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Television Media Software Linux

MythTV Links Up with Program Guide Provider 277

Posted by timothy from the what-you're-going-to-watch dept.
Neil Campbell writes "As a long-time MythTV user, I found this announcement to be quite a surprise. A company by the name of TechnoVera has partnered with the founders of MythTV on an interesting project: A pay service for electronic program guide information rivaling that of Microsoft's Media Center. No more Zap2It surveys to continue using their free albeit basic service. The most important part of this is the fact that revenues from the service will be used to fund Open Source development; most notably MythTV. Registered Users will even have the opportunity to vote on feature enhancements that they would like to be incorporated into MythTV. I'm sure there will be some initial trepidation from the Linux community, but overall I think this should be considered progress. More attention and money for MythTV will result in a better product."
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MythTV Links Up with Program Guide Provider More

MythTV Links Up with Program Guide Provider

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  • US only I am afraid (Score:5, Informative)

    by kentmartin ( 244833 ) * on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @03:34AM (#12564167) Homepage
    The company providing this stuff is LxM Suite [lxmsuite.com] but, unfortunately, according to their FAQ [lxmsuite.com] this is a US only offering.

    Damn, I would be willing to pay for a decent service in the UK. Oh well, time will tell...

    • What is wrong with the UK Radio Times grabber (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not trolling, but I'm just wondering what is wrong with the existing UK RT grabber?

      I'm using this quite happily (it was a pain to set up I must admit, but now its working, I have no gripes).

      Personally, even if a UK pay service became available, I'd stick with the free RT service, as it's fine for what I need.
      • I use the RT grabber too and agree it's great value for money, being free and all. However it does have its flaws. It often doesn't contain episode names and numbers (making it hard for favourites to record just one copy of each episode), it doesn't use the "first showing" flag properly, etc. Basically it's fine for a barebones service but a pay-for service could contain much cleaner & better data.

        I'd pay for a reasonably-priced UK service, just for the semi-guarantee that it's there to stay if nothing

    • Radio Times (Score:5, Informative)

      by orv ( 398342 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:09AM (#12564287) Homepage
      Why do you need a commercial service in the UK? The Radio Times provides an excellent free listings service for mythtv.
      • I'm curious...does this change mean you HAVE to use the pay service to get Myth to work, or will you still have the option for the free (with periodic survey's) guide service?

        I don't want to pay a monthly fee....I hated that with Tivo...did the lifetime thing on that. One of the main things that was appealing about Myth...was the 'free' guide service...

        I didn't see anything in the article or on the MythTV website saying if you'd have a choice where you got your guide information.

    • I knocked up some crappy Java client a while back. What differentiates it from Freeguide is that it sources all of its UK listings from one place (provided, for free, by a member of this very site, no less :)). If you're interested, e-mail me at my username minus the underscore at hotmail.com.

      It's very rough around the edges (as I got tied up with work, and couldn't continue to work on it :( ), but it works decently enough, although the provided listings are occasionally wrong. Here's a screenie [etotheipiplusone.com].

    • Damn, I would be willing to pay for a decent service in the UK. Oh well, time will tell...

      Did you really read the FAQ?

      Is LxMSuite available outside the USA?

      TV listing information is currently limited to the USA. If there is enough demand for listing information outside of North America, we can make DataDirect::TV data available to European users.

      If you brush it off and don't contact them how would they know there is Demand?
      • Did you really read the FAQ?

        Of course not. This is slashdot. You can assume I haven't even read the article. You'd be pushing your luck if you think I even read the summary. In fact, you shouldn't even assume I have completely read and understood the title, which of course is "MythTV links up with p0rn provider" isn't it?

  • Definitely a good idea. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eric(b0mb)Dennis ( 629047 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @03:36AM (#12564174)
    All MythTV really needed was a well-funded and backed listing system. Zap2it was a good mid-point, but not on par with Tivo's or Microsoft's offerings.

    Old (but very decent) PC hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper... (save for older ram.. but ddr is getting old too) So, for the enthusiast, MythTV just became a lot better..

    If the price is right, this could definitely work out.

    • Nice but Myth needed improvement in other places (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Amgine007 ( 88004 ) * on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @03:44AM (#12564213)
      All MythTV really needed was a well-funded and backed listing system. Zap2it was a good mid-point, but not on par with Tivo's or Microsoft's offerings.

