Slashdot Mirror
Linux PVRs Highlighted
foolinator writes "Yahoo News is featuring an article highlighting TiVO alternatives. This includes MythTV (my favorite), Freevo, and even sites on how to start as a newbie. All of us who subscribe to the mailing lists be prepared to help out the newbies as Linux PVRs become more mainstream."
This is great -- more PVR software to help innovate PVR along.
But remember, TiVo uses Linux too! There's a TiVo hacker forum here.
Recall that all of these efforts are standard definition television. Despite the nay-sayers, high definition television is indeed a reality, and has Linux support thanks to the HD-2000 card, which I'm happy to report has no support for Windows.
What a breath of fresh air. Now, back to watching hard-disk recordings of Alias featuring the supremely-cute Jennifer Gartner, who, in high-def, has many supremely-cute freckles.
will "homebrew" PVR users have to program it manually like a VCR?
For those who haven't looked more closely, MythTV uses a web listing service (I believe Zap2it) to get its listings. It really wouldn't be very useful if it had to be manually programmed, would it?
My roommate and I actually built one of these. Its a great project that provided much anit-Wintel fun. It also provided a great reason to add wirless to the condo.
Gentoo Linux and an Athlon XP 2400 mate up very nicely. Only thing missing is that WinTV-PVR-350, deffinately the most expensive piece of hardware but well worth the $165+ price tag. We started with FreeVo, but decided on MythTV. It was much more mature a year ago.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
The latest version of MythTV uses Zap2It's datadirect service which does not scrape webpages. They have also said in their forums that it will remain free, your only obligation is to fill out a survey every three months to continue the subscription.
Ahhh yes young grasshopper....
But zap2it.com is catching on and just added XML data downloads to their labs. They call it datadirect or some such nonsense. No more parsing hundreds of webpages for the listings. You just get a nice XML download. Mythtv already supports it great.
Check it out yourself at http://labs.zap2it.com.
MythTV has a code to use for signup in their setup documents and with that and a short survey you are in business.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
I doubt that I could build a computer to do what TiVo does for less than twice what a TiVo costs (just the hardware), add monthly fees - and I'm thinking that it would take two or three years to break even.
This stuff is really cool - and I like the fact that a single system can stream video across my home, but I wouldn't realistically use this.
Finally, with David Letterman (Late night talk-show host, for those whom don't know) plugging TiVo continuously on his show... I doubt that TiVo is going away anytime soon.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I have tried both freevo and mythtv and found that neither are exactly to my liking. Right now I use mencoder and cron to record any tv shows that I might want to watch later, and tvtime to watch tv live. I know its not a total solution, but thats not what I'm looking for: I don't have the luxury of having an extra pc to be a dedicated pvr(or for that matter a tv), thus I find mencoder does exactly what I want it to do. Are there any others out there that use alternatives to freevo and mythtv to record / watch tv? More specifically, what formats do people record to? I record to divx, does anyone record to mpeg2 and not use either freevo or myth? For anyone that is interested, here is the script I use to record with mencoder.
If you want to learn how to set up mythtv, this is about as complete a guide as I have ever seen:
www.wilsonet.com/mythtv
Mad props to Jarod Wilson
I originally had a fedora core box, but I recently switched it over to gentoo.
"it occurs to me that trying to use one of these alternatives will work great until the automated TV listing parser stops working due to a moved web page or some other problem.
/. crowd take it easy on my site please it's had a rough day =)
"
Fair point... except most of the major homebrew PVR software applications no longer use screenscraping. IIRC the latest XMLTV uses a direct connection to get the guide data (from zaptoit i *think*)... the guide data is starting to find ways to partner with the diff software out there...
Also although it's not free (either as in beer or speech) software like SageTV (which i'm in love with for it's pvr 350 support) and snapstream's beyondTV include the listing service, if i'm not mistaken...
*shrug*
e.
--> hey
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
once you buy all of the equipment and get everything installed, it's way more than Tivo would be. still, I don't do Tivo cause I don't want to pay for the service, so a Linux box running as a PVR will be what I do, eventually.
any news on this front? are the Linux PVR apps more mature featurewise than the monthy pay options?
I *want* to build one, but time (and money) are my current obstacles.
CBV
free ipod and free gmail!
lol... you got me there =)
/. or if they did it would be to the original news story and somehow that would slow down the effect. *shrug* man was I wrong...
