It's Not TV, It's MythTV 437
ChipGuy writes "The New York Times looks at MythTV (an open source PVR technology), Bit Torrent and Videora and how they are disrupting the television business, especially the lucrative business of selling TV DVDs. Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner."
Before it's /.ed (Score:5, Informative)
A few days ago, I wrote about Videora, a BitTorrent+RSS client which makes it easy for folks to find and download torrent files from the web. The post, picked up by others generated mostly positive responses to the software. Think of Videora as TiVo-for-torrent, using RSS feeds. In an effort to shed more light to the product, I did an e-interview (via email) with Sajeeth Cherian, a Canadian student, who has hacked together this wonderful product. Here are excerpts from an e-interview.
OM: Tell me a little bit about yourself?
SC: I am a student attending Carleton University, which is located Ottawa, Canada's Capital. I am in my final year, perusing a degree in Communication Engineering and let me tell you, engineering is as hard as everyone says it is. Lately I've been interning at a couple high tech firms around the Ottawa region to get some real world experience and finish up the work experience requirement for my degree.
OM: What prompted you to write Videora?
SC: My roommate likes to watch anime and constantly scours the web looking for his favorite anime to download. (Anime is the Japanese term for Japanese animation, cartoons that are broadcast in Japan and which are then subtitled into English by groups of volunteers or commercial companies). About once a week he would complain to me how he was wasting all this time searching for these shows. I think he was wishing that these shows would just somehow download themselves. Well after a few weeks I got sick of hearing his complaints so I decide to look for a solution to his problem.
OM: Now aren't you a good roommate? mine just finished my cup-a-noodles and never replenished the pantry. Still, RSS? SC: After searching some of his favorite anime BitTorrent sites, I came across one site which offered an RSS feed. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a simple format that is used by web sites to send article headlines, summaries and links back to full-text articles on the web. Anyways, this RSS feed was special, instead of linking to articles on the internet, it linked directly to the very BitTorrent files that these sites linked to on their web pages. By simply scanning the RSS feed and downloading the desired BitTorrent files it linked to, I concluded that he could download his anime automatically without ever having to surf to an anime BitTorrent website again.
After discovering this RSS feed I began to envision a product. Some thing simple, which allows users to find shows easily and a couple clicks later (after the shows are added to their 'season tickets') would automatically download these shows to their hard drives in the background. With this, users wouldn't have to look for certain video to download, because the video they want would already be on their hard drive. Thus giving them free time to do more interesting things, rather than scour the same old websites. This seemed like a killer idea with more potential than just quieting my roommate so I began to develop this idea into computer software. Along the way, I added a few other features including the ability to aggregate video files into 'want lists' which allows users to easily manually download videos of interest. Needless to say, my roommate doesn't complain to me anymore.
OM: I have seen that most of the cutting edge work on peer-to-peer and torrent type programs is happening outside of the US? Does being in Canada make it easier to work on such P2P products? SC: I don't think being in Canada makes it any easier than being in the United States to work on peer to peer products. Anyone, from any country can work on a peer to peer program without any trouble, all you need is a little computer programming know how. I read recently about a professor at Princeton who wrote a P2P product in 15 lines of code. I don't think he had any trouble producing it.
OM: What do you think is the impact of BitTorrent, RSS and other such technologies is going to be on the media - both d
Could be good... (Score:4, Informative)
If the television networks or maybe the producers want to allow me to download their shows w/out ads, the same day they're aired at a fast download speed for a reasonable rate, then I'd probably bite. I sure as hell won't buy a DVD set of a single season of any TV show for fifty bucks. Maybe a subscription service for 20-30 bucks a month that lets me download the shows I want might be worth it to me.
Of course what I just described is a pipe dream, so for the moment I'll remain content with the hdtv rips available.
Re:Why do we pay these people? (Score:1, Informative)
Who: Tim Allen. What: Handyman dad in the ABC comedy "Home Improvement" (1991-99). Salary surge: Obviously inspired by Seinfeld's aforementioned feat, Allen threatened to leave his show after its seventh season if he didn't get the same seven-figure salary in 1997. The comedian ended up besting Seinfeld by sealing a $1.25 million per-show deal with ABC -- a $900,000 increase from his previous $350,000 per-episode rate.
Who: Paul Reiser, Helen Hunt. What: The inoffensively comely couple in NBC's "Mad About You" (1992-99). Salary surge: Reiser and Hunt told the world that they both might not return to the flailing series for a seventh season. And despite the fact that neither expressly wanted more money, NBC nevertheless forked out a $1 million per-episode contract for each to stay -- and they did.