      Gotta disagree. Myth is nice but is still FAR lacking in many ways - UI and ease of development in particular (speaking from some experience).

      The UI alone is a mess; examples: menus for eg setup descend and descend with zero context; similar settings stored all over the palce (see commercial flagging and transcoding); recordings organized by show but then loop endlessly; general ugliness (skins can only do so much).

      Fix it yourself? See my second gripe.

      I like Myth, but it has many warts, and missing program guide data is not one of them. ymmv.
      • Gotta disagree. Myth is nice but is still FAR lacking in many ways - UI and ease of development in particular (speaking from some experience).

        I find Myth pretty feature-rich, and it certainly seems to screw up and forget to record stuff less frequently than the Sky+ boxes some of my friends have.

        You might be right about the UI to some extant - it's mostly ok for the techie but probably not so suitable for the general public (but then are the general public going to build their own Myth box or just buy one of the commercial PVRs?).

        I think the main problem with the UI from my point of view is the recording priorities stuff - I don't like having to juggle integer priorities for all my programs and would prefer to just see a list of shows ordered by priority and be able to move a show up and down the list.

        There is also some inconsistency with key bindings too - most of the UI looks in the key bindings database to find out which key is "select", whcih is "play", etc. However, some parts of the UI make assumptions instead - i.e. expecting Enter to be "select". But that's reasonably minor and probably doesn't affect most people.

        I've not really done any UI development for Myth (just added a few controls to some of the setup screens...), although I did write some of the back end code (A/V synchronisation routines, etc) and can't say it was that hard to implement, despite not really being a C++ coder - I usually just use C so there was a slight learning curve there.

        I like Myth, but it has many warts, and missing program guide data is not one of them.

        I use the RadioTimes listings and I have to say that everything has got a *lot* better since RT started providing machine readable listings - the site scraper used to take hours and every so often they'd change something that broke it. There is still the occasional problem that programmes which are rerun several times during the 2 week period you get listings for sometimes don't have matching descriptions or subtitles so you get 2 recordings but for the most part it's not bad. Of course I'd like radio listings too (used to get them from the scraper but they don't provide machine readable radio listings).
        • Oh yes, I know I shouldn't reply to myself but a point I missed:

          There are no CAMs available for decoding Sky channels, so you have to use a normal Sky box to decode to analogue and then reencode to MPEG4 instead of just using a DVB-S card to suck the MPEG2 data straight off the satellite dish. This sucks but I don't think Ofcom (or whoever) is likely to force Sky to sell a CAM, which gives Sky+ a bit of an advantage. :(
        • There is also some inconsistency with key bindings too - most of the UI looks in the key bindings database to find out which key is "select", whcih is "play", etc. However, some parts of the UI make assumptions instead - i.e. expecting Enter to be "select". But that's reasonably minor and probably doesn't affect most people.

          This is my biggest gripe with MythTV, and I disagree that it's reasonably minor: UI inconsistency is really bad. Having up-arrow mean something on one page and a different thing on a
          • The thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that there's no excuse for this, except for the choices made by the project leader.

            I don't think this is down to a choice my Isaac but simply down to the ad-hoc nature with which FOSS projects such as Myth are developed. Different bits come from different people and so consistency can be limited. What they actually need is a "UI guru" or a organised team of UI people to sanitise the UI and new elements as they are implemented, however that involves
            • I must make a very important point here that many people (users) just don't get: with FOSS software, everyone developing it is freely putting their time into the project and getting nothing in return except the features they are implementing. This means that in general, developers working on a FOSS project will only implement features that they themselves want. So basically, if you want something doing then you may well have to do it yourself, you certainly shouldn't expect someone else to give up their tim
          • "The thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that there's no excuse for this,"

            You have the source code so change it! Really this is what drives me nuts is some ne will write about how a FOSS program does this little thing or that little thing wrong but will do nothing to change it.

            • I look at it this way: If the original developer had DONE IT RIGHT in the first place, nobody would have to go through and re-write it now. If there's a configuration file that tells which keys are mapped to which functions (going by previous posts on this thread), then why isn't it used consistantly by EVERY screen?

