MythTV Frontend for Windows with Live TV!

Update: read this post for using XBMC as MythTV frontend.

You have setup a MythTV backend server with Ubuntu as the background or say Fedora, but to be able to watch live TV from all possible frontends you need to install Ubuntu or Fedora on all the machines, either as sole OS or via dual booting. You always wished if only we could get fully functional MythTV frontends for Windows XP, Vista or 7 which would let you enjoy the power of MythTV from inside Windows box because may be your wife, girl friend or kids are not yet fully comfortable with *nix yet, or may be you need some applications which are best available for Windows. Well no more worries.

OK, technically speaking this isn’t a Windows standalone Frontend for MythTV, but it certainly serves the purpose. Trick is rather simple and some of you might have already thought of it, but haven’t tried it yet. So here is the result of such an effort. I created a Mythbuntu 10.04 virtual machine using VMware Player, I chose 1GB ram and 8GB disk size for the virtual machine. Installer would ask you regarding the purpose of your instllation, i.e. backend or frontend etc., I chose it to be a frontend only installation.

When you reboot the setup would ask you to configure your MythTV frontend, press Esc to skip it for the time being, we would do that later. After installing the updates, I went ahead and installed VMware tools inside the Mythbuntu virtual machine.

You can do so by choosing to install VMware Tools from the VM menu in the VMware Player top menu. It would mount a CD with the source code for the installer. Copy the file to your local disk inside the Mythbuntu, and extract the contents by doing

tar -zxvf replace_with_VMWaretools_filename

Now goto the directory where you extracted the content and launch the installer by doing this at the terminal

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Choose Watch TV and press enter and live TV should start to stream from your backend server. Good part is that you can watch TV in window mode as well as full screen, remember to make the VMware Player window full screen before launching MythTV frontend, if you want to watch TV in full screen.

Enjoy MythTV on windows.

Possibly related posts (generated automatically):

1. Perfect MythTV Frontend on Windows 7 / Vista or Mac Using XBMC
2. Setting Up Multiple Remote Frontend for a MythTV Backend
3. Master Backend Server and Single Frontend MythTV Setup On a Ubuntu 10.04 Box
4. Stream Live TV to Several Computers on LAN
5. Upgrade MythTV 0.22 to 0.23 on Ubuntu 9.10
6. Enable Closed Caption (CC) / Subtitle on Live TV / Video Playback
7. Setup Windows Media Center IR Remote for MythTV and XBMC
8. Features of Free VMware Player 3