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Television Media Software Entertainment Linux

Freevo Developers Interviewed 82

Posted by CowboyNeal from the up-close-and-personal dept.
prostoalex writes "O'Reilly's LinuxDevCenter features Freevo, 'a media platform that brings together various applications for video recording and playback.' They interview the developers, and talk about the current plans for the project. Freevo is not just a standalone product, it's a platform to which other developers, interested in home media on Linux, can plug into."
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Freevo Developers Interviewed More

Freevo Developers Interviewed

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  • Windows version? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Cowherd X ( 850136 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:31AM (#11513371) Journal

    The first release, in May 2002, consisted only of a blue screen

    So they made a Windows version first?

  • This will never take off. (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:32AM (#11513378)
    This product will never become popular until the authors implement some solid digital rights management. Several studies funded by the RIAA and MPAA conclusively prove that users want DRM in every piece of software and hardware that is made today.

    I'm afraid without such restrictions on them, users just won't want to use such software because nobody wants free and unfettered access to equipment and software they purchase.

    • Re:This will never take off. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:42AM (#11513429)
      Informative? I think the parent was joking.

      I think DRM is going to slip itself in to many aspects of downloading/playing songs and movies without people complaining about it. This is because your average customer of this software and equipment doesn't realize exactly what it can do. I think there is going to be a backlash when people figure out that all DRM means to them is the inability to play a media file. I'm still waiting to hear about an actual feature or benefit this gives to the end user.
      • This is because your average customer of this software and equipment doesn't realize exactly what it can do. I think there is going to be a backlash when people figure out that all DRM means to them is the inability to play a media file. I'm still waiting to hear about an actual feature or benefit this gives to the end user.

        I'm probably just rehashing what has been said before but it is difficult to see how digital piracy can be eliminated.

        The only way is for music and video to be safe digitally is if no
      • Informative? I think the parent was joking.

        Please. Us moderators have the right to be funny sometimes too. That '+1 Informative' was intended as a joke. I hope it will be metamoderated accordingly.

  • Perfect question for the first PVR box builder (Score:5, Informative)

    by 2MuchC0ffeeMan ( 201987 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:38AM (#11513413) Homepage
    Howard Wen: How does Freevo differ from MythTV?

    Dirk Meyer: MythTV uses QT, which uses X. Freevo should also run on a frame buffer, a DXR3 or something else. The next difference is MythTV depends on a MySQL database. Freevo always was a GUI for external programs. There was never the idea to build a TV application like MythTV inside Freevo.

    Rob Shortt: MythTV has the live TV time-shifting nailed, and for that I am envious. While Myth has the advantage in [this], I think Freevo does a better job of other media handling.

    Freevo tends to be a more nimble program, or I should say "platform." This has to do with us not using a data server like MySQL or depending on Apache for the web interface. Instead, we use a combination of caches, object serialization, XML files, and SQLite for persistent storage, and our own lightweight web server using Twisted.

    Aubin Paul: MythTV is exceptional, and I admire much of what they've done. But I don't like some of their design choices. For example, why would I run X-Windows on my TV?

    • Re:Perfect question for the first PVR box builder (Score:4, Informative)

      by BillyBlaze ( 746775 ) <tomfelker@gmail.com> on Saturday January 29, 2005 @01:09PM (#11513969)
      One minor nitpick I'd make their - Qt doesn't necessarily use X - it usually does, but it can also run on the framebuffer, or embedded devices, or Windows. (Of course, so can SDL).

      I've actually been planning to give Freevo a try - primarily because mythbackend has a habit of dying on me, and a few other quirks.

    • Good alternative? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Nik13 ( 837926 )
      Not that I've played with either (my HTPC has always been running on windows), but this sounds like a good alternative to us all using DVB captures instead of crappy analog captures (once you try DVB capturing, you never want to go back). Sounds like this could go nicely with VDR (unless VDR already has those kinds of things in it already?). It seems that the only kind of digital capturing that any companies are interested into is for OTA HDTV, but it would be nice to have something for digital cable or s

  • Freevo vs. MythTV (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:41AM (#11513428)
    I am considering building a Linux "Media Center" PC soon and one reason I like Freevo more than MythTV is that for the most part it is written in Python. It seems that Freevo would be far easier to modify and write plugins for than Myth (which mostly written in C). Even the creators of Freevo claim they did not know Python before they started.