              It's great that OSS lets people fix things like this, but it should also let people slap bad programmers in the face. "You put in this menu and didn't use the right key binding, slap! No co

              • Re:No excuse at all. (Score:3, Insightful)

                by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
                "It's great that OSS lets people fix things like this, but it should also let people slap bad programmers in the face. "You put in this menu and didn't use the right key binding, slap! No cookie.""
                Hey you get what you pay for. He wrote it for himself so he must like it.
                If you do not like it.
                1. Help him make it better.
                2. Don't use it.
                3. PAY him to make the change.
                That is what gets me. You never gave him a cookie you are a free loader. If you do not like you have no right to do anything.
                I had a problem with
      • I am no MythTV programmer, but have played with the XML based menu system... Reorganize everything to macht your needs. It realy is that simple! My wife loves MythTV and she is not the type who knows what PVR stands for.

        Cheers
      • The UI is indeed a mess, and configuring the fonts to look properly on a tv is a nightmare (you have to get your X DPI *just* right, then change settings in the frontend for Qt, and after all *that* you have to manually adjust 6 or 7 files for your particular theme, since themes specify absolute font sizes).

        That said, the reason the latest Myth release was so close to the last one is so Isaac could 'get it out the door'. The plan, so far as I understand it, is to revamp the entire UI for the next release.
      • "Gotta disagree. Myth is nice but is still FAR lacking in many ways - UI and ease of development in particular (speaking from some experience)."

        And getting it ALL working at once is a bitch!!

        I've been struggling for about 5 months now, to get my PVR250, Audigy card...to work with Myth, and produce SOUND with video.

        I can play .flac files off the harddrive through myth..sound card is just great. But, when I record video through the PVR card...get good picture...but, no sound at all....and even with the

      • I think MythTV badly needs an Edje [enlightenment.org] UI. That would be a match made in heaven.

        (For those unfamiliar with Edje, it is the UI library used in E17 and EFL-based applications like Entrance.)
        • I think MythTV badly needs an Edje UI. That would be a match made in heaven.

          You bring up an interesting point. Here and elsewhere, I haven't really seen anyone defend Myth's UI. Based on replies it looks like improving some of the UI is a priority for the next release. But as we can see, users (and developers willing to spend time) have different preferences.

          The real interesting thing is that a while back Myth split the 'front end' and 'back end' into distinct components. I believe the driving motivatio
    • Announcement on MythTV WebSite:

      Support for the LxM Suite services. Basically, this is a subscription-based data-services/extras setup, with some of the money coming back towards the project in the form of development bounties. More info on the site, but, seems fairly neat to me. The initial theme that they're working on looks rather nice, too. (It's nowhere near as dark running on a TV as it appears on a monitor). I'm personally not involved with this terribly much, but one of the other major developers

      • I see this as a branch/fork.
        Then you didn't read hard enough. The LxM Suite support is not a fork. It is an accepted patch in the main CVS head. This release is a point release of the release trunk + patches from cvs, not a fork from it.

        Based on the announcement, I'm not certain why everyone's waving flags and saying that Zap2It labs is going away.
        Me either. It's not.

        if one of the major developers says that they're not involved in it much and: "If it's busted, blame him (Jarod Wilson), not me. =)", I

  • Sounds good to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Adrilla ( 830520 ) * on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @03:37AM (#12564183) Homepage
    I personally see no downside to this, it's only 5 dollars a month, which is cheaper than the TiVo monthly fee, and that money will go right back into making the product even better, plus the 5 bucks returns a more professional scheduling service for the end user. So I see it as a win-win situation.

  • Doomed to fail. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @03:43AM (#12564208)
    1. It costs money.
    2. It is a subscription.
    3. Only MythTV users will use this.

    As far as I know, there are no retail systems based on MthyTV that would provide this service in some kind of nice package like Tivo or something. So there is no market presence (yet). So they have to rely on GNU/Linux nerds for income. This is a big problem. GNU/Linux nerds are notoriously cheap. And they hate subscriptions. Failure is immenent, I'm afraid.

    • Re:Doomed to fail. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Scyber ( 539694 )
      One advantage this has over TiVo's model is that they have no hardware costs (nor related hardware R&D costs) for the product. Which means they probably need a much, much lower subscriber base to cover their costs. Although, I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing them putting together some pre-fabricated MythTV boxes for the masses.

