MythTV is designed to utilise V4L to access video input devices such as encoders and tuners. At this time, MythTV works best with USB DVB-S/C/T cards supported by multimedia/webcamd because webcamd provides a V4L userland application. Any DVB card supported by webcamd should work with MythTV, but a list of known working cards can be found here. There are also drivers available for Hauppauge cards in the following packages: multimedia/pvr250 and multimedia/pvrxxx, but they provide a non-standard driver interface that does not work with versions of MythTV greater than 0.23.

HTPC contains a list of all available DVB drivers.

Being flexible and modular, MythTV allows the user to have the frontend and backend on different machines.

For the frontend, multimedia/mythtv-frontend is required, as well as an X server, which can be found in x11/xorg. Ideally, the frontend computer also has a video card that supports XvMC and, optionally, a LIRC-compatible remote.

For the backend, multimedia/mythtv is required, as well as a MySQL™ database, and optionally a tuner and storage for recordings. The MySQL™ package should be automatically installed as a dependency when installing multimedia/mythtv.

To install MythTV, use the following steps. First, install MythTV from the FreeBSD Ports collection:

Set up the MythTV database:

Configure the backend:

Start the backend: