PeterFull disclosure: Publisher Apress approached me asking me to review this book and sent me a free review copy. Other than that, there is no affiliation or other involvement between myself or FOSSwire and Apress.
MythTV is one of the most flexible and powerful personal video recorder (PVR) systems out there and is also a thriving open source project. Installing it and configuring it can take quite a bit of expertise, however, and so Practical MythTV - Building a PVR and Media Center PC aims at a project-based approach to getting your MythTV installation up and running and then taking it further.
The book is split into three main sections. First of all, MythTV is explained and the book goes into detail about how MythTV works, what requirements there will be as far as hardware and software are concerned and explains many of the concepts and basics behind MythTV. It makes a very good introduction to the project if you haven't delved too much into it before and makes it very clear what you are going to need.
Next, the book goes through the installation process. Interestingly, the book focuses on a MythTV setup based on Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake, the long term support release) rather than choosing a pre-installed Myth distribution such as KnoppMyth.
It also chooses to focus on installation from source for both MythTV itself and related software such as LIRC, rather than through Ubuntu packages. Although it is explained very well and is detailed, the inclusion of compiling from source means that readers will probably need previous knowledge and at least intermediate skills with using Linux. The sudden change in the level of technical detail is a little disconcerting - you go from the basics of MythTV in the first chapter and then suddenly jump into doing complex tasks involving compilation.
Once compilation is done, the process of getting TV listing data and setting up recordings is explored. Considering how difficult an issue this is to address with such a diverse range of possible configurations and regional differences in how to get TV data, it is written very well. It details the Zap2It service for North America and XMLTV for the rest of the world.
After getting your MythTV box up and running, the focus shifts towards exploring more advanced functionality and some plugins and other applications that plug into or use MythTV functionality. Looked into are installing and using alternative MythTV themes, remote frontends such as MythWeb and the Jabber/XMPP interface, MythVideo, transcoding and more.
Overall, the book is well written, goes into good technical detail while remaining to explain things well enough for a reasonably tech-savvy user to be able to set up MythTV.
My main concern would be the assumption of prior Linux knowledge. The introduction states you need "limited or no experience with Linux or Unix". I think that in this case, some time should have been taken to introduce complete Linux newcomers into the Ubuntu environment, which is something that wasn't touched on an awful lot. The installation of Ubuntu was well-covered and is generally a very simple process, but after that not much time was given to familiarise the user with the Ubuntu environment used throughout the book.
The rest of the book is extremely well written, clear and is a very good companion to MythTV. True to its name, it takes a practical approach to solving problems and if you're a Linux user interested in setting up a MythTV installation, it will make a very good resource.