      • Re:Doomed to fail. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Belial6 ( 794905 )
        The cost may be even less when compared to Tivo than many realize. If I am not mistaken Tivo and ReplayTV both charge their fee per unit. If this is $5 a month, can work with multiple machines in a household, instead of $60 a month for 4 tuners, it would be $5.
    • There was at least 1 Purduced and it ran into problems with of all things guide data. Data Direct does have a policy about commerical use that means that if I take and build a myth box and sell it to you and provide support for you then you can't use there free data. If I wanted to start selling myth boxes with 1 Year support I would be talking to the copy about rebranding there service as part of my hardware sales and maybe put 1 Year of data servers into the program. After 1 Year I no longer server the

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @03:54AM (#12564248)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • No problem with service but $5 a month is too high (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:05AM (#12564279)
    Thats $60 per year. This seems a high number
    considering Yahoo music service is at $5 / month.
    I think $12 per year would be more reasonable,
    also considering free alternatives exists (although
    they might not work as well).

    • although they might not work as well

      Exactly the reson why $5 a month sounds very reasonable.

    • So, what would you have said 2 weeks ago, before the Yahoo music service came out (and so the nearest thing was 3 times more - and don't forget that's an intro price)? Considering that Tivo is $15 or so a month, that's a pretty good deal. And if you don't like it, use Zap2It and fill out the survey instead.

  • Media Center Program Guide (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AaronBrethorst ( 860210 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:14AM (#12564306) Homepage
    You know, I don't pay anything for my Media Center program guide. It's just there, and just works. And clearly this could be taken as astroturfing (just look at my sig), but it's not. I use Media Center because it's cool and it works, not because my employer told me to (or anything equally silly). That said, I think it's really cool that MythTV will be getting a more fully featured program guide.
    • I had always wondered how Media Center pays for their program guide data. I assume that Microsoft is paying for it and then writing it off against the cost of the software. If it costs them (say) £2 a user a month then so long as people upgrade once every two years then they'll still be well in profit.

      • I had always wondered how Media Center pays for their program guide data.

        Are you kidding? I bought my PVR setup including free programming guides for about the same cost as MS Windows Media Center Edition. They should be able to pay for the programming a dozen times over just with the huge margins they are collecting on media center.

    • Actually I came to the same conclusion you did.

      I ran mythTV for about 8 months and there were things that I really liked about it (powerful integrated ripping tools, no DRM to be found, completely extensible) and things I really hated about it (inconsistant UI, occasional crashes, having to tweak the hell out of vid drivers to get decent PQ).

      In the end I got fed up after being called into the living room to "fix the TV" one too many times by my gf after X crashed out on my myth box.

      I'm now on MCE 2005 an
    • I use Media Center because it's cool and it works

      Which is pretty much why I use MythTV. Oh and the fact that I can do what I want with my media, and I can watch HDTV using a Celeron 2.5ghz instead of a P4 3ghz with HT, and I don't have to pay $1200 for a Myth machine the list goes on and on...

      That said, I think it's really cool that MythTV will be getting a more fully featured program guide.

      Yeah I'd say you're astroturfing. Myth has had the exact same data data as MCE for free for quite some time no

  • I intend to setup a MythTV sometime in the next few months, and have been doing some research.

    Does anyone know if, in adding support for this program service, they have *removed* support for the free zap2it service? Because I dont *want* to give anyone my credit card to automatically bill me monthly, Id be much happier with whatever hoops zap2it wants for the no-money-involved option, and I would only be interested in a basic data source, I dont need whatever extras the paid service has.

  • You should be aware... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:23AM (#12564328)
    That programming guide information is sent over both cable and terrestrial broadcast systems.

    If you pay for what is already being sent into your house for free, what does that say about you?

    "I can't code?"

    Look at http://www.atsc.org/ [atsc.org] for free specs.

    • That programming guide information is sent over both cable and terrestrial broadcast systems.

      If you pay for what is already being sent into your house for free, what does that say about you?

      That guide information you speak of doesn't even come close to providing enough info to reliable schedule recordings let alone provide all of the other usefull information for bells and whistles like new eiposde only recording, or looking up shows to watch by genre etc.

      Oh and even if the crappy data was enough for y

    • Re:You should be aware... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @12:18PM (#12567541)
      That programming guide information is sent over both cable and terrestrial broadcast systems.

      If you pay for what is already being sent into your house for free, what does that say about you?

      "I can't code?"

