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."

Comments

Does this really apply?

[Allen Zadr]

Tivo is a service. The service is tied to a hardware platform, but it's still a service.

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.

I would be willing to update a system every couple of months if necessary, but my Mother sure wouldn't...
more importantly, Dave Letterman wouldn't.

Re:Does this really apply?

[Snad]

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.

Indeed. I was very interested in MythTV, but given that there are currently no active, reliable ways to obtain the program listings for New Zealand television (such as it is...) the whole thing became rather moot.

One of the great advantages I saw was being able to present my gf with a list of TV program names on screen that she wanted to record (or had recorded and therefore could play back), rather than dick around with the video tapes and the (let's face it) pathetic UI that exists on most video recorders.

Without that program listing things like MythTV lose some of their gloss.

The obvious solution being that I should create my own mechanism for scraping NZ TV websites for program listings but I spend far too much time on /. to have time to create, and more importantly maintain, such a method. My gf, and my mother, and their work colleagues would be even less inclined to do so.

Of course, being in such a small country we're SOL with regard to any kind of TiVo-like service anyway.

Re:Does this really apply?

[nathanh]

Indeed. I was very interested in MythTV, but given that there are currently no active, reliable ways to obtain the program listings for New Zealand television (such as it is...) the whole thing became rather moot.

Yeah, good point. The live-tv stuff I must admit isn't very useful to me. What I use MythTV for is saying "I want all episodes of BLAH and you figure it out". Then I come back a few weeks later and watch them all back to back.

Without a functional tv_grab script I simply wouldn't bother. Thankfully the tv_grab_au script does seem to work pretty well. I see tv_grab_nz in the xmltv install. Does it not work for you?

Re:Does this really apply?

[Ath]

To me, if TiVo's the best, and still cheaper (at least for the first couple of years of use), why use homebrew except for bragging rights?

Here's one reason: I live in Europe but have a remote MythTV box setup in the USA. I remotely control it and download whatever I record. I cannot do that with a TiVo.

A second reason is that some PVRs have additional functions built in. MythTV has add-ons for DVDs, music, weather, web browsing, videogame emulation, photos, etc.

TiVo is great. I love it. