MythTV Vs. TiVo, Round 2 337
Egadfly writes with a comparison of the open source MythTV and the highly commercial TiVo Series 3. "How different are the two systems' available remote control devices and their graphic interfaces when it comes to ease of use? Which product should you choose if your HD signal comes OTA or if you plan to use CableCARDs? And what software features (present and future) can you expect with each product? Will loopholes in FCC regulations and cable company encryption ultimately squeeze out MythTV and other open source players?"
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Broadcast TV is dead, by the way.
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
TIVO: Sorry, I've deleted that show because a local company 'accidentally' set the macrovision copy protection flag [tivocommunity.com] on the broadcast.
There are some pragmatic benefits to using free software to store/watch/stream/listen to/etc your media.
(and its not as hard as you make out)
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article, about the User Interface: I want screenshots! Not some excuse why it's hard to judge. "This is my seven page article. however, it's a hard subject. therefore I'm going to write how hard it is to write about this subject"
CableCARD is all that matters (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Granting someone else control over your box may* make it easier for you to use, but it sure as hell isn't your box anymore.
Back on the topic of media specifically, I'm afraid that most people have no idea how much the BigCo's are pushing for control [boingboing.net]. If people knew, would they care? I doubt most people will even see a problem with broadcast flags and devices that refuse to play content...
People are complacent, and have learned to accept a (imho) fairly high level of suck in exchange for not having to think.
(*But no guarantee ... while I have no 1st hand experience with it, Vista reads like a nightmare compared to any reasonable modern distro)
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
To a significant degree, I think you're correct. Look at what Microsoft foisted upon the world, in the form of Win9X. Talk about your high level of suck
That bothers me.
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a device for watching television. You are building/buying this device so that you can sit in front of the idiot box like a slack-jawed yokel for thousands of hours. You're complaining that the 5 hours learning how to set-up MythTV is the waste?
What rate do you want to bill the universe for your TV-watching hours? Go for $450/hr; it sounds even more impressive. Your TV watching hobby might be costing you $200,000 per year, OMFG!
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've got nfs share over wireless (802.11g) that randomly disconnects itself when idle. and mythtv & the nfs & the wireless require a reboot to function. unfortunately, due to sequencing and timing of boot, the nfs share doesn't always reconnect at boot, and I'm not always able to remember to check the the wireless connection is up, before I check the nfs share to mount the share, before I boot mythtv. If I get in a hurry, or forget to check something- I have to reboot. not that I can blame these issues 100% on mythtv, but unfortunately, it does rely on some inconsistent technologies as I've implemented it. maybe if I had a cat6 run between machines and maybe if i had a better file server it wouldn't choke... but that's not an option for me.
Now when it works, it works wonderfully for watching downloaded video.
when it works.
Re:CableCARD is all that matters (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont have cablecard and I enjoy all the shows in full HD.
I use the bittorrent card.
Full HD, no commercials, I get to watch them the next day anyways. Heck because the same guys release the TV shows I can easily write a script with wget and other apps to look for the torrents and download them automatically. It's just like a tivo except it extracts the commercials and compresses them to mpeg4 so it's even easy for me to take them on my laptop.
and yes, I dont give a rats about "legality" these same asshats that run these networks are forcing me to find the shows on bittorrent because they demand the cable companies scramble it.
International Use (Score:2, Insightful)
I have been doing a little research on MythTV (again) and still am off put by the complexity of it. The Tivo box really is my OS X to MythTVs Windows, in my opinion. But an even bigger issue to me is if I had to start paying a monthly fee to Tivo since they dropped their lifetime support fee option.
ps. The article was so lean on details I wonder if the writer even touched either a Tivo or MythTV box.
Neither. It's MediaPortal versus Vista MCE (Score:5, Insightful)
You're lying. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and put a watt-meter on your cable box+MythTV combo. I'll bet you spend more on additional electricity than you would on the monthly Tivo service fee.
Re:You're lying. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha ha, yeah, if you think Myth users selected it as an option because it's cheaper, you're seriously misguided. I know I selected Myth because it's more flexible, powerful, and featureful than any commercial DVR I could buy (I don't have an HDTV at this point, so downconverted HD would be just fine for me).
Re:TiVo wins of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I don't use MythTV or a Tivo.
So I go into the store and start playing around with the Tivos on display while I'm shopping for a PVR solution. I'm looking at a few different options including building my own MythTV box, buying a Tivo, buying a Windows Media Center PC, buying some other appliance, and buying an add on for one of the boxes I have laying around the house.
