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Most PCs would probably have a hell of a time even coming close to pushing 10 terabits/sec

Today, yes. But 10 years ago, I never imagined that I'd have a hard drive larger than a few hundred megs, or this unheard-of speed to connect to the Internet (9600 sounded fast at the time, I think).

The point is, there's no knowing what's coming down the pipe. But as some say, if you want to run a media server in your basement streaming several HDTV shows to various TVs in your house, you need some serious bandwidth.

As it is, I'm planning on setting up a MythTV box when I get the chance (AFTER I get furniture and appliances - I own nothing as of now), so this is all part of the reason why I want to wire everything.

Will I pay $32 for an embedded device or $699 (PC licence) for my MythTV box?

Funny you should say that!

Put Myth TV on a computer with a hardware encoding TV tuner card and you'll have a damn fine PVR.

While there are several projects out there, I have heard rave reviews for MythTV from folks who do digital video and linux for a living.

Mythtv records multiple channels, it archives, it does playback, it runs on compartively modest hardware, it's C++ on linux under GPL: no stinking DRM for these folks!

So, what are you waiting for? build your own TODAY!

p.s. don't be fooled by the lack of activity on sourceforge; the project really lives on mythtv.org, where there is plenty of activity.

But here's the kicker -- these people are competing for TiVo's current and future market share. They know that if they block people from being able to zip through commercials on previously recorded shows, that people will skip this product and go with a TiVo, which doesn't have such a restriction. They are also offering (in my area) this upgraded cable box with PVR for only $7 a month.

But what happens when these "good enough" devices put TiVo out of business? The good money is on them suddenly announcing that you will no longer be able to speed through commercials. You will only be able to store your shows for x number of days before they will be forcibly erased, you will only be able to watch your recordings from x time to y time, and oh yeah, the $7 a month fee just went up to $14 a month, sorry for any inconvenience. Once their is no competition, the restrictions will be unleashed and we won't have an alternative.

I say to hell with these upgraded cable boxes, go with TiVo (or build your own) and don't trust the Cable companies to do the right thing. Most of them are owned by big media companies anyways (It's called "Time Warner Cable" for a reason), so you know that they are just itching to control your viewing habits even more than they already do.

This is like exactly what I built for myself.... down to the letter, including the WiFi! It's runnign MythTV. I should have patented it!

-Ted

Um, really?

• Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC and Vorbis encoding only). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.
• An image viewer/slideshow application.
• A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups.

-Ted

The Myth TV mailing list suggests that the Hauppage PVR-250 is the best choice. Someone on the list said it can be found for $90 OEM.

record one show while watching another

According to the MythTV site, you'll need two TV tuner cards to do that.

MythTV looks like a good start, but the effort required to get it working is significant, and it doesn't do anything BUT timeshift and record. It can't playback your DVD, VCDs, SVCDs, or Divx CDs, it can't save your recorded shows to CD/DVD, it can't playback music or display images, etc... Once MythTV/Freevo gets all these features, then this current software won't be that impressive.

MythTV has most of these features as add-on modules. MythTV's modular design means that there are an ever-growing number of modules that can be used to extend it's already rich feature-set.

if someone makes a tivo for it.. that'd be sweet too.


People have been using xboxen as a front end for MythTV for a while now. You still need another computer to do the capture/encoding, since the xbox can't capture video. It works fine reading off a hard drive on a network and decoding video though.

I've got a very simple setup. Instead of trying to get multiple sound cards in one machine and running audio cables all over the house (or going with wireless speakers which really suck) I decided to have a central file server with all the mp3's on it, and small old notebook computers (pentium 1's) which I got cheap off ebay. Make sure you do some research before you bid, and get ones with good built in sound output, otherwise you'll have to buy some PCMCIA (or USB if they even have USB!) sound cards, etc... I've had problems with a few being too noisy, so pick and chose carefully.

In a couple of rooms, they're hooked up to good external speakers. I can additionally surf the web, read email, and ssh into other machines from them, though it's limited... 640x480 displays and low ram keep the fancy web pages from working well. But they're perfect for mp3 playback.

A word of advice - remove their batteries. They're going to be plugged into the mains all the time, so they'll be constantly charging their old batteries, and thus wear them out. Not that you'd care much either way unless you'd want to occasionally grab one and go outside in the back yard and get some sun (add a WiFi card of course.)