I meant to spend the day readying a nice new dedicated server for byopvr. I spent the day hot potato getting the site migrated off the VPS (after the first crushing courtesy of reuters/yahoo news)... then pvrblog graciously linked to the site and that influx of new visitors crushed the new server, before I could even get to optimize it... now this... now this... =)
The site you see now is slightly pared down to help it limp through the crisis. I didn't really think anyone would post it to
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
No that's not true. Any tv capture card can support digital cable, as long as its outputs are compatible with the tuner's inputs. The only issue I've seen in relation to a cable box is that you need to have a way to control the IR signal (usually via an IR Imitter) with one remote control. Every digital cable box that I've ever come across has had at least a coax out, if not RCA outs, which should be able to plug directly into most tuner cards. Beyond that, there should be no compatibility issues.
My old coworker and friend uses this card and loves it, he just wishes he had better reception to get the HD channels in his area.
I don't do much PVR'ing. But I am using a Hauppage PVR-250.
/dev/video1 The output is mpeg2 streams, bitrates and the tuner I control by ptune-iu.pl perl gui script.
/dev/video1 > show.mpeg
/dev/video1
/dev/video1 --freqtable ntsc-cable-hrc $2 /usr/local/bin/test_ioctl -d /dev/video1 -c bitrate=$4,bitrate_peak=$4
/dev/video1
/dev/video1 >> ~/media/recorded/$1 &
It's a tuner that encodes it output into MPEG stream. Note that I am using experimental IVTV drivers, so the quality/stability is not garrenteed. But it works for me. The device file that gets used is
All in all it's pretty primtive. I am to lazy to setup a real PVR program. Basicly to make a recording you can go like this:
cat
To play directly from the card:
mplayer -vo xv -vf pp=lb -framedrop
I wrote a script called "recorder"
(script)
#!/bin/bash
# Usage: recorder name channel length quality
# length is in minutes
echo "16000000 is great 8000000 is good 4000000 is normal for quality."
echo "name channel length quality"
~/bin/ptune.pl --input
echo "recorded $1 on channel $2 for $3 minutes at $4 quality at `date`" >> ~/media/recorded/recorded.log
if lsof |grep
then
killall mplayer
fi
cat
POO=$!
sleep $3m
kill $POO
(end script)
So I use it to scedual recordings of shows I want to watch. I use tv.yahoo.com for the listings.
So to record a show I use the at command. It goes like this:
at 11:25
recorder randumbshow 32 40 8000000
^d
And that sets the job to run at 11:25 for 40 minutes on channel 32 at medium-high quality.
That will take like 4gigs of space. To scedual recordings to go everyday at the same time I use "crontab -e" command. Syntax goes like this:
55 0 * * * $HOME/bin/recorder futurama 51 40 6000000
That sets it to record everynight at 00:55 (military time) for 40 minutes on channel 51 at medium quality. Simple stuff.
But it's well worth it. I've got one running at home, and it is an amazing device with all free software. You'll want to drop $120 to $150 on a Hauppauge WinTV PVR card with remote and your HD will eventually top 100 gigs if it hasn't already. You're looking at about a gig per half hour that you record. What's cool about my box is that in addition to acting as a PVR, it's also an ssh and samba server and its constantly grabbing 3 or 4 bittorrents. Also it can pause and rewind live tv. I must admit though that I have spent on the order of 30 hours setting it up and just fooling around with it in general. You'll want to be familiar with Linux before you even attempt to set up one of these. If you're looking for an easier way, you may want to try KnoppMyth. It's bootable live CD that installs myth TV. It may require a little tweaking at the end, but it could save you a heck of a lot of time. Of course then you'll realize that there's nothing good on TV anyway but your geeky pride will be stroked.
All cable companies in the US are now required to provide HDTV customers with a firewire-equipped cable box, on request. You can use this to make an HDTV PVR system from a Mac.
Some points which pundits may not mention (I'm a MythTV user):
- Dedicated PVR systems are always cheaper than building your own from parts
- PVR systems based on old hardware will be slow. It doesn't matter if you throw a hardware encoder/decoder in your Duron 850, it will be slow. You want all the CPU and disk speed you can get. Trust me.
- Be prepared to spend 40+ hours over the next three months setting up, configuring, debugging your system. Less if you don't care about customizing and tweaking. More if you're less experienced, and want to compile from source, or don't have popular hardware.
- If you use your Linux box for other things, be aware the system resources mythtv demands may make it slow and chunky.
- Setting up a MythTV box requires installing lots of stuff. The mythtv software works with LIRC (remote control drivers), iVTV (tuner drivers), and a bunch of stuff I don't remember. This isn't an install one thing and you're done project.