      How about "I have a life"?

  • Excellent news (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shrewtamer ( 521554 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:35AM (#12564358)
    It's great for mythtv to have this potential revenue source. I hope it works out. It is a shame the service isn't available more widely around the world, but there are many methods to fill your myth database. Hopefully though this new system will do well and extend to other parts of the world. It needn't be expensive to run or to subscribe to, yet the volume of subscribers has potential to pay for a lot of development effort.

    I've just got my first mythtv system working 2 days ago and I'm happy as larry. The advert detection is working very well. Being able to pause a live show is great. The program guide and recording scheduling functionalitys make choosing what you want to watch easy. I find its best to record stuff you want to watch because the advert detection is so good. It is possible to do advert detection during recording. There are performance constraints of course. Another nice function is slowing down or speeding up playback without altering the pitch of the audio. When you watch Attack of the Clones you can speed up through some of the crappy stilted dialogue and slow down in some of the excellent action scenes!

    It's a bit of a bitch to setup the whole system and it does take quite a lot of hardware resource but the results are so good that I really think this thing is going to attract a wider and wider audience. It's not just the TV....various plugins provide gaming, music, weather information, news, dvd playing, movie playing, photo viewing and importing. Altogether it makes an excellent entertainment centre in any living room.

    I have an Athlon-XP 2.4 with 640Mb RAM, a generic SAA7134 (LifeView 3000) tuner which does no hardware mpeg encoding. Its got an Nvidia GeForce FX5500 graphics card with a Tv-out connected to my ...TV! I'm using an old style terrestrial broadcast system and I have to deal with some signal noise - so I have a deinterlacer and a denoiser in my playback filter chain - this adds to the processor load. It's too much for the system to be able to simmultaneously record a showing and playback (current or previously recorded) showing without dropping frames on the playback. I think I might need a tuner card with hardware encoding. First I'll look at throwing in more RAM or faster hard drive setup if appropriate. You can have multiple backends and multiple frontends. Also more than one tuner card in the same backend. I'd really like to keep it all in the box under the tellie though, with the laptop as an occasional frontend.

    • Re:Excellent news (Score:5, Informative)

      by spagetti_code ( 773137 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @07:36AM (#12565173)
      Get a tuner card first - especially something like PVR-350 [hauppauge.com] that can encode TV to MPEG and simultaneously decode MPEGS to S-video/composite for playback.

      My 1.2GHz machine uses 10-15% CPU encoding/recording one channel and, at the same time, playing something previously recorded at 1366x768 (with ads removed of course :-)

      Also, unless you have done some significant work around dealing with heat, you have a pretty noisy machine in your living room. Ick.

      If anyone starts this type of project, get a low spec and very quiet machine, such as one based on an EPIA MII10000 (1.0GHz) [viavpsd.com] or fanless Eden600 [via.com.tw]. Add a PVR-350 [hauppauge.com] and a *quiet*/fast/big disk [theregister.co.uk] (I have 550GB), and you are away.

      Oh, and use KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv] for a quick and painless install.
      • I found a PVR-500 on ebay for $20 less than the PVR-350. It has dual tuners so you can watch one while you record the other. It detects as 2 separate PVR-250s. I really like it.

    • Re:Excellent news (Score:2, Informative)

      by Glitch010101 ( 202423 )
      A few rebuttals:
      MythTV is packaged just like many of our favorite complex programs. KDE is a bitch to set up, but it's pretty easy to do "apt-get install kde"

      Similarly, atrpms and others package MythTV for easy installation.

      Installing MythTV is a 5 step process from bare hardware.

      0.) put together an old box (I'm using an Athlon 1.4ghz in my recording box and and a Via M10000 in my playback-only box) and a cheap tuner card. The Hauppauge WinTV-D series for around $40 on ebay works great. The WinTV PVR's
      • I honestly don't know how the default drivers are for NVidia cards,

        You can get a linux driver from nvidias web site. The biggest drawbacks are that you have to compile it into the kernel and that you can't set the front-porch or back-porch settings unless it is a GeForce4 or higher. (front/back porch lets you squeeze to fit your tv. Absolutely necessary on my 16:9). The kernel thing is only an issue to me because I'm hooked into DVI on the TV and don't get any video until X loads. You'll find lots of

  • OT, but I can't resist (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:42AM (#12564375)
    What's a good, cheap card for Myth TV. Neweggs got tons of cards under $80 bucks, so many it's hard to decide. I'm looking to replace my aging STB bt848 base card (it's got these weird wavey blue bars in the picture that're driving me nuts, doesn't show up in capture though, go fig).

