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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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I support spreading santorum
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!"
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
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.
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.
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
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.