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Nope all those wars lost.

IpTV will be the solution. I watch 5 ipTV rss feeds now at home reducing my "leeching" of broadcast content at a friends home significantly. (Please Comedy Central, put the Colbert Report and the Daily Show online with a RSS feed!) Channel Federator absolutely rocks and is addictive as hell, dl.tv is my ZDTV fix, and on and on. If you like linux build a set top box with a HTPC case that looks like a piece of video gear for less than $300.00 and use mythtv, it you are a windows nut buy the same hardware and use XP Pro + MediaPortal Both kick the ever living crap out of the really lame XP media Center 2005 and use less resources so you dont have to buy a monster machine.

you get DVI out that most good plasmas and lcds support, and if you dont DVI->HDMI converters cost almost nothing.

Why wait around for them to figure it out for you? do it your self. Being PC based you can use these "anything" drives and play all formats (in linux after some tweaking to get rid of the "protection", in windows with the player app installed)

I dropped cable and my TV program quality improved.

Depends on your DVR...on my MythTV box, I just hit a button, and it automagically skips ALL commercials instantly...there is no FF'ing..one button and ZAP you're back at your program.

It works about 98% of the time too...I very rarely see any commericials at all...aside from Superbowl Sunday.

I don't see now ABC can disable MythTV on my Linux hardware. Sure you can make me go throw the inefficient analog data stream, but you can't disable it.

It's not a technology. They can't magically reach into your MythTV box and disable fast-forward. Rather, ABC wants the cable companies not to include a fast-forward function with PVRs they distribute.

I dunno, I quite like my linux-based Myth box for watching tv and movies.. ;)

Are there any programs like this?

Yes, there are.

http://www.mythtv.org/

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User_Manual:I ndex

From MythTV Background:

Background

I got tired of the rather low quality cable box that AT&T Broadband provides with their digital cable service. It's slow to change channels, ridden with ads, and the program guide is a joke. So, I figured it'd be fun to try and build a replacement. Yes, I could have just bought a TiVo, but I wanted to have more than just a PVR -- I want a webbrowser built in, a mail client, maybe some games. Basically, I want the mythical convergence box that's been talked about for a few years now.

http://www.mythtv.org/

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User_Manual:I ndex

From MythTV Background:

Background

I got tired of the rather low quality cable box that AT&T Broadband provides with their digital cable service. It's slow to change channels, ridden with ads, and the program guide is a joke. So, I figured it'd be fun to try and build a replacement. Yes, I could have just bought a TiVo, but I wanted to have more than just a PVR -- I want a webbrowser built in, a mail client, maybe some games. Basically, I want the mythical convergence box that's been talked about for a few years now.

Most of us have a MythTV box anyways, or not?
It's the same with all commercially available systems... they're not biting the hand that feeds them. Sooner or later you'll have the fancy commercal skipping/deleting only in nonprofit/opensource software.

MythTV is also participating in the Summer of Code

MythTV is also participating in the Summer of Code

Along similar lines, MythTV is also involved.

I haven't watched commercials for a while. MythTV has auto commercial skip, and "skip ahead 30 seconds" as standard features. Watching live TV is so...low tech.

It's not hard to imagine increasing the processing power there and adding additional functionality like a divx dvd player, and some basic video games (roms anyone?).

Thus, the limitations of the xbox 360 will probably keep game makers from taking too much advantage of special things the PS3 can do that can't be ported.

http://www.mythtv.org/

MythTV-based systems like OpenMedia will blow DRM-crippled products like Intel's Viiv right out of the water.

I mean, who in their right mind would buy a restrictive system like Viiv when free-as-in-speech OpenMedia systems are available? Of course, the challenge is explaining to consumers why Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is against their interests, and spreading the word that MythTV-based systems are superior to DRM-crippled offerings.

Intel is pushing a technology called Treacherous Computing, which will prevent unsigned code from running on their hardware. So even if you have the source code, if you try to remove the DRM restrictions, the hardware will refuse to run the modified binary.

The Free Software Foundation admits that the anti-DRM provisions in the GPLv3 will not be enough on their own to prevent the nightmare scenario where users can't trust their own computers.

People who understand the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management at a technical level (ie.Free and Open Source software developers) should warn the general public to avoid buying DRM-crippled hardware. Consumers should know about the great variety of DRM-free computers and accessories built specifically to work with Linux, the KDE desktop, and other Free and Open Source applications.