    • Re:OT, but I can't resist (Score:4, Informative)

      by jeffkinney ( 443264 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @07:55AM (#12565222)
      The PVR-250 or PVR-350 are good choices if you want to use KnobbMyth or follow the Fedora Myth How To.

      The PVR-150 is a good single tuner card, or even better, the PVR-500. The 500 is detected as two 150s (so you can record two programs simultaneously), takes up only one slot, and splits the coax input internally.

      However, the 150 and 500 cards are supported only under the IVTV development branch (0.3.4). Although very stable, the driver is changing daily and requires more effort when compared to Fedora MythTV or KnobbMyth.
    • I run a Hauppauge PVR-350 in my box. It runs in a PIII 500 with 386mb ram and the processor is hardly ever even touched. Hardware encoding and decoding are done on the card itself. It's somewhat expensive (about $180 depending on where you get it), but if you have old hardware it's worth it to not have to build something with more power (although that is fun too).

      I'll also be adding a PVR-250 (hardware encoding only) to my backend system as a second tuner eventually.

  • UK programme guide (Score:3, Informative)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <<giles.jones> <at> <zen.co.uk>> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:43AM (#12564378)
    As long as this doesn't affect the XMLTV module I use for the UK. This grabs XML data from the Radio Times website (they provided the raw XML files as a goodwill gesture), it gives me about 2 weeks of data and enhances my TV viewing no end as I need not miss anything.
    • The Radio Times data isnt XML, its tilde delimited fixed fields which means you dont require an XML parser (which is great because Im using the raw data for something else - project to be released shortly if you are intrigued).
    • Another possibility if you're using freeview is to use the 'over the air' guide - it's just over a weeks worth of data, constantly updated.

      If you've got dvb-eit support (and dvb, obviously, since you need a digital tuner card to watch freeview) in your mythtv build, then it's a simple as ticking the OTA guide option on each channel setup in mythsetup. Can take a few minutes to populate the listings when you first switch, but after that you can just forget about it.

      Much simpler than messing about with xmlt

  • Just signed up... (Score:5, Informative)

    by BoldAndBusted ( 679561 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:44AM (#12564379) Homepage
    ...and I don't like how I have to painstakingly re-enter my lineup (uncheck, uncheck, uncheck, uncheck), when it would be sooo much easier if I could just import my existing Zap2it lineup. But, I want to vote on new features - we'll see how this pans out. Only $30 for the six month pilot, not too much of a pain in the wallet for what we might get. Oh, and I'd really love to see the lineups tailored to individual subscription packages - THAT would makes keeping up with your sat/cable provider's constant lineup changes a bit less of a chore. We'll see if paying for it really gets you any more say...

    Been using Myth since 0.15 in August, '04. With a PVR-350 in a Shuttle SN41G2 V2 box and 2x200GB LVM'd drives. Having a PVR really helped me to get the most out of my Dish subscription - hard to believe how cool it is to be able to record all those research and university networks in a managed way - you can take entire courses this way. And watching "Mosaic: News from the Middle East" has been an education.

  • There is a HUGE opportunity here... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cap'n Crax ( 313292 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @05:07AM (#12564446) Homepage
    For someone to start a company building and selling MythTV boxes. Put a large hard drive in it, DVD burner, etc... Ideally it would be region free, HDTV capable, PVR features, able to play DVD/CD/MP3/VCD/SVCD/JPG/etc... You could rip DVDs and CDs, store your music library, use as a WebTV, and so on. It would replace your CD player, your VCR, your DVD player, your Stereo (with a radio card). It would be the one-for-all media box.

    If someone started selling these pre-made and ready to go, I'll be the first to buy. Of course, I could probably build one, but I KNOW the market is there to buy them if somebody steps up to the plate.

  • Mac mini (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MagerValp ( 246718 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @05:39AM (#12564533) Homepage
    Great, now all we need is a full port to MacOS X. The Mac mini is small, silent, and good looking - it's almost a perfect HTPC platform, only lacking on the software side. I'm currently using it with MPlayer, iTunes, an ATI remote, but a real media frontend would make it much more grandma friendly.