I enjoy tweaking systems, but I wasn't aware of the amount of time I'd have to put into MythTV. This in no way detracts from the project - it's a great project. Just know you're getting into something that's fairly technical, and requires troubleshooting.
For the record, PVR 350 + Athlon 1800 + 512 megs/ram on my mythtv box. Debian.
---
I support spreading santorum
Amen.
I figured that Memorial Day weekend was a good weekend to try and get this working.. I had found a handy-dandy step-by-step guide on how to install MythTV on Fedora Core here.. I figured, how hard can it be?
I was wrong, by far... I never could get LIRC to run under Fedora Core 1, let alone the two instances I need (One for my remote, and the other to control my homemade IR Transmitter to control my digital cable box).
So, I tried another alternative, that being KnoppMyth, a Knoppix disc customized for MythTV. By far, I've gotten much better results with this. I was able to get the second LIRC instance going too. I don't get the pretty gewgaws out of the box (KDE or Gnome, etc), but it does have the virtue of working.
For those considering building their own, and aren't Linux gurus, I would suggest going with the "standard" hardware in use (Nvidia video cards for TV Out+Hauppauge PVR250, or a Hauppauge PVR350).. You'll find much more help that way.
MythTV has post processing ad skiping that works fairly well. Doing it on the fly requires a lot of confideence in your mehcanisim, or you risk skiping parts of the program.
nix is very simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity. (Dennis Ritchie) ~
ehintz
There's currently two ways to use MythTV with digital cable... The first (and most obvious) way is to use an IRBlaster. It's a device that hooks up to your MythTV box that changes the channel on your cable box when you change the channel on MythTV. It slows things down a bit, so it isn't ideal.
The other way is to get a cable box with a serial port (that works with MythTV). The only one I know off the top of my head is the Motorola DC2000 series. If you ask your cable company for a firewire-equipped box, they're most likely going to give you a DC2000. Also, if you get an HDTV cable box, you're most likely going to get a DC2000.
If you have the serial port setup, digital cable changes channels fast and works like a charm. A superior solution to the IRBlaster.
Side note: In this setup you don't even need a TV tuner card. Just some sort of video input to your PC. However, if you do want to get a TV tuner card, make sure you buy a WinTV PVR-250 or a PVR-350. They have built-in MPEG2 encoders which look absolutely beautiful and take quite a load off your CPU.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
How about today.
http://www.pchdtv.com/
Get a free ipod.
Look a little harder.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
All I can answer is in regards to MythTV:
1) If you use a Tuner card with an MPEG encoder, it records in MPEG2. If you use a Tuner without an MPEG2 encoder, MythTV uses your CPU to record in either RTJPEG or MPEG4 (user configurable). MythTV can transcode these formats to pretty much whatever you want after the recording is done.
2) MythTV can automatically flag commercials during recording. When it later transcodes the recording, it auto-skips these flagged areas. Works quite well, but can occasionally mess up (mostly it doesn't miss parts of your show, but might record an extraneous commercial or two). It has some newer experimental commercial skip features which I haven't tried yet. It's all user-configurable.
3) MythTV doesn't require a tuner. You could hook your cable box up to a video input of some sort on your PC and use it with an IRBlaster or serial cable (assuming your cable box can be controlled by a serial port).
4) If you buy a WinTV PVR card, it comes with a remote and IR interface... These work flawlessly with MythTV. However, I should note that MythTV works with LIRC... So if you get any old IR reciever working with LIRC, it'll work with MythTV. Essentially this means you can use MythTV with just about any remote you can get your hands on.
5) MythTV supports TV, Videos (auto-metadata lookups which is sweet, checkout the screenshots page), games (MAME, SNES, NES, Linux games, very cool), weather (My favorite module), RSS Newsfeeds, DVDs (which includes a nice ripper), and some others I can't think of off the top of my head right now. There's also a MythPhone module in development that works like Netmeeting/Gnomemeeting (http://www.zen13655.zen.co.uk/mythphone.html).
6) It's Linux, however, there's hooks and things in the code so that it might run on Windows some day. We'll see.
MythTV RIGHT NOW is an amazing piece of software, but because it's open-source, it's rapidly developing into something much, much more. Right now it's the PVR leader and I suspect it's going to remain that way for quite some time... A very promising future.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
If you're interested in MythTv and want a distro I would try Knoppmyth http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html
The bulk of TiVo's new subscribers last quarter came through its partnership with DirecTV, which offers TiVo service built into some of its television set-top boxes so that users can pause live TV, easily set up recordings and skip past commercials...