On the music side, there are plenty of websites that legally sell DRM-free, RIAA-free music by independent artists. Consumers can use an iTunes-like application called Songbird to easily download songs from these sites.

As for movies, building a Linux media center works better than the DRM-crippled offering from M$FT. Just download MythTV and run it on a computer equipped with the pcHDTV HD-3000 card and the PVR-350 card -- these will capture both standard definition (NTSC) and Digital/Hi-Definition (ATSC/HDTV) signals.

I mean, seriously ..... come on. If there is ever a reliable way to distinguish advertising from editorial content {such a thing actually was nearly mandated in the UK once but was rejected}, then it will end up being used in ways that benefit the consumer more than the advertiser.

There is. MythTV does commercial break detection and can either notify you when one starts and let you skip it with one key press, or even skip them automatically. It looks at things like the number of totally blank frames and the length of time between scene changes, and you can help it by telling it which channels don't have commercials at all. I think it can even look for station logo's (which usually disappear when a commercial break starts).

It works great! I very occasionally get false positives (on videoclips usually, which makes sense), and sometimes I'll have to press the skip key twice in a row, but otherwise I hardly see any commercials at all these days.

Obligatory, MythTV rocks post. I've had my MythTV box for almost a year now, and yes, It changed the way I watch TV. I guess I have TiVo to thank for that, but since I'm a linux user and I like having complete control over the system, I have to choose MythTV over TiVo.

> Hell, the only reason it works with things like MythTV without jumping through hoops is because computers have so much memory for cache in them these days.

Funny that MythTV only requires 256MB of ram..... That's very little for running the OS, backend services, Myth frontend & backend while leaving so much for cache as you say! Take a look at Myth's hardware requirements....

Memory
A MythTV host that is both a backend and a frontend and using software encoding with a single capture card should run adequately in 256MB of RAM. Additional RAM above 256MB will not necessarily increase performance, but may be useful if you are running multiple encoders.

And then rember back when TIVO came out (1999) 256MB of ram was not uncommon. The motherboard I used back in 1997 could take 512MB but as I recall I had 256MB.

You need to find another reason why MythTV works so well...(Unless you believe 1997 is "These Days"). By the way have you ever used MythTV to be such a critic?

Myth.

In general, I think ATI cards are not as well supported in Linux as are the NVidia video card chipsets. However, the ATI video card portion of the AIW is supported by ATI proprietary video driver and apparently the results are respectable. The proprietary ATI driver only supports Radeon 8500 and later chipsets though. The rest are supported by the Xorg "ati" driver.

As for the tuner section of the AIW, the story is not so good. This is the best I think you can hope for:

http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_All-in-Wonder _HowTo_(English)/

Maybe some day the tuner section will be supported by Linux and / or MythTV. Possibly, this is may happen some day but I wouldn't hold your breath.

http://www.rulerofearth.com/

The AMICUS script does support the ATI video cards with both the proprietary driver for the newer ones and an X install for the older ATI video cards. Ironically, the ATI proprietary driver installer is itself an X application so it implicitly assumes you already have X installed and configured *before* you run it. Strange.

Back to the topic, don't throw away old hardware, find a new use for it! Help your neighbors and coworkers salvage old PCs by making them useful in other things. Most PCs built since 1998 can be at least part of a PVR system. Older ones can be routers or media servers.

When I send in old PCs to the local computer recycler they have been stripped of anything useful and are usually just the old cases, ancient motherboards, and truly broken stuff. I keep the salvaged pieces kept in plastic boxes for when I help other people fix their old PCs. The whole collection fits in a medium sized shelving unit.

I am continually amazed at finding whole PCs by the side of the road, on the curb for trash pick up, etc -- often complete with personal data! I like to think it is a public service to gather these old clunkers up, scrub the hard disks of personal data, salvage what I can, and put the rest in an appropriate recycling facility.

Andrew Lynch

http://www.mythtv.org/

See the MythTV site to see a good idea of how screenshots can help someone evaluate a product

oops! I clicked Submit instead of preview. Anyway that's the link to the myth hardware page (http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss 3.1). I would suggest going to at least 512M and to get a faster processor than you really think you need to allow for growth, addition of HDTV, etc. You will also probably want to reformat some of your recordings and that is happier on a faster processor. I use a athlon xp 2800+ and it is OK.

