MythTV Allows Multiple Front-Ends On Wide Range of Platforms 254
As the DVR becomes a much more pervasive performer in home theater setups, the level of excellence demanded by the general consumer seems to continue to rise. The open source project MythTV has been in this arena for quite a while, and now offers the ability to have multiple front-ends on your MythTV install on a wide range of different platforms. Able to run on Windows XP, Vista, Xbox, and even an Apple iPod, the new flexibility is sure to interest many consumers (and many competitors).
Re:MythTV increasingly impractical (digital and HD (Score:3, Informative)
except your an idiot...
cable company is REQUIRED by fcc to give customers cable boxes with firewire out.
myth tv can control almost all firewire boxes just fine.
Re:MythTV increasingly impractical (digital and HD (Score:3, Informative)
s/your/you're/
As a former MythTV User (Score:4, Informative)
My recommendation? Tivo. Hands down! It doesn't have all the features and flexibility as the other units, but it's fast and responsive - from a usability perspective. And I can even download my shows to my PC.
Windows MCE was pretty nice - but after about a month, my filesystem got corruped, and I lost everything - including the 300 CDs I had ripped (manually) to the unit! The UI was a little slow.
Then came Myth. A royal pain to get running. The features and flexibility were very nice. The worst thing about it however was the music portion of it. (MythMusic). That was horible beyond believe - especialy in-contrast to the Windows MCE, which was very very nice. MythTV's UI was kind of slow and klunky as well. I do not miss it.
Then came the Comcast HD PVR. That was too great - limited functionality and channel guides were a pain. No music, no download capability. We only went through 2 or 3 of these boxes (due to dying) during our month we owned them - when we found out Tivo firmware was available.
The Comcast HD-DVR with Tivo firmware was the worst. We went through about 3 trips to the Comcast office, dead units, 3 or 4 technician house-calls. Lost show, etc. They eventually came out with a version of firmware which at least stablized the box. It's not too bad now - but a bit clunky - not as fast and responsive. The firmware is still kind of screwed-up - gives you the wrong sounds when clicking through things - shows disappear sometimes - a few unit freezes, etc. No music - at least not our - just the crappy Comcast music channels. Oh yea, and whatever you do - don't hit the "on-demand" button - 'cause that'll just ruin your whole evening.
So for the few things we watch in HD, we use the Comcast HD-PVR with Tivo - reluctantly.
For everything else - all the reruns, and bulk of stuff we record - and music - It's all still the Tivo Series-2. It works. It's fast. It's reliable. It's responsive. It does what I want it to when I hit a button. We've never lost a show. We're on our original unit after many many years. It's simple and streightforward. I don't want to do "development" at night - I just want to press a button and watch TV. Tivo does that, and well.
The only realy upside to MythTV was that it was free...but not anymore!
Re:MythTV increasingly impractical (digital and HD (Score:5, Informative)
MythTV supports firewire access to cable boxes. MythTV can do both capture and channel changing via firewire. I currently have a MythTV box hooked up to a Motorola DCT-6200, and this allows me to record HD (as well as SD) channels. Having said that, some Cable companies will encrypt "premium" channels making this solution useless for those channels. However, for my needs at least, MythTV+firewire+DCT-6200 works fine. Throw in OTA HD channels (which in my location look significantly better than their cable versions due to compression in the latter) and life is good for my simple needs.
I like my Direct TV HD DVR (Score:4, Informative)
a guide that fills the screen unlike the comcrap guild that looks stuck in SD with ads on each page.
Free HDMI cable
OPTICAL and COAXIAL audio
E-sata
RF and IR remote
E-net
DIRECTV on Demand
usb for the OTA tuner add on.
on line Recording with out having to run a sever.
and the GUI looks a lot like the TIVO comcast gui that comcast shows off on there web page.
I have the box in a cabinet under the TV and the remote works fine.
Re:ah, what about the backends? (Score:2, Informative)
Does anyone watch the output of their MythTV on anything other than their computer screen? Every time I look at MythTV, a solution for getting the video onto a TV set-- in either SD or HD is a completely unsolved, undocumented and glossed over issue. When someone solves that problem, MythTV may finally not really be a myth.
Getting DVI output from an nVidia card to work with an HD TV isn't too difficult at all. Mine is hooked up to my 52" RP CRT (a Hitachi 51F500). About the only caveat is that, with a native 1080i display like mine, you still have to enable de-interlacing as the nVidia Linux drivers simply don't handle output of 1080i content to a native 1080i display without tearing and motion blur (unless you de-interlace the content). It appears that, rather than fix this or even admit there's a bug, nVidia has chosen to wait for the day when there are no interlcaed displays left.
Aside from that one annoyance, mythtv is quite east to get working with HD TVs.
Re:ah, what about the backends? (Score:2, Informative)
MythTV only impractical for the deaf (Score:1, Informative)
CableCard is pretty much dead at the moment, due mostly to switched video and the extensive consumer restrictions requirements it entailed. The nonexistent enforcement by the FCC on the requirement that cable operators deploy it and total the lack of consumer interest in the experiment added to it's complete failure.
MythTV can capture HD video just fine using from the cable/satellite box, it's only the closed captions which are in an inaccessible form due to encryption*. Also, MythTV only needs to use IR for Dish Network boxes, DirectTV has a serial interface (using a "USB" plug), and cable operators in the US are required to implement firewire channel changing. Of course, in Europe DVB CAM systems work just fine with MythTV, as required by law. Only the USA attempted to implement the unworkable CableCard specs instead of using the tried and true DVB CAM system for access control.