AP Online
For those using Windows, you may want to check out http://www.gbpvr.com which is a free windows PVR much like MythTV.
It supports multiple tuners. Hardware decoders like the PVR350, Hauppauge MediaMVP and SigmaDesigns XCard. Its a work in progress, but seems to be making great progress.
I'm a mythtv user in NZ. Have been using for the last 4 months as a PVR, no problems (after six months of getting everything working correctly)
I have a working tv_grab_nz which scrapes off the TV1,TV2 + Sky Web sites. Works about 95% of the time at the moment.
I planning a rewrite of it to make it a lot more reliable, and fix up some of the quirks that trip up mythtv a little.
Once working to my liking, I plan on submiting up to the tv_grab people, so us NZ's are left behind in the stone age.
Of 4.99 per month regardless of how many DirecTivo units I have?
Money must be tighter for you than than it is for me. I'll gladly keep paying the five bucks a month.
My Tech Posts on Twitter
I wish more companies would follow Zap2It's lead here in the U.S. and provide listings as direct downloads. You can go into labs.zap2it.com and prepare your North American listings and when you go to connect you just download the channels you setup. It's 100 times better than screen scraping the old web site and all you have to do is fill out a 2 or 3 question survey every 3 months to maintain your free membership. All my problems with MythTV in the past were not really mythtv, but xmltv breaking. All zap2it had to do was change a single character in their website display and xmltv would break requiring a new release which usually meant a new release of MythTV was needed. It was fscking ridiculous. As a North American user I'm glad I won't have to worry about that anymore.
The main argument I hear is that people are afraid that Tivo will go bankrupt. My belief is if they bought a Tivo then Tivo would be less likely to go bankrupt. But this kind of logic is often hard to explain to your average "I deserve to have everything handed to me for free" idiot on Slashdot.
TiVo doesn't, either. Next troll, please...
(FWIW, I use both.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
First, proprietary format. You're right on. I have to install Media Center 9 to even watch something and then the quality is less than stellar in light of its compression ratio. I have noticed the differences between their codec and some others too, but that's not a criticism as much as an observation.
Fast forward is fine. The 30 second skip feature's invaluable but auto commercial skipping I think is a legal landmine and it's a bad perception thing. I have no problem hitting that button 4 times in a row fast.
I have a tuner card so I don't know about other options. There was some kungfu going on with getting drivers working but once it worked I didn't touch it.
Remote works great. It's got a much wider angle than even the tivo remotes. You could get one for myth too though
This is really incidental. I guess those are almost order qualifiers at this point. They're so easy there's no excuse to not, but I don't use them.
Yeah, and here's some more complaints that you wouldn't probably ever envision without the joy of testing one.
There's a database corruption issue about once every 4 days. I'd imagine it follows a poisson distribution, but the corruption will randomly occur. When that happens it will record scheduled shows, but it won't add any new ones or accept changes to any existing ones. Also it can't / won't update guide data or do anything other than record and watch what's there.
The sound will sometimes be overcome with static. I suppose this could be a video card issue but a restart always fixes the problem. It also seems to retroactively affect shows although I haven't really figured this one out yet.
Guide data is notoriously unreliable. This may be a function of the ever occuring database corruption which prevents any new data from being added, but either way it's annoying.
The machine it's running on is a beast compared to the processor that powers a tivo. That and I imagine the drive in it will last another year if I'm lucky.
Menu ergonomics are awful. Once you're used to it it's not bad, but the 'back' button is relative and it's nearly impossible to switch between 3 different menus without having to return to the root menu to get back to it. The animations are pretty, but that's the best part. They get on your nerves too when they pause for 10 seconds and load the data you're trying to get at. There are a bunch of other menu issues that I've managed to adapt to, but it's not intuitive.
The menus, when they're not crashing/pausing, are faster than tivo series one, but about on par with the series twos.
I like it because it gives me a dvr that's working and free (for the moment), however windows is certainly not the 'innovator' in this field. A 2.4+ machine that you have to restart at least every week is hardly competition to a tivo that runs solid for over 2 years.
Quack, quack.
Just wanted to plug my software:
6) There are not only hooks to windows, but WinMyth exists. That is, there is a windows myth front end written nativly for windows.
you can also compile mythtv via cygwin in windows, but in my opinion that's not quite as clean.
I've always found it odd at how the hacker community treats TiVo. There is little information or recent work on how to extract the video out of a TiVo box (except for extractstream), and don't even think about bringing it up on TiVo fan forums. In fact, those forums won't allow talk about removing the ads TiVo downloads into itself. I'm surprised at this. I'd think the "it's my hardware, how dare they download ads into it" mentality would win out.