I think most people will want 2 capture devices--watching one thing and recording another is normal, right? That makes the Hauppaugge very attractive.

You will need more disk capacity than you imagine. Set up with LVM and it is easy to expand.

If you prefer Fedora to Knoppix, look here: http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

who else does this? I have been looking for something like this.

MythTV

... and MythTV, which has worked that way since it's inception several years ago.

http://www.mythtv.org/

I use this http://www.hauppauge.com/html/mediamvp_datasheet.h tm at the tv and this http://www.gbpvr.com/ on the computer (windows). You can also use this http://www.mythtv.org/ for linux

" What is KnoppMyth?

* Short Answer: KnoppMyth is Knoppix optimized for MythTV.
* Long Answer: Our vision is a distribution that makes it trivial to setup a set-top box.
We've included everything that believe is needing to reach this goal.
And, in fact, the developers use this distribution on their own PVR's.

What is Knoppix?

* See http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

What is MythTV?

* See http://mythtv.org/
Cool! So does this run completely from the CD?

* No. You can use the CD as a frontend, but KnoppMyth must be installed to the hard drive.
Will it ever run completely from the CD?
* Maybe. "

So you can't test it unless you install it.

I believe the OP was asking about a live cd that had a hard drive install as an option.

Intel is pushing a technology called Treacherous Computing, which will prevent unsigned code from running on their hardware. So even if you have the source code, if you try to remove the DRM restrictions, the hardware will refuse to run the modified binary.

The Free Software Foundation admits that the anti-DRM provisions in the GPLv3 will not be enough on their own to prevent the nightmare scenario where users can't trust their own computers.

People who understand the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management at a technical level (ie.Free and Open Source software developers) should warn the general public to avoid buying DRM-crippled hardware. Consumers should know about the great variety of DRM-free computers and accessories built specifically to work with Linux, the KDE desktop, and other Free and Open Source applications.

On the music side, there are plenty of websites that legally sell DRM-free, RIAA-free music by independent artists. Consumers can use a cross-platform, iTunes-like application called Songbird to easily download songs from these sites.

As for movies, building a Linux media center works just as well as the DRM-crippled offering from M$FT. Just download MythTV and run it on a computer equipped with the pcHDTV HD-3000 card and the PVR-350 card -- these will capture both standard definition (NTSC) and Digital/Hi-Definition (ATSC/HDTV) signals.

notification when you get a new email, or caller ID information shown on your TV

MythTV already does this (and has better PVR features than the telcos/cablecos).

I find that neither has anything on mythtv. open source and the latest version has firewire capture and channel changing from my SA3250HD. Check it out if you haven't yet. http://mythtv.org/

Yes...you need a tuner card. The cool thing is...you can install MULTIPLE tuner cards...be recording as many shows as you want and watch a different channel at the same time if you wish.

But, no...you don't have to watch on a monitor or laptop...you can have your video card output to normal TV. Actually the great thing to do, is get a LCD TV monitor, and run it through that, or what I'm planning on doing when I get a house again, is to hook the myth box up to a DLP projector...and shoot it to a 100" screen...hard to beat that. A 100" tv, with PVR (which by the way is fantastic at automagically skipping commercials), all for less than $2K if done brand new.

And the myth box does more....through it I view the weather...can surf the web, it manages music, and dvd's...it is truely a full blown media box.

Grant it...it is often times a bit difficult to get set up and running...but, once it is...sure makes tv part of life fun.

Sounds like you need to go read a little more about it...go to MythTV

That all sounds a lot like the way NeXTSTEP network booted -- all over bootp and such.

Anyway, the MythTV wiki has an entry on this: Diskless Mac Mini Howto that looks, at least at first glance, to be what the OP was asking for... (though interestingly, it looks like they're not booting OSX over the net, but Linux. Hm.)

There are several free Linux software projects which might or might not what you are looking for. The first thing that comes to mind is something called ZoneMinder which, if I am not mistaken, is a Linux home security sytem which uses remote wireless Internet cameras.

Then there is also the well known Myth TV project which among other things is mainly used by people who bouild their own Personal Video Recorders(PVR). Myth TV supports both HDTV, NTFS and possbly also some other video broadcast standards.