*Closed captioning advocates for the deaf lobbied for the requirement to place the captions in the encrypted video stream rather than in the unencrypted portions of the stream. The rationale apparently was that it would be less likely to get accidentally lost during remux. But making it illegal to record the closed captions is an unfortunate and predictable side effect. The LOC has denied all substantial petitions for DMCA exceptions for the deaf to date, but the next administration may appoint someone more compassionate to head the Library of Congress.
DVD Jukebox (Score:2, Informative)
What MythTV, or rather MythDVD does really well is function as a DVD Jukebox. There is nothing else out there right now for backing up your DVDs that is as painless as Myth, unless you want to spend thousands on the Kalidescope system. You pop your DVD in, import it as either a 1:1 iso, a perfect copy of the main title, or a compressed (xvid) copy. It will even pull the cover art and metadata from IMDB for you. I'd highly recommend Mythbunutu for those heading down this road.
Re:As a former MythTV User-NO TIVO, NO TIVO... (Score:3, Informative)
I get a call about if from my Wife, and have to SSH in from work to re-launch the Myth front-end? It was really cool that I could do this - but quite unfortunate that I had to.
I hooked into the ACPI power button routines to kill/restart the X server when mythtv hung up. The backend was it's own process outside of X, so it continued to run fine when this was done.
So, all non-technical wife-types had to do when mythTV hung was to press the power button and it would take care of itself. But to be fair, by the time I stopped using it (I went off-grid) it was pretty stable - perhaps once a month a frontend reset was needed.
Re:MythTV increasingly impractical (digital and HD (Score:4, Informative)
Re:MythTV increasingly impractical (digital and HD (Score:3, Informative)
I suspect the issues and devices (cablecard etc.) you're describing are US-specific. It's not becoming irrelevant in the rest of the world (at least not for any of the reasons you mention).
I'm using MythTV with 2 DVB-C cards and decoding pay channels without trouble. I'm currently using a softcam setup with a pay card (Irdeto 2 encrypted signal), but have used official Irdeto 2 and Viaccess CAM modules with success.
I've been using MythTV for the past 4-5 years, and am generally very happy with the product and the service I get from it.
Re:As a former MythTV User (Score:4, Informative)
I rip on Microsoft as much as the next person, but the people who made Windows Media Center did a really stand-up job and deserve credit for getting right the things Tivo fucks up (and continues to fuck up, years later).
Digital TV (Score:4, Informative)
Digital TV doesn't need encoding. It can just write the bits that fly in from the antenna to the hard drive. It can recompress into another format if you like, but that needn't be done in real time.
Re:Digital TV (Score:3, Informative)
You can use DVB-C capture cards to capture the digital encoding strait from a cable line, if the channel is not encrypted. Where I live, all of the over the air channels are broadcast digitally unencrypted over the cable line. Everything else is encrypted. I could still record the analog channels using a regular analog capture card.
MythTV has always supported live streaming over the network. Wireless might not be able to keep up, but a 100Mbps connection is way more than enough. If you want to capture digital channels, then the simplest option is the HDHomeRun
http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun [silicondust.com]
It is a network attached dual tuner box that will stream the broadcast MPEG-2 data over the network to MythTV. MythTV will then record the stream to disk and/or transmit it to whatever frontends you have.
(Note: MythTV is designed to exist in two parts, the backend which records and streams, and the frontend which decodes/displays. Typically these two parts run on the same computer, but you can have any number of frontends and backends all working together. I've read about organizations using multiple backends to record 10+ channels at one with dozens of frontends to watch. Think of something like a hotel.)
Re:ah, what about the backends? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MythTV increasingly impractical (digital and HD (Score:1, Informative)
Re:small format pc for myth? (Score:3, Informative)
Any good guides out there?
Good HTPC guides usually aren't updated as often as the "general" system guides (bugdet, midrange, high end) and they usually aren't "cheap," but they can have useful info about what hardware to consider.
Since the HTPC guides aren't very cheap or up-to-date, I also recommend Tech Report's and Ars Technica's "general" system guides. Tech Report has an "Econobox" section and Ars Techinica has a "Budget Box" section.
I'd like to put together a small format PC for this sort of thing. Alas, I can't use a cheap tower, it needs to be one of those small form factors that can fit in an entertainment center. I'd like to spend as little as possible
I don't know if the In Win BK Series (Mt. Jade) [in-win.us] is small enough, but it's pretty small, cheap, quiet (if you use Intel), and flexible. I'm only checking Newegg, but Newegg has the BK623 [newegg.com] for $59.99 + $17.50 shipping and the BK636 [newegg.com] for $59.99 + $9.99 shipping, both with 300W power supplies (Fortron Source, according to some reviews).
For your entertainment center, note that the footprint of a BK6xx case (323mm x 276mm) is "equal" to the footprint of a Sony PS3 [playstation.com] (325mm x 274mm), but the BK6xx is about 1.7 inches taller and is not "wedge-shaped" like the PS3.
So it's not "tiny," but it's compatible with all those cheap HTPC microATX motherboards (integrated graphics, HDMI, FireWire, digital audio out, etc) and it accepts a standard 5.25" desktop optical drive, 3.5" desktop hard drive, and 4 full-height expansion slots (for HDTV tuners).
Also note that the case's unique cooling system, which uses no case fans other than the CPU's fan (intake) and the power supply's fan (exhaust), only works efficiently with motherboards using Intel chipsets and an Intel retail CPU with its stock heatsink/fan. So that eliminates good, cheap HTPC chipsets like the AMD/ATI 780G and the NVIDIA 3200. Boards based on Intel's new G45 chipset are starting to arrive at Newegg [newegg.com], though.
There are several reviews of the BK Series on the Googleweb [google.com] and In Win's BK Series product page [in-win.us] has a "Reviews" tab (favorable only, I'd guess).