    • Re:Freevo vs. MythTV (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Cthefuture ( 665326 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @12:22PM (#11513628)
      It seems that Freevo would be far easier to modify and write plugins for than Myth (which mostly written in C).

      Probably, Myth is written mostly in C++ though. The code is a horrible hack job though. Written by a college student. Not that all college student projects suck, it's just that usually the inexperienced create poor designs initially.

      Even the creators of Freevo claim they did not know Python before they started.

      This is not a good thing either. Same problem as above.

      Overall, MythTV looks a lot better and has more features because more people have been working on it. The code is often buggy and hard to hack on. However, it does work resonably well and I've been happily using MythTV for over a year with no major issues.
      • The code is a horrible hack job though. Written by a college student. Not that all college student projects suck, it's just that usually the inexperienced create poor designs initially.

        Like, um, the Linux Kernel?

        LK
        • The key word is usually. I was writing professional quality code by college as well. But that was only because by the time I was 18, I already had some 20,000 hours programming experience. Most people do not dedicate their lives to programming like that, especially not at such an early age. Some of us do.
      • Probably, Myth is written mostly in C++ though. The code is a horrible hack job though. Written by a college student. Not that all college student projects suck, it's just that usually the inexperienced create poor designs initially.

        yeaahhhh right. While some of the people who contribute code to Myth are college students, the core development team has been writing software professionaly for a number of years.

        The code is often buggy and hard to hack on.

        Buggy? Hell it's stable enough and bug free

        • The "core development team" has not always been the same people.

          I have never run any version of MythTV that would not crash for some reason or another. I tend to be a heavy user and push software to its limits though. I just learn what to avoid to prevent crashes, but it has never been 99% bug free for me.
    • The original Tivo was done with a lot of Tcl scripts, probably with a healthy dose of C integration (which is very easy with Tcl). The point being, that yes, using scripting..errr..dynamic programming languages improves flexibility, and if you plan carefully (doing the right bits in C), won't even impact performance much.
  • Planning on building a box, anyone want to comment on which one is better? Never used Freevo, played around with Myth a little bit, but my TV card at the time didn't work with it.

    • Re:Freevo vs. MythTV (Score:3, Informative)

      by avidday ( 671814 )
      Freevo is "lighter", more modular and more customisable. The MythTV developers really have time shifting sorted out well. On the other hand running MythTV means running X11, using a MySQL server for recording and listing management and Apache if you want a webserver from end for it. Freevo does the same thing with three python apps that sit over SDL, XMLtv/PySQLlite and the twisted framework. I have tried both and I like Freevo better - the flexibility it affords is a big plus.
    • Mythtv, only because of Jarod's HOWTO:

      http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php [wilsonet.com]
    • Depends on what you want to do. If you want a media center to handle video and audio files then Freevo sounds like a good solution.

      But for me.. sorry.. Freevo is useless. If they're going to play off the "TiVo" name by calling it Freevo it should be able to handle timeshifting of live TV.

      If I cant pause/rewind/fast-fwd live TV then I'm not touching it. If they ever figure out how to add that functionality then I'll take a look. They're currently "working on it" but they've been doing that since I look

      • But for me.. sorry.. Freevo is useless. If they're going to play off the "TiVo" name by calling it Freevo it should be able to handle timeshifting of live TV.

        If I cant pause/rewind/fast-fwd live TV then I'm not touching it. If they ever figure out how to add that functionality then I'll take a look.

        How often does the average TiVo or MythTV user watch live TV, though? It's one of those neat features that TiVo uses to sell its boxes, but in the more than four years I've had my TiVo, I've almost never w

    • Re:Freevo vs. MythTV (Score:5, Informative)

      by FullCircle ( 643323 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @12:53PM (#11513842)
      I've used both for a long time and I currently use Freevo.

      Both do a great job at playback on video files. Both have similar features for photos.

      Freevo has a better music playback system IMHO. Myth requires an overly complicated two step process of making a playlist using a badly designed menuing system in one screen and then going to another section of Myth to play back your currently selected playlist. With Freevo you have the option of selecting a folder to playback as a complete album or making a playlist. 99% of the time I want the album so this works better for me.
      I guess my life isn't random.