A third possiblility that comes to mind is VLC which is a cross-platform media player and streaming server.

And then there are various other video related programs for Linux such as TvTime the televison application, or MPlayer the movie player. Concievably even something like the Ekiga (formerly known as GnomeNetMeeting) might be relevant. Ekiga supports Full-Screen Videoconferencing. Ekiga supports Video4Linux and Firewire Cameras Support through plugins.

Many Linux video projects seem to be built building block fashion, using other previously written free Linux software, as dependencies. In many cases there are also various other free video projects which are sometimes just user friendly front ends for other free video software. I could not even begin to list all of those free Linux software projects for video and other things.

By the way, Linux has never had virus problems but, even so, there are free anti-virus programs available for Linux. The one that I use is Clam Anti-virus. There are also several good free firewalls avilable for Linux which allow you to control which IP ports are open or closed. There is one other interesting video project which is interesting but, probably not what you are looking for is the free movie studio in a Linux box.

I hope that something that I mentioned might be usesful. You can then decide if Linux is really what you want or not. I personally like it anyway.

Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. MythTV flagged the commercials and spliced them out of my recording. Oh, I'm also lathered in illegitimately acquired free Buffalo Snackers as I type this. Arrest me now!

MythTV can be installed and setup very easily using the KnoppMyth distribution, and then customised after that (all I've done is install libdvdcss). Otherwise there is Jarod's detailed setup guide, and the mythtv-users mailing list is very busy, and people on there are very helpful.

If you're in New Zealand, we have a localt mythtvnz list.

Rob :)

You must mean MythTV.

You're talking about MythTV, and it's quite good. It's difficult to get working in many cases, but most people who like it put up with that because of the flexibility it allows. One backend, multiple frontends, so your TV upstairs can watch shows recorded on the main machine in the living room, for example. It also has great IMDB lookups for existing video files, no DRM (media center edition definitely doesn't have either of those). Best thing I can recommend is to try it. You can always install Media Center edition too, if you think it's bad. Not like it'll take anything but a bit of time, and it's free, so the price is much better than Media Center.

I've had a lot of luck running MythTV on inexpensive hardware I had lying around the house. There's no reason to spend buckets of cash like the one mentioned in the article if all you need is a simple PVR.

It's taken 4 years to get to ver 0.19, so only 16 more years until version 1.0 is released.

That's perfect! It will be ready just when my kids are finishing high school and getting ready to go off to college! Hopefully the developers will keep working on it so "Myth" doesn't live up to its name.

Yep, around about as stupid as installing .tar.gzs from someplace random. Besides, you can always download the source files and build the .debs yourself after satisfying yourself that it is indeed the same source code.

Others have said good things in general (XFS,JFS,ext3).

I looked into filesystem comparisons in setting up a MythTV box.

My issues were:
(1) efficient use of hard drive space, and
(2) performance.

Efficient use = filesystem settings have a big effect on amount of usable space.

For ext2/3:

-m 0 = setting 'reserved space for root' to 0%. Default is 5%, which can be 10-20 GB these days, all unusable to non-root users

-T ____ = can tell ext2/3 to optimize inodes and byte-per-inode for different size average files. Largefile versus news spools (tons of small files). Because of the way that a file can be spread out and mapped across the filesystem, this has an effect on 'wasted' space, and maybe performance (# of inode entries per file to lookup).

-b, -i - can set total # of inodes and bytes-per-inode directly. Advanced control over filesystem creation

I never got around to looking into this detail for XFS/JFS - they seem have fewer such options.

Performance I'll leave it to others to talk about filesystem performance with largefiles in general.

MythTV takes a lot of writing, and as it turns out, deleting, of large temporary files for the TV features (records, pause, FF/RR). After some reading online, I've found MythTV performance is drastically impacted by filesystem choice due to all of the deleting.

