My curiosity toward MythTV-specific distros was touched off by MythBuntu's latest release earlier this month, Public Alpha 3. I run Ubuntu on my primary desktop machine, and had a relatively painless experience installing MythTV on it courtesy of the official repositories. Only while waiting for the MythBuntu ISO image to download did I decide to check out its competition.

The process consists of several steps. First, you transfer the video source material to your Linux machine (video grabbing). Next, you edit the video, possibly mixing it with other video and audio material, and then render it into an output video file. If your goal is to upload a file to the Web or share it with your computer-savvy friends, then this is the end. Sometimes, however, you want to create a DVD suitable for conventional DVD players. In those cases the final step is authoring the DVD.

Before starting the conversion you need to download the videos to your computer. Youtube-dl is the perfect tool for the job; check Joe Barr's article for more information. If you use Firefox you can also try the VideoDownloader extension. You will need a recent version of MPlayer with Mencoder built with support for Flash Video; if you can play the .flv videos with MPlayer you're good to go.

Packages for both programs are available for most Linux distributions and BSDs, so you can install them on your favorite OS easily. Compiling the programs from source isn't difficult, as long as you get their dependencies right. Both programs provide adequate documentation about the installation. You can burn the final files to a DVD disc with the help of the growisofs utility from the dvd+rw-tools suite.