In my living room, I have a somewhat decent, but cheap PC hooked up to my surround sound stero and big screen TV. I've got a wireless keyboard/mouse and game pad for it, and also use it as a DVD player and game system (instead of buying a Playstation2). One of these days I'll replace it with one powerful enough to run MythTV and get rid of the TiVo.

This setup has worked very well for me, and the cheap notebooks are usually cheaper than special set top boxes that playback mp3's that you have to fiddle with crappy one line LCD screens scrolling through hundreds if not thousands of songs, etc.

YMMV, but the above works for me.

Want to run Linux on a device that supports TV-Out with 0 XFree configuration required right of the box, has controllers supported in Linux for games, a solid video card, built in Ethernet, has several distributions optimized for its standardized hardware and looks nice as a media center in a home theater setup? For UNDER $200 on eBay?

Now don't get me wrong, these guys are silly, but Linux on an XBox has plenty of uses. MythTV frontend anyone?

-Neil

That's where I found out about the case. It seems to be popular with MythTC users.

In any case, it certianly *looks* better than the iWill case.

• MythTV, also used to edit commercials out of the recording
• MythMkMovie, used to make DivX files

The SiS chipset is the least of your worries for this purpose. You either need an MPEG-1/2/4 hardware decoder/encoder, or a > 1Ghz processor, either of which will throw your form factor off in various ways. 233MHz is pathetic for MPEG work (yes the TiVo has a proc about that fast, but it also has embedded encode/decode chips).

The guys at MythTV have discussed this at length; there is just no small, quiet, cheap, Linux friendly way to make a TiVo. Sorry.

http://www.mythtv.org/
or this,
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/
or this,
http://pvr.forceconstant.com/

and just for fun and as a FU Bill, why not this?
http://www.target-earth.net/xbox/hardware.html

Please stop supporting these closed source companies that use Linux and don't contribute anything back other than the bare minimum to be compliant with the GPL (if that). Build a PVR with MythTV. If more people start using it and helping with developing it then it'll quickly leave Tivo and ReplayTV in the dust.

Please stop supporting these closed source companies that use Linux and don't contribute anything back other than the bare minimum to be compliant with the GPL (if that). Build a PVR with MythTV. If more people start using it and helping with developing it then it'll quickly leave Tivo and ReplayTV in the dust.

Please stop supporting these closed source companies that use Linux and don't contribute anything back other than the bare minimum to be compliant with the GPL (if that). Build a PVR with MythTV. If more people start using it and helping with developing it then it'll quickly leave Tivo and ReplayTV in the dust.

Why would you want to pay for a monthly subscription to TIVO anyway when there a many FREE services that only require you to make a one time purchase... or no purchase at all...

Windows Based
Snapstream PVR
ShowShifter

Linux Based
Myth TV
Linux PVR Depot"

I have built my own PVR from scratch and the cost was comparable with a TIVO. Those packages offer many of the same features found in TIVO and ReplayTV... Plus, you can integrate them very easily into a home automation system or home network.

- Slew -

In addition to using an IR dongle to fire commands off to your cable box (which has already been mentioned above), you can also use a serial cable to control certain units (more details here).

In addition to using an IR dongle to fire commands off to your cable box (which has already been mentioned above), you can also use a serial cable to control certain units (more details here).

xmltv for open source listings. Read about it here.

Works with the front end of your choice (a few suggestions)

Linux:
MythTV.
Freevo.

Windows:
SageTV.
MyHTPC.

Also, LOTS of good reading at the Home Theater Forums (the Linux forum is embedded under that link).

All of the above systems allow you to use on-screen listings, search for programs by schedule, name, category, etc. They learn favorites and do everything tivo does, best I've been able to tell.

I've been a Tivo user for a year and a half now. Couldn't live without it - until I get my HTPC set up and running the DVR for me on my home network. Just got the green light from my fiancee for that summer project.

And, while I'm at it, I've got a script that'll chop out commercials, and make a divx for you, at this site. I'm going to be doing an update, because not all mythtv nuppelvideo files can be encoded directly by mythtv, but that is now fixable.

MythTV v.0.9 was released yesterday

Works great on the 500mhz system I found in the trash a couple of months ago.

Freevo also works quite nicely.