I ask the sales guy, "so how do I skip a commercial?" After a long rant about how there is an easter egg that allows me to assign a 30 second skip ahead to a button that does not seem to labeled for that option if I push this particular sequence of controls, I'm thinking something is really wrong with this picture. (On the solution I ended up with I go to the preference section and insert the numbers I want in seconds for the skip ahead and skip back. I want to configure my device not learn how to shoot a fireball in Mortal Kombat XXII.)
Next I ask about saving video and making copies for on the road. I mean I can record a VCR tape, I should be able to record and burn a DVD, right? Well, yeah if you buy a model that cost another $500 dollars you can burn DVDs with it, but not all shows will burn. Huh? And it won't do VCDs at all for cheaper archives of stuff like news broadcasts and public access lectures from local professors. Hmm, that is annoying. And how easy is it for me to save it as a video file I can watch on my Mac laptop on the plane without wasting my battery on the DVD player? Really its that hard huh? At this point I have some real serious doubts. I mean, the interface is okay aside from the skip ahead, but why can't it do these simple tasks?
Then the sales guy starts talking about the subscription. Subscription? Why do I want to pay a monthly fee? For up to date program info, hmm, that is fair enough, but there are already like 20 free online Web services that offer that info supported by ads. Why should it cost you guys so much? Why not add a few ads? Oh you do have ads and it costs that much? Isn't that sort of gouging people? So what happens if that service is wrong or spotty or I just don't like it? Can I pay one of the other companies and pick the price/service that meets my needs best? No, I'm locked in huh? I was really not sold on this.
I ended up passing on Tivo because they seemed expensive and wanted to add in all sorts of artificial problems and limited behaviors for what seemed like no good reason but which, in retrospect looking at their big Cable TV partnerships, makes a lot of sense for them, just not for me as a customer. The solution I ended up using was the combination of an old, old mac tower I had sitting around, an Elgato EyeTV tuner+software, a new video card that would mirror to a monitor and TV, and a DVD burner for the tower. It cost me about 1/3 the upfront price of an equivalent Tivo (would be more for someone who needed to find an old mac) and the program info I use is free and ad supported and I can pick from among a variety of options. When I want to archive a few episodes of a TV show I can use the built in editor to delete the commercials and then click burn to DVD (or VCD) and it works, every time. I can skip ahead or back with the included remote with no problems. Playback of live TV or prerecorded , while burning a DVD and while recording something else causes no slowdown or stutter. Export to Mpegs for viewing on the plane is selecting the export menu item and then dragging it onto the auto-discovered shared laptop drive. It never crashes. It never fails to boot. If the power dies and the UPS dies it recovers just fine. I had a hard drive die once and swapped it out. Every now and again there will be a display problem for the video (every couple of weeks) and I have to quit and restart the application, which takes about 3 seconds. That's pretty much the only complaint I have.
I guess my point is, you can mock MythTV if you like, but it is just as easy to mock the artificial limits of Tivo. It makes tasks that should be easy, hard and task
Re:CableCARD is all that matters (Score:5, Insightful)
Take these scenarios:
1. Let's say you have a VCR recording over the air broadcasts, and it's set to record Heroes on Monday. It does and you happily watch your show, commercials and all. Morally acceptable, right?
2. Ok, same thing, except you fast forward through the commericials. Is this still morally acceptable? Really you're not upholding your part of the bargain (watching commercials) for the free TV you're getting.
3. Ok, so now you discover on Tuesday that your VCR didn't change timezones properly (something about DST being moved forward or some other nonsense), and didn't record Heroes for you. You download it with commericials and watch it. Is that bad? Is there a fundamental difference between this and the first scenario?
4. Or, say you download it with no commercials, how is that different at all than the second scenario?
Where exactly does downloading previously broadcast material become immoral?
Re:Every time I think of taking the plunge and do (Score:3, Insightful)
FWIW, the only issues I usually see is when I change something. As with most Linux applications, once it is stable it will usually stay stable unless you change the configuration (hardware failures notwithstanding).
IIRC, it was Isaac Richards that originally developed MythTV. I think Jarod is the guy with the most popular install guide.
Re:CableCARD is all that matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, for your second point, no one 'pays for' over the air TV, at least not the viewers. Advertisers are the ones paying for broadcast TV. So, which scenario is on shaky ground: downloading with commercials included, or Tivoing and skipping commercials? The first one is the illegal one, while I think the second is the immoral one. (Not that this stops me from skipping commercials).
Following the same logic, if I pay for cable, what is the fundamental difference between downloading an episode with no commercials and Tivoing it?