How to run MythTV on Windows using andLinux

In a previous post I’d talked about how to run MythTV, the very popular multimedia software, under Microsoft Windows (you can find that post here). The basic problem is that MythTV only runs under Linux — there’s no such thing as a port of that application to Windows. That previous post talks about how it’s possible to use a virtual machine to set up a Linux virtual machine within a Windows OS so that Windows users can run MythTV, with a few caveats.

Now that I’ve been using andLinux I wanted to see if it was possible to run MythTV on a Windows installation without having to use a virtual machine. It is — and here’s how.

The Basics

First of all, of course, you have to have andLinux installed on your Windows OS. If you’re not really sure what andLinux is or how it’s different that a virtual machine you should read my previous post, “andLinux — an easy way to run Linux applications right on your Windows desktop“.

Installing MythTV

Once you have your andLinux installation up and running you can install MythTV just like you’d install any other Linux application — using Synaptic (for a GUI installer) or using apt-get (from the command line). Once MythTV is installed remember that you first have to run the “mythtv-setup” script, just like you would with any other installation of MythTV.

Some Caveats

Using andLinux to run MythTV under Windows has the same set of limitations that we ran into when we ran MythTV under a virtual machine. Those limitations are a result of the way that andLinux (or our VMWare virtual machine) see the hardware we have in our Windows system.

TV Tuner

The MythTV application running under andLinux has the same problem as it would running under the virtual machine — it has no way of seeing a TV tuner card in your PC. The solution to the problem is the same as it was when we used a virtual machine –use a tuner card which is located on the network instead of a tuner card which is located in a PC. In my case I use the HDHomeRun by Silicon Dust. You can find a more detailed description of that tuner in a post that I’d written here.

Watching Video

Just like the problem with the tuner card, watching video through the MythTV front-end running under andLinux suffers from the same problem as running MythTV from within a virtual machine. In both cases the problem is that the Linux OS isn’t using your graphics card directly; instead, it’s using either a virtual graphics card (in the case of the virtual machine) or an X-Server (in the case of andLinux). In either case there just isn’t enough graphics horsepower to be able to display full-motion video with no choppiness.

There are other ways to view shows which are recorded in MythTV though, and I cover some of the more popular solutions in the previous article I’d written about running MythTV under windows. These solutions may not be as simple as using the MythTV front-end but they will do the job.

Conclusion

Using andLinux to run MythTV is certainly a viable alternative to running MythTV within a virtual machine, especially with the simplified Linux installation made possible by using andLinux. If you’re a Windows user who’s interested in checking our MythTV I think that using andLinux is the simplest way to see what all of the fuss is about.

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