The ads that TiVo downloads help support TiVo and keep them up and running.
They're one of a very small number of companies who are extremely customer focused, and who try to do right by the people who buy their stuff all the time. This needs to be respected and rewarded.
That, and they unofficially support hacking of their system to add capacity and features.
The reason the boards don't allow certain topics is so as not to sour that relationship.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Myth's method of doing this seems fairly reliable once you fiddle with it a bit. By default, it looks for blank frames, but I told mine to look for blank frames coinciding with scene changes, which is much more reliable.
As also mentioned, you canm tell Myth to automatically skip the commercials once you've finished recording.
It's very cute, and works very well 90% of the time. Ad splash comes up, skip, program restarts.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
There are also IRC channels (#mythtv and #mythtv-users on Freenode) and very active and helpful mailing lists to ask for help if you get stuck (at some point or another, you will!).
Be an elitist - read Slashdot at +4.
Sorry, should have been clearer in my original post. It has the ability to scrape any channel which has it's listing on http://www.skytv.co.nz/index.cfm?pageid=449 So can pick up practically anything shown on Sky Digital. Of course TVNZ doesn't allow it's listings to be shown on Sky's web page, so it goes to the TVNZ website for those.
Side note: Appears there is some issue with the TV3/C4 listings on Sky at the moment, as the website isn't showing anything one the guide 8-(. I might have to look at scaping either Tv3's website or TelstraClear's to get reliable listings for those 2.
Hell, it's good to see the sources posting on directly on ./.
I'm running MythTV 0.15 with the new Zap2It code - *much* better than the old tv_grab_na way of doing things. I really wouldn't have too much of a problem if Zap2It decided to charge a *reasonable* monthly fee, on the order of $5.00 or so per month. It still beats having a unit that phones home with all your viewing habits - I find it ludicrous that TiVo expects people to pay a monthly fee for listings while the company gets free viewing data back which is substantially more valuable.
I also find it incredibly handy to run a Myth front-end on other machines so as to be able to watch TV/recordings where I don't have cable drops or another TV.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
>>
OK - What I want to know is if anyone out there has been successful in getting MythTV (or FreeVo) working successfully under Slackware.
I've tried (and I am certainly no Linux newbie) and could not get all the dependancies to work/compile/install. I spent the better part of 3 days working on it when I gave up.
>>
well a great user on byopvr site put together a guide for just that.
Homebrew's guide to installing mythtv on slackware (w/pvr350 support)
also see this forum post on the subject
Good luck...
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
There's a difference between being able to tell that a box in the 12345 zipcode rewound to watch an ad again, and that Joe User's box rewound to watch an ad again. However, as so many things in life are, it's all about who you trust.
Tivo has three data collection modes: Opt in, Opt Neutral, Opt Out.
You can Opt-out by calling up Tivo and asking to Opt-out. They send a command down to the box that sets a flag not to send the data anymore. You can verify this flag has been set on your box by turning on backdoors and looking at the system information screen. Or you can believe me or other people who have opted out and seen this happen for themselves. Your call, who do you trust?
Opt-Neutral is the default data sending mode, and it sends data that has been scrubbed of any identifying information other than the zipcode. Actually, it hasn't been "scrubbed", it's simply that that data doesn't get put into the log file in the first place in this mode. This has been verified by Tivo hackers, including myself. Again, who do you trust?
Opt-In sends the tivo serial number in the data file itself, along with adding a whole host of extra info. You can do this by joining http://www.hotline2hollywood.com . This means that all the stuff you watch will be trackable to your box. Not to you personally, mind you. Despite the rumor, there's no camera built into the box behind that "eye" looking thing on the front.
I'm opted-in. Why? Because I don't give a damn if they know what I watch. Hell, I don't care who knows it. It's not critical to me. Maybe they'll realize that I thumbs down all the reality shows and tend to skip crappy commercials. With any luck, this info will filter its way up to the suits and they'll improve the crap currently on TV. Forlorn hope? Probably. Still, it's nice to think that maybe I can make some kind of difference in the shit that's on TV now.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Also, they now provide a multiunit discount, after the first TiVo additional units are half price for monthly subscriptions.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
They've been really open about this since the beginning, i.e. 4 years or more. They collect data on viewing habits, and provide aggregate stats on those viewing habits, but they don't tie them to individual viewers. If you don't even want them to do that, then you can ask them not to, and they won't. Simple, no?