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-24.html#ss 24.2

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users /52672 ---SNIP---

> My last reply to myself. Based on a Googled reference, I was able to
> break my XFS 4G file size barrier by formatting the partition 'mkfs.xfs
> -dagsize=4g'. So, here are the complete results:
>
> Time to delete a 10G file, fastest to slowest:
>
> JFS: 0.9s, 0.9s
> XFS: 1.3s
> EXT3: 1.4s, 2.3s
> EXT2: 1.6s
> REISERFS: 6.2s
> EXT3 -T largefile4: 5.9s, 10.2s
>
> After running the XFS test, there didn't seem to be any point in
> reformatting the partition again, so I left it on XFS, but I think I
> would be happy with JFS, XFS, or EXT3 w/o '-T largefile4'.
>>>>
wepprop at sbcglobal
Feb 8, 2004, 2:33 AM
Post #21 of 22 (4121 views)
Re: Changing filesystems? [In reply to]
Robert Kulagowski wrote:

> Interesting. If others care to weigh in, I can either re-write the
> "Advanced Partitioning" section in the HOWTO, or whack it completely.
>
> William, can you give some background on the hardware used for your
> tests? I'd be curious if this data holds up across various drive types,
> LVM, etc. (Without trying to exhaustively test all the possibilities,
> that is)

It appears, based on my personal experience alone, that file deletes are
the only system operations that can stress the hard drive enough to
produce dropped frames. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out,
recordings and deletions go together in Myth. So, unusual as it may be,
it does make at least some sense to take file deletion performance into
account when deciding which filesystem to use for a video partition,
especially for people with multiple tuners.

The really ironic result from my personal perspective is that it would
appear that using the '-T largefile4' setting for ext3, which I was so
pleased with because it give me an extra 2G of storage, may well have
been responsible for all those recordings I had ruined by frame drops.

Assuming it works out, though, I could really get to like this XFS
filesystem because it appears to give me slightly more storage space
than ext3 w/ '-T largefile4' did and it has pretty fast deletes as well.
---SNIP---

It may be pricier than 400 euros to build your own HD mythTv box, but you may be interested in this (Comcast in my area issues Moto DCT 62xx boxes):

Feature of MythTV:
http://www.mythtv.org/
-firewire capture method, for those with cable boxes capable of firewire output (Motorola DCT-6200 + cousins, SA 3250, etc).
-Internal channel-change over firewire support for DCT-6200 series cable boxes.

HOWTO on interfacing to the DCT 6214:
http://replayguide.sourceforge.net/dct6412/

MythTV is going on right now. It's constantly running somewhere...maybe everywhere. I just checked...it's recording something for me now.

As soon as you buy a PC with enough CPU or Video horsepower, you have already spent more than double what an off the shelf unit would cost.

But what does that doubled cost get you? You get a machine that works the way you want, instead of one crippled for end users. If a component goes bad, you can replace it with off the shelf parts. You can manage your massive collection of tv shows with the standard unix tools. Plus, you can play arcade games while not watching tv. Also, do any commercial DVRs come with RAID5?

So there are several ways in which home built DVRs are superior to off the shelf DVRs. Whether they're worth the extra cost is up to you.

Any discussion of home theater PCs needs to start with the open source solution Myth TV It works with open standards - unlike the Media PC from Microsoft that keeps you from doing just about anything with your recorded shows.

Except I'd rather eventually watch King Kong on HD-DVD on a 30" than a 19" monitor. Before you tell me to get an HDTV, I'll point out that most of the lower-end models don't actually do true 1080i, let alone 1080p. Furthermore, I don't have the budget to buy a 1080p HDTV and two 19" LCDs. So the sweet spot in the middle could be the Dell 30".

and it would be nice to have full Tivo-like capabilities from my PC

Can I take this opportunity to point at MythTV. I've been using it for several years and it's still better than the systems the sat and cable operators are providing here in the UK. I was stuck using my parent's NTL Digital system at Christmas and realised just how much functionality I take for granted in Myth which just isn't there in the NTL system. Similarly I hear friends commenting about features they wished Sky+ had and they're always things that Myth has already been doing for ages.

Admittedly there are a few bugs that neet to be mopped up in Myth but on the whole it's a good project. I think the only thing I'd really like to be able to do that I can't already do is use a satellite tuner in my myth box instead of re-encoding the S-Video output from my Sky box. (Yes, Myth does support DVB-S cards, but getting a DVB-S card with a common interface is very pricey still and since Sky won't produce a VideoGuard CAM I'd be stuck using an illegal programmable CAM such as the DragonCAM - total cost, £100 for the card, £50 for the common interface and £80 for the CAM == way too pricey)