Ryan Fenton

You want real time encoding, live guide features, ability to pause live tv, automated recordings, a unified enironment for MAME, DivX, DVD, MP3, Slideshows, and web browsing? What about the ability to control and schedule recodings via a web interface? Or the ability to edit recorded programs on the fly to remove commercials etc? What about automated DVD / DivX description info from IMDB as soon as you load it up to play? Oh, plus picture in pucture, and the ability to distribute the encoding load across as many machines as you want..

Look no further than MythTV. It's only been in development for a year and it has all this and more. IMO this is the most under-celebrated open source project there is. Its amazing, makes Windows Media Center look like a hunk of garbage.

I must admit that though I am not an avid PC Gamer the last round of information was in my head when I selected a video card this weekend for my mythtv box. I did end up going with an nvidia and am very glad I did. I was amazed with the driver for linux nividia supplied. It could not have been easier. Plus the ability to set bios options on the TV rather then lug down a 17" monitor is nice but that may be a standard feature of graphics cards with S-Video out.

...(or don't want to pay the subscription) just build a MythTV system.

Personally, I thind PVRs are definitely worth hacking - if you don't prefer rolling your own with somethink like VDR, , or FreeVo.

TVs are still the most important medium to distribute information through (with the net gaining ground fast), and I, for one, would like to decide for myself what to do with the information I recorded from TV; I don't want some companies making these decisions for me.

MythTV directions link to a grabber a guy has written for pulling DirecTV listings.

Then you have to hook up your receiver to the pc via serial to get MythTV to switch the receiver channel for you.

In the face of pressure from the tv industry, Replay may be dropping the 30 second skip feature and Tivo doesn't even have it unless you do the little hack and even then it's a pain in the butt. May I suggest taking a look at MythTV - it's a homemade PVR using linux, but if you take a look you'll see that it's full feature. You can schedule shows, the program listings are all there, it notifies you of scheduling conflicts, etc.. it is truly a Good Thing.

http://www.mythtv.org/

Software solutions such as MythTV and Freevo (both run on Linux) require fairly hefty hardware to do the encoding of TV to MPEG-2, MPEG-4, etc. Then they need to decode it to play it to the screen. Both encoding and decoding is necessary in order to do the time shift.

However, MythTV is leading the charge to offload this processing to the WinTV PVR cards, freeing up the system CPU for other stuff, or just allowing the user to scrape by with minimum requirements. So the feasability is improving quite rapidly right now.

MythTV has also been doing some impressive work on their GUI (check out the screenshots). This was one area I previously thought Freevo had a leg up on, but that advantage is going away.

Links:
MythTV
Freevo

you mean like this?

I used to wonder the same thing, until a friend of mine who is messing around with mythtv pointed it out to me (and he's going to be pissed he didn't get to post this):

There are the screen changes, as you mentioned

Commercials are usually a set length: 30 seconds, 1 minute, per ad

Sometimes you get the network logo when the show comes back on

I think there are other ways...sc00p, post 'em up.

Link, for all you other lazy bastards out there.

IIRC a lot of "next-gen" DVD players will be using these mainboards, and they've started putting things like hardware mpeg decoding/etc. into them. They're ideal for digital jukebox/emulator/dvd player/pvr combo systems.

I don't know that these little boxes are quite powerful enough at this point to be ready for PVR applications. This is especially true if you're talking about encoding (recording a show) and decoding (watching a show) at the same time. Tom's
had a nice little VIA ITX test a little while ago and the Via processors got drilled when trying to display MPEG-* and DivX movies even in medium resolutions. Obviously the hardware decoders and other improvements VIA has made should help out a good bit on the scores. Perhaps it will be possible now to run MythTV and view recorded shows on this box and offload recording duties to another box on the network. It will be really interesting to see what these new little boards can do. I'll pick one up once they're able encode and decode at the same time at high resolutions. I'll probably be waiting a while but that's ok. :)

badda bing

myth tv

One great thing is that some developers have put together some scripts to take the shows that you record with MythTV and encode them into DivX files, so they can be archived off to a CD. I use it all the time, and my 160GB hard drive is almost full. I really have to get time to burn! :-)

People keep saying that we wont have IDE compatible computers 20 years down the track - but if you are backing up all your data onto IDE drives - then just keep a computer thats IDE compatible for 20 years too and you'll ALWAYS have a comptuer to play them with.

