MythTV is a Free Open Source software digital video recorder (DVR) project distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Building MythTV on Windows

There's a lot of compiling to do so you'll need a fast, fat Windows box:

• At least 5 GB free space on a fast disk.
• At least 1GB (2GB for debug build) virtual memory, physical RAM preferable.
• A recent multi-core CPU; or lots of patience.
• A fast internet connection >= 2 MB/s.

In summary, you'll need to:

• Install the MSys shell and mingw32 compiler.
• Download our build script.
• Extract and run the build script which will in turn download, patch and compile a number of libraries and MythTV sources to produce the MythTV programs, libraries and installer.

So you'll need to be happy with the command line, the C/C++ language, make and shell scripts.

Install MSys and the Mingw C/C++ compiler

• Open the Mingw download page and click:
  • 'Automated MinGW Installer' then
  • 'mingw-get-inst'
• Select a version e.g.
  • 'mingw-get-inst-20101030' then
  • 'mingw-get-inst-20101030.exe'
• Wait for the download to finish.
• Run the installer and ensure to add:
  • C++
  • MSYS basic system
  • MinGW Developer Toolkit

Download the build script

It is highly recommended that you download this build script to automate the build process. If you want to do the build manually then look at the Step by step guide first and use the '.diff' files from the latest patches as a guide to making the necessary changes.

Use Windows Explorer to open the archive and save the script in the MSys shell home folder:
C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\home\[username]

NB the script and patches were designed to build MythTV 0.24, released on 11 Nov 2010, but will also build MythTV 0.23.1 and the current git master (v0.25pre-1070-g9590973).

Using the build script

Start an Msys shell from the Windows desktop by clicking:

At the terminal enter:

to list the options available for the build process.

To start the build simply type:

The script will display the type of build selected and prompt you to continue. Pressing return will start the process of downloads and builds which can take some time - around 1-2 hours on recent multi core systems.

NB It isn't uncommon for make to fail while building Qt with the error message:

If so then ensure that you have at least 1GB of VM and restart the script. It may be necessary to repeat this process several times. Sometimes it may be helpful to restart the computer.

Hopefully everything built OK and we ended up with an installation archive. If not then follow the Step by step guide to resolve the problem.

Running MythTV for Windows

Now that we have built MythTV we're anxious to try it. We have 2 choices:

1. With VirtualBox on a Linux, Mac or Windows system.
2. On a real Windows system.

For testing Windows compatibility then VirtualBox comes into its own. It's simple to have a number of canned Windows systems ready to run and it's easy to re-start from known configurations. Click here to read more.

Ultimately the intent is to run on real hardware. Click here to read more.