I bought a new box for MythTV before Christmas and it rocks! For those that don’t know MythTV is a free software PVR (see http://mythtv.org/ for details). My box is awesome. I got it from EfficientPC.co.uk, it’s the Isis box (http://efficientpc.co.uk/desktops/flexible/isis/) with full spec for processor, ram and harddrive. The guy who runs the website ensures that the components are all linux compatible which means far less hassle when setting things like mythtv up (as opposed to me spending almost 2 years trying to get a USB Terratec Hybrid XS working on linux – which I finally managed to do about a month ago!)
So now I have have it and have it almost all set up how I want I thought I would put some notes together on some of the issues I had (unfortunately not all these things work out of the box) so that if anyone else hits them they can hopefully find some solutions here.
MythTV not recording scheduled programs
This problem turned up yesterday whilst trying to get by Shuttle PC in my room to be set up as a myth frontend. When I went to the mythweb upcoming recordings page I could see no recordings. I then tried to manually schedule recordings from the tv listings page and they did not appear. After much googling and fiddling with settings it turned out that the backend IP address on the box was still pointing to 127.0.0.1 when it should be changed to the LAN ip. After flipping that over everything appeared again 
Securing MythWeb for multiple Users
Both my flat mate and girlfriend saw the benefit of me having 1Tb of space to fill with their favourite TV shows. MythWeb gives them perfect interface to schedule them from home or work, but I don’t want to leave it open to any old person so I used the mythbuntu control centre to set a user and password on mythweb. Unfortunately that limits it to one user so I wanted a bit more control to add multiple users. Fortunately its as easy as:
sudo htdigest /etc/mythtv/mythweb-digest MythTV <username>
That then prompts for a password to add and all is locked down and good
I’m sure I’ll find other nuggets of myth tv wisdom as I go along and I’ll add them on here. For now though I have 500Gb of Xmas Film Trash to watch.
