Well, maybe it's not "trivial", as I've been working with Samba for years. But I'm certainly not an expert, and I think the examples in the default smb.conf file would do the trick.

It's very easy with Samba on Windows and Mac. Unfortunately I've found that samba performance under Mac OS X is not great - I just didn't notice it until I got gigabit ethernet. But, then I set up NFS shares on the Mac so ripped DVDs can play in MythTV, and NFS shares on MythTV so that the Mac can play recorded TV shows. Performance is incredible with gig-ethernet - it's like playing the videos off an external drive!

yep, can do... I can rip a DVD and mount the linux box via NFS and watch the video_ts folder on the Mac.

The linux box is 100base-T through an Apple Airport Extreme base station and the Mac(s) are all 802.11g and they play the DVD no problem.

I've got myyth running and recording OTA - HD using the pchtdv5500. I'm not sharing recordings and I'm not sure I want to.

Could someone tell me if I will be able to share a drive on my MythTV machine with another computer that is running Windows OS or a MAC?

This may change my thoughts on creating a linux based DVR.

I triple boot ubunu knopmyth and w2k. I'm a linux nooby, but really wanted to try mythtv.

Knoppmyth is easy to install, but very touchy. I put it on the first hard drive IDE 1 and let it have a disk all to itself. It boots from lilo. If I put it on IDE2, all I get is trouble. If I keep it on IDE1, I get a quickly installed myth box. I upgrade the hideous fluxbox windows to kde manager by using the Debbian install

apt-get update
apt-get install firefox

There is a HowTo on the Knopmytwiki that will tell you how to do this. Don't bother asking questions on mysettopbox forum. The moderator is a fusbudget and will erase your questions if they don't fit his conception of where the post belongs. Not exactly nooby friendly for a support forum (Knomyth) that has, as its stated goal, the purpose of making MythTv install easy.

I then setup a dual boot w2k/ubuntu on the second drive, You can do this by making it temporarily master master on IDE1 during the install. Grub choses between ubuntu and w2k. Try as I might, I could not get mythtv to run on ubuntu. That is the joy of using knopmyth, it does the heavy lifting for you (To give credit where due, the chief architect of the very useful Knopmyth distribution is also the fussbudget who moderates the mysettopbox forum)

I then put the Knopmyth back on IDE1 and the w2k/ubuntu disk on IDE2. Now for the trick. The award bios system lets you choose which disk to "use as IDE1" It works like a charm. It was a feature of the msi motherboard that was recommended in the stormlogic reference platform

If you are going to try doing this, and are not a linux guru, I strongly advise using a reference hardware system. I based mine on the dragon 1 from stormlogic

HTH
--G

I actually want to do the reverse, almost!

The computer I got to be the backend/frontend only has room for one HDD, so I wanted to put expansion drives in my other computer (windows XP) upstairs. I would record everything to the local drive in the myth box, then every so often move the recordings over to the big drive in the windows box. Can Ubuntu see that drive as a shared network drive and have the recordings show up in MythTV? Both computers connect to my network wirelessly, would there be playback issues for SD or HD material?

I am really getting excited about setting up Myth!

I actually want to do the reverse, almost!

The computer I got to be the backend/frontend only has room for one HDD, so I wanted to put expansion drives in my other computer (windows XP) upstairs. I would record everything to the local drive in the myth box, then every so often move the recordings over to the big drive in the windows box. Can Ubuntu see that drive as a shared network drive and have the recordings show up in MythTV? Both computers connect to my network wirelessly, would there be playback issues for SD or HD material?

I am really getting excited about setting up Myth!

I think this will be difficult as the current version of myth (.20) only looks in one directory for recordings per backend. And the recording filenames aren't intuitive (metadata about each myth recording is stored in the database which has a pointer to the file). Also, streaming HD content wirelessly with 802.11g is unreliable. YMMV depending on factors in your house. Transferring this files would take a lot of time to.

What you could do is copy the file over and setup MythVideo to view them. You would want to use Mytharchive to retain the metadata, cut the commercials, etc. on your recorded shows.

Also, you'll have to decide how to format that HD on the windows side if you do it with mythArchive. Linux isn't natively able to write to NTFS, you can't use FAT for longer recordings because of the File size limitation, and windows doesn't natively understand ext3 or XFS. You can make it ext3 and install fs-driver on your windows box, or install NTFS write support in Linux, but note some have found it to be unreliable and in some cases, dangerous to your data and hard drive. It's been getting better though. I use fs-driver on my XP box to enable to ability for it to read my ext3 partitions.

Interesting . . . I figured the recording/backend location might be a prob . . . along with the wireless streaming. Looks like I just have to buy a bigger HD for my setup.

Thanks newlinux!

You are welcome. You can setup your current system with LVM for the partition you are storing your recordings on, which will allow you to add space seamlessly you recordings partition. Then you can just add a disk later which effectively just increases the space of your pre-existing recordings partition. Wish I had done this :). However whenever Myth .21 is released it is supposed to support having recordings placed in multiple directories.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/benefitsoflvmsmall.html