      Neither is very good at playing DVDs. If you do get DVD playback functioning, the menus will either kinda work or not at all. Don't throw away that $30 DVD player just yet.

      Myth has more polish and extra features such as background ripping and VOIP.

      The main problem with Myth is the complexity of the application. It uses a MySQL database to hold almost all of its information on movies, music and settings. This makes setup, even on a Debian system very complicated. Using a specialized distro such as Knoppmyth helps, but even the Knoppmyth installer is a bear to get fully functioning.

      With Freevo, details about each movie are kept in a single text file located in the directory with the movie. If I move the files around, the data never gets lost. With Myth, losing the database will lose any work you have done entering movie info. I know I could backup the database, but why should I have to? Think Windows registry vs. Unix text configuration files. Why use a database when a simple directory listing will suffice? The developers never heard of KISS, that is certain.

      Compared to Freevo, MythTV crashes a lot. IMHO, the overhead of the database and the complexity of C++ make MythTV harder to debug. At one point, one of my Myth installs lost the ability to add more files to the listing. I have quite a few full series on the drives and I wonder if I didn't hit some limit in the software. I finally gave up on Myth at that point and went with Freevo.

      Don't get me wrong, I'd like to use MythTV. It's the instability and the dread of configuring MythTV that keeps me using Freevo instead.

      Freevo is simple and functional.
      • It can be a pain to install (much easier thanks to stuff like KnoppMyth, Jarod's HOWTO for FC, and emerge on Gentoo), but once it's running it is SWEET.

        I really like how Myth handles streaming to remote frontends, and it has a lot of nice plugins.

        I tried Freevo once and didn't like it at all. I use Myth and love it.

      • Re:Freevo vs. MythTV (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Neither is very good at playing DVDs. If you do get DVD playback functioning, the menus will either kinda work or not at all. Don't throw away that $30 DVD player just yet.

        I have to disagree with this. First of all, neither one plays DVDs directly, they both rely on an external program. The default player for both is probably still mplayer, which as you say, does not do DVD menus. But if you tell them to use Xine for DVDs instead, as most people do, DVD menus work flawlessly.

        Some people also use Ogle
      • Compared to Freevo, MythTV crashes a lot

        Funny I don't remember the last time I had a crash with Myth.

  • i agree, this looks nice. it's good to be in control. it's great that it runs on linux. my question is: why bother? there's nothing on anyway. the handfull of shows that are worthwhile (for me only the simpsons, really) you'll get on dvd anyway... all without the ads! no timeshifting or anything, you OWN the thing! i haven't had a tv in years, and the only thing i miss is the news.
    • I don't really watch any TV to speak of, and don't even have a tuner in my set-top box.

      I've been using Freevo on an EPIA 10000M exclusively for watching movies and listening to music on a little set-top computer (Mini-ITX) for at least a year before the Mac Mini appeared on the scene. It's also much more convenient for showing friends and guests our digital photos without all having to crowd into the office as Freevo has a great built-in image viewer. And the whole thing is 100% controlled via a remote u

    • If you bothered to read the article you would realise Freevo does a lot more than allow you to watch TV.

      I use Freevo on a tuner-less PC. I have it hooked up to my projector and it is a lot easier to use a remote control and pick the DVD or CD I dumped to my hard disk, show people my holiday photos (with nice alpha blending), listen to the radio, download information and images about the film from Amazon.

      Sure, I could do all this with mplayer, realplay and Firefox but it's a damn site easier to press a fe

  • What about MythTV? (Score:4, Informative)

    by laird ( 2705 ) <lairdp@gmail.TWAINcom minus author> on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:53AM (#11513485) Journal
    I'm amazed that they wrote up the Freevo project without even mentioning the MythTV project [mythtv.org], which is far more mature (i.e. dues more, works a lot better, has more users and developers). Aside from doing more and working better, MythTV has a nice, scalable architecture that allows you to have multiple back-ends (storage and video encoding) and multiple front-ends (control and playback) so that you can have (for example) a big MythTV back-end in the basement with tons of storage and a couple of tuner cards, and have lightweight MythTV front-ends (which can run on an X-Box (for example, see http://www.killefiz.de/k/machines/xbox-mythtv-fron tend/) or a Mac. And since mythtv is available via apt-get install mythtv-suite it's really easy to set up and play around with on any Linux box. The latest version adds MythPhone, which is a fun way to play around with voice over IP and videophones. I'll admit that I spend more time in MythGame (runs all MAME games, etc.).