The big problem with that theory is that hard drives aren't really meant to be used as a back-up media. Everything I've heard is that they have reliability problems if stored for long periods of time. The advantage of a RAID is that you can easily check your media, and even if one disk fails, you have a real-time backup.

That's not to imply that the server needs to be on all the time, just as needed to access the data.

On the other hand, you could set the thing up as a Freevo or MythTV box, and you can throw away your TiVo at the same time as you throw away your video tapes. Everything would always be online, ready to access as needed, and new stuff could be added anytime.

A PIII/733Mhz system can encode one video stream using the MPEG-4 codec using 480x480 capture resolution. This does not allow for live TV watching, but does allow for encoding video and then watching it later.

The developer states that his AMD1800+ system can almost encode two MPEG4 video streams and watch one program simultaneously.

A PIII/800Mhz system with 512MB RAM can encode one video stream using the RTJPEG codec with 480x480 capture resolution and play it back simultaneously, thereby allowing live TV watching.

A dual Celeron/450Mhz is able to view a 480x480 MPEG4/3300Kbps file created on a different system with 30% CPU usage.

A P4 2.4Ghz machine can encode two 3300Kbps 480x480 MPEG4 files and simultaneously serve content to a remote frontend.
The review mentions the Hush comes shipped with a MPEG-2 decoder, clearly an important paramter in this equation.

A PIII/733Mhz system can encode one video stream using the MPEG-4 codec using 480x480 capture resolution. This does not allow for live TV watching, but does allow for encoding video and then watching it later.

The developer states that his AMD1800+ system can almost encode two MPEG4 video streams and watch one program simultaneously.

A PIII/800Mhz system with 512MB RAM can encode one video stream using the RTJPEG codec with 480x480 capture resolution and play it back simultaneously, thereby allowing live TV watching.

A dual Celeron/450Mhz is able to view a 480x480 MPEG4/3300Kbps file created on a different system with 30% CPU usage.

A P4 2.4Ghz machine can encode two 3300Kbps 480x480 MPEG4 files and simultaneously serve content to a remote frontend.
The review mentions the Hush comes shipped with a MPEG-2 decoder, clearly an important paramter in this equation.

Check out the MythTV site for PVR info on Linux.

Software wise, MythTV is by far the best solution atm, although Freevo is coming along.

They are $200 and you save time, money and effort. Even the geek effect isn't worth it this time.

It took me at most an hour to hack up a script to record using Ruby and mp1e from RTE. Here it is, and here's a sample listing. Real hard. Not. It finds dupes, conflicts, and can easily support multiple cards just by running multiple instances.

Granted, it doesn't track showtime changes, and it's not fancy at all. But it gets the job done, it was easy to write, it's easy to modify, and it's been recording all the TV I watch for the past few months without a hitch. It cost me an hour of my time.

Spend the money and help a company.

Why would I want to do that? TiVo isn't exactly a "nice" company, either. It might be one thing if these came with open specs for modification, pulling the files off and burning them, and modifying the source to do what I want. But they don't. And they won't.

Here's a list of sites that can help if you're married to doing this:

How could you forget MythTV, particularly when Freevo is just a ripoff of MythTV source?

And you can't make backup copies of (rip) DVDs with a TiVo. And you don't get the backend/frontend separation that comes with MythTV. And the geek effect is absolutely worth it! :-)

The MythTV Project is what you want. As often noted on Slashdot, it does nearly everything that TiVo does, and a heapload more. It's open source, and under active development ... however, it's not quite at full functionality. The most recent stable release is version 0.8 and while not without some bugs seems to work quite nicely. I've paired it with a AVerTV Studio TV capture card, a Shuttle FV25 mainboard, and a Celeron 1.4 GHz processor. To my understanding, MythTV supports external tuner devices such as satellite systems. Installation/construction is straightforward but not for the faint of heart. Some RPMs exist for certain required components, but much of installation involves the "./configure; make; su; make install" cycle.

IF -- and this is a strong supposition -- you either have spare hardware laying around that's pretty strong (eg, in the GHz range rather than 100s of MHz) or have a weird bent on building your own systems, then by all means roll up your sleeves and dig in! However, if you are looking for the least expensive or easiest alternative, then buy a used or refurbished TiVo.

I don't have a TIVO or Replay or anything, but I did notice that there were some open source alternatives like Freevo and MythTV. How do these stack up to TIVO? Is it worth waiting for those projects to mature, or do I get a TIVO or Replay now?