MythTV is a GPL licensed suite of applications that, together, provide a complete home entertainment system. The system’s capabilities include television, movies, music, photography and the display of other information like weather and news. It has been developed using only open source components and works under a variety of operating systems from Linux to Mac OS X.

This TechBrief provides an introduction to the leading open source home media convergence system, Mythical TV, more commonly referred to as MythTV.

MythTV is a digital entertainment suite that is as sophisticated as any commercial system available on the market today. Part 1 serves as an introduction to MythTV and guide to install the latest development frontend and backend on Ubuntu Linux. It covers building the development branch of the project suite using the latest source. Due to the complexity and variations of hardware and software, this brief will only focus on North American service. Part 2 will focus on building and installing the complete set of official modules.