    Is anyone else here using a mini as a HTPC? What does your setup look like?

    • Re:Mac mini (Score:4, Interesting)

      by xmodem_and_rommon ( 884879 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @06:25AM (#12564636)
      When I move out, I will buy me a mac mini for use as a HTPC.

      Have a look at CenterStage [centerstageproject.com]

      CenterStage is on open source project to build a powerful and intuitive media center application for the Apple Macintosh, this project was inspired by the launch of the Mac mini, an ideal Mac to use as part of a home theatre system.

    • Re:Mac mini (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ath ( 643782 )
      The MythTV frontend has been available for Mac OS X since the 0.17 release, which is from February 11, 2005.

      Of course, you said full port so I assume you also mean the backend. That would require two things. First, a video input (which the Mac mini may have, I just do not know). Second, the encoding would have to be handled via software as I do not think there is any encoding hardware in the mini.

      From a form factor standpoint, it is perfect.

    • Re:Mac mini (Score:2, Informative)

      by EnglishDude ( 580283 )
      I do, although using OSX and the frontend port only - the Mac Mini, IMO wouldn't be up to the task of being both the frontend/backend due to not having an encoder, video in etc - you can use an external tuner true, but still. I have an backend on an mini-ITX motherboard somewhere in the house, and the Mac Mini connects to that.

  • What is different? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by killeena ( 794394 )
    Besides not filling out surveys and having local movie times, there doesn't seem to be much difference between this and Zap2it. I can live with filling out an occasional survey and going to my computer to look up movie times. Maybe when the service offers more, I will think about it.

  • yeah right (Score:2, Interesting)

    by winse ( 39597 )
    like ppl (average reader here) are going to pay for a decent service when they can get a crap free one. Not to troll, but most people here use free stuff ( as in beer ) over comercial stuff even if the free stuff happens to be substantially sucky. I just don't see it. I do love my MythTv though.

  • Wow all the cost of Tivo and a pain in the ass too (Score:4, Funny)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @09:43AM (#12565898)
    Finally, a product that offers me both the monthly fee of Tivo and the general pain in the ass of setting up MythTV. How could it fail?

    -Eric

  • Is the day I retire my mythtv setup and buy a Tivo. The biggest selling point for MythTV for me was taking a stand against getting nickel-and-dimed to death by Tivo.

    Why should I be nickel-and-dimed by some startup who will be dead in a year or two and then I'll have to get a Tivo anyway? Personally, I have no problem filling out a short survey once a quarter.

  • But... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mapmaker ( 140036 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @10:19AM (#12566273)
    If I wanted to pay a monthly fee for PVR service, I wouldn't have built a MythTV box - I would have bought a Tivo.
  • The article states: the guys at MythTV seem to have responded well, posting a rare interim release (MythTV 0.18.1) to avail all its users of the new functionality. This isn't quite true, the 0.18.1 branch was an undertaking by the myth developers to have a stable branch of myth with fixes backported to it from CVS, it wasn't created just to enable LxMSuite, although LxMSuite was incorperated into it.
  • "Is LxMSuite available outside the USA?

    TV listing information is currently limited to the USA. If there is enough demand for listing information outside of North America, we can make DataDirect::TV data available to European users."

    Come on guys! The USA is not North America. As a Canadian MythTv user I would definitely consider the service if offered here. Just don't tell me I'm actually in the US.

  • Canadian Listing's (Score:4, Informative)

    by chilimonkey ( 730128 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @11:48AM (#12567202)
    In their FAQ they state :

    Is LxMSuite available outside the USA?

    TV listing information is currently limited to the USA. If there is enough demand for listing information outside of North America, we can make DataDirect::TV data available to European users.

    Since I live in Canada, which is in North America, I was wondering if the listing would be available here. So I emailed their support and here's their response :

    There was a last minute contract snafu that led to support for Canada being dropped at launch. Canadian listings should be available via LxMSuite very soon.

    Thanks,

    LxMSuite Support

    Just an FYI for us Canadian's :)

  • Endangering the freeness of Zap2It? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @11:50AM (#12567224)
    Having a company start charging $5 per month for the same service Zap2It provides only serves to encourage Zap2It to begin charging real-life cash for their service as well. And in the end, that means fewer choices, not more.

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