    From trying both projects, the only interesting thing about Freevo is that the front-end is written in Python, which is a nice language but is slow, while MythTV is written in C++, which is an annoying language but is fast.
    • I read the article yesterday, and the do mention MythTV. I haven't used either system much, but I do know that Freevo is also easy to install.

      The developers say that on one hand, they dislike the reliance of MythTV on X, on the other, they envy MythTV Broadcast Pause feature, something they are still trying to get right.

      Now maybe their fear of X is as uncalled for as people who say X makes the desktop slow, but they are aware that MythTV has more features. In all Freevo seems to follow the Unix tradition

      • Qt Embedded (Score:3, Informative)

        by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
        It is possible to install Myth without X. It's a bit of a PITA nowadays, but it can be done.

        Now relying purely on framebuffer, on the other hand... BAD IDEA. Ditching X means ditching hardware scaling, hardware IDCT, and hardware motion compensation, critical to:
        a) Running a frontend on a slower system
        b) Viewing HDTV at all. It's a pain without hardware MoComp and IDCT, but there's no way in hell you're going to do it with software scaling.
    • The reply above covers most of the points, but not all. When you say "MythTV does more" you might quantify that -- It does more with television viewing. MythTV is nearly (if not completely) useless for watching movies, listening to music, or looking at image media -- all things that Freevo does very well, which is all I, and a number of other Freevo users, employ it for.
      • That's funny, cause I just finished wathcing a dvd I ripped using MythDVD in perfect quality. Oh, and I have a 30 gig mp3 collection that plays nicely in mythMusic. As for galleries, I've never been compelled by looking at photos on my TV, but mythGallery is there, never used it. Myth may be klunky, but its pretty powerful once its up and running. -C

      • Re:What about MythTV? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Gregg M ( 2076 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @03:31PM (#11514873) Homepage
        MythTV is nearly (if not completely) useless for watching movies, listening to music, or looking at image media -- all things that Freevo does very well

        I saw a lot more than a Tivo clone at the MythTV website.

        • Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.
        • An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
        • An image viewer/slideshow application.
        • A weather module.
        • A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups.
        • A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes.
        • An RSS news feed reader module.

        How well MythTV performs these tasks is up to someone else to say. But looks like a lot is covered here.

      • Ummm MythVideo, MythMusic and MythGallery. Do all those things and do them VERY well.
      • "When you say "MythTV does more" you might quantify that -- It does more with television viewing. MythTV is nearly (if not completely) useless for watching movies, listening to music, or looking at image media"

        I've installed and run both, and this is just silly. MythTV is much better than Freevo at TV viewing, but MythTV also does more other things. As I said before, this is mainly a matter of maturity -- MythTV has more functionality integrated into it than Freevo, but over time many of the MythTV modules

      • MythTV is nearly (if not completely) useless for watching movies, listening to music, or looking at image media

        I don't care much one way or the other about pictures or music, but you're flat-out wrong on movies. MythDVD works fairly nicely; it calls whatever DVD player app you want to use. mplayer is rather lacking (no menu support at all), but xine offers full-featured playback with menus and AC3/DTS passthrough. It even ignores PUOs (which others have said are frequently abused by Di$ney, though I

    • MythTV is linked heavily in the article itself. Also, MythTV and Freevo largely have different goals and design ideals.

      For example, MythTV is Linux *only*, while Freevo has a FreeBSD port and could easily be switched over to Net or OpenBSD.

      As for Python being slow -- this is all covered quite well in the article and from experience I can say you wouldn't know you were using Python (at least judging by speed).

  • this is all nice but (Score:5, Interesting)

    by treat ( 84622 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @12:43PM (#11513747)
    All this linux machine as a DVR stuff is great, except that I can't seem to find a video card that will work with my TV. I just want to display 1080i and 720p without any pieces of the image cut off. I have a nVidia card with DVI outputs that I can't find any information on how to configure correctly with my TV. I would buy a new card if I know it will work flawlessly, but no one seems to have information on what cards are good, or how to get the timings to configure X.
    • I suggest you check out mysettopbox.tv (knoppmyth's home page). Their forums have lots of knowledgable people who have done just this. You might also search the mythtv-users group (available in archive or in a nicer threaded format on gossamer-threads.com). There are people there who have helped a bunch of others getting the correct X modelines, etc. Good luck! -C

    • Re:this is all nice but (Score:2, Informative)

      by buck68 ( 40037 )
      My advice, if you want to try DVI to your TV, that's fine. But if you don't get satisfactory results initially, don't waste any more time. After huge amounts of research, I found out that my TV (a 30" Widescreen CRT by Toshiba) is basically impossible to get working (beyond 640x480) with DVI from a computer.
      I think the same is true of many TVs. The path of least resistance lies with VGA to component adaptors like the Audio Authority VGA to Component (Y-Pb-Pr) Transcoder (Model 9A60). The 9A60 is a bi

  • Mac Mini (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zhenga ( 770390 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @01:53PM (#11514235)
    Has anyone tried Freevo on OSX?

  • Freevo is leech-ware (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 29, 2005 @02:53PM (#11514623)

    Freevo's operation relies on scraping content off third-party websites without permission. Not only is this a dubious practice from a legal and ethical point of view, it's a bad long-term strategy. Should Freevo become popular, then the owners of the content that Freevo lifts will either take steps to cut off Freevo access, or will disappear because their business model is being subverted.

    I've been in contact with some of the authors of the Freevo project regarding this issue; their attitude seems to be "we are able to do it, therefore we will." What about should? Is it a good idea to bite the hands that feed you?

    • I am fairly sure you can use the DataDirect service with it as well.

    • I don't know that formatting freely available information into a medium that's useful to a different audience is a horrible practice...

      If nothing else, the entire news industry is based off of reporting other people's news and presenting it in a different format to fit the audience intended. Heck, that's all Slashdot is...
    • As long as they obey robots.txt, why not?

    • Re:Freevo is leech-ware (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dischi ( 150989 ) on Sunday January 30, 2005 @09:34AM (#11519397)
      I'm the main developer of Freevo. I don't know what you are talking about. We only parse the imdb website and unlike many other projects pulling data from imdb, we have the permission to do so. And you were in contact with us? I can't remeber someone saying something like this and I would never say "I don't care" about such things. And BTW, we don't rely on pulling data from websites, it's only a small add on.
  • All this controversy of "MythTV vs Freevo" is kinda silly. I mean, we're all geeks, right? Are we so lost in our preferences to realize that they're designed with different priorities and functionality? For instance, Freevo will appeal to a market that has more of a "I want it simple" market because of it's clean development and ease of install/maintenance. Does this make it better than MythTV? Heck no. MythTV appeals to an audience that wants to do more out-of-box and doesn't care about the simplicit
  • It seems that Freevo and MythTV both have their strengths and weaknesses. They both sound good to me. I'm wondering why nobody has said anything about running both on the same machine, perhaps even at the same time.

    Is that feasible? Can they read eachothers meta-data and media storage?

    • It's definitely possible to have them both installed and playing happily on the same box. I don't think you could have them both running at the same time doing the same thing in all cases, and it really depends on your setup as to how you'd do this.

      As far as meta-data goes, you'd be hard pressed to get them both playing nicely without modifying one or both. Where one uses and SQL backend, and the other flat-files, the different schools of thinking would be a bit of work to get to play nicely. They coul

  • What HW to use (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aagha ( 130742 )
    I've been thinking of putting either a MythTV or Freevo box together for some time. However, before starting out, I want to find some decent HW that won't bankrupt me. A friend of mine reccomended an ASUS Pundit box, but I'm wondering what others have found? Anything cheaper or smaller?

    • Hop on Newegg or and look at their cases. If you look at all their Micro-ATX Desktop cases, many are meant to be home theatre boxes, and are made for flexible uses.

      I'm sure there's entire sites devoted to this sort of hardware, so google may also be your friend (as is always). I haven't looked, but this is, after all, the internet.

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