Who: Anthony Edwards, Noah Wyle, Eriq LaSalle. What: Everyman surgeons in the NBC medical drama "ER" (1994-present). Salary surge: After the announced departure of fellow hunky colleague George Clooney and the inking of a $13 million-per-show relicenscing deal between Warner Bros. and NBC in early 1998, Edwards, Wyle and LaSalle all renegotiated their pay -- and got $350,000 to $400,000 each per episode for their troubles.
Re:Bit torrent poses no threat (Score:3, Informative)
It sounds to me like you are behind a router/firewall and the packets aren't being routed properly.
Re:The fact of the matter is... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:myth (Score:4, Informative)
Install Debian, apt-get install mythtv. It's not very hard. Took me an hour including the FTP install of Debian to setup my last MythTV system. The only complicated part is if you want to use Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 or 350 cards in which case you have to screw around with the kernel modules because Hauppauge isn't very open with these proprietary mpeg-2 encoder cards so they've had to be reverse engineered. If you're just using a generic tuner supported by Video4Linux out of the box like a Hauppauge WinTV 401 model that uses the bttv kernel module and btaudio module (included with any vanilla Linux kernel) for capturing the audio then the Debian install and MythTV debs are all you need really.
MythTV has not even been updated for a whole year.
Quit making stuff up. The last stable release was in September and they put out a new stable release every 4-5 months. In the mean time nothing is stopping you from running the CVS version of it if you're so inclined. I'm still running MythTV 0.15.1 from May because it's very stable and 0.16 has no new features I require. The box is up 24/7 and it's simple enough that my wife has no problem figuring out how to use it to record her shows.
Re:myth (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know where you get your info from but mythtv.org [mythtv.org] disagrees with you. (September 2004 for the 0.16 release, this weekend , apparenty for 0.17)
This is not a project for the linux newbie.
But, learning to get mythtv from cvs and compile is relatively pain-free
Re:The fact of the matter is... (Score:3, Informative)
But then I figured out how to configure my router/NAT box to foward BT ports to my computer.
Battlestar Galactica takes me just over 24 hours to d/l. 350 Mb in size, about 5kb/s download speed.
I'm on a dial-up, so that's about as good as it gets.
Re:The fact of the matter is... (Score:2, Informative)
"Few people want to spend their Sundays downloading music or TV show from weird places"
You speak of downloading like it's an active process. There's no requirement to keep peddling in order for the file to complete. You click what you want, minimize, and then check back every so often (I usually check my downloads once per day to see what has finished). Whether it takes 30 minutes or a week I'm not going to be spending any more of my actual time downloading it.
Re:TV is disrupting its own business! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The fact of the matter is... (Score:2, Informative)
I fit that economic demographic if anyone does. The "mid line" computer I have is an old p3/450 which I bought last year off of a friend for $100, paying $20 over a period of five months. I can afford $50 for cable internet but that's about all. I don't have cable television (can't afford it) and I sure as hell don't subscribe to any online services that have a fee larger than a one-time payment of $5 (hello,
People think that because someone can afford to eat and to have one luxury that means that they can afford and have a BUNCH of luxuries. That's sloppy and innacurrate thinking.
It's entirely possible to only be able to afford one 'perk' and only then with careful budgeting and prioritizing (ie, chosing cable internet over cable television because you cannot have both).
Re:myth (Score:1, Informative)
Re:myth (Score:5, Informative)
MythTV was hard. I loaded up KnoppMyth, and immediately needed to tweak it so I could use LVM on my video partition. OK, no big deal, there are good HOWTOs.
Soon, I absolutely needed to update the kernel to 2.6 because ndiswrapper on my wireless NIC panicked the kernel.
Sound has always been a struggle. One kernel worked clearly with OSS but crashed the sound driver on recording way too often. The next kernel didn't work at all with OSS so I needed ALSA (which I preferred anyway) but now the sound is not great. Very distorty.
And the absolute toughest was getting a serial IR dongle to change channels on the satellite box. I needed to custom-build a second instance of lirc and mess around with the IR pulse parameters (like randomly changing the numbers this way or that). No documentation apart from "change these numbers"
I got it working, and I absolutely LOVE my mythbox, but more than once I contemplated Windows MCE, so I could just get the dumb thing working without so much fuss. I just wanna watch some TV...!
Re:The fact of the matter is... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DishNetwork Support? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.irblaster.info/ [irblaster.info]
http://losdos.dyndns.org:8080/public/mythtv-info/
I currently have my Myth box connected to analog cable and it works fine. I plan on moving down to the living and hooking it up to my dish network receiver pretty soon. The quality of the show is only as good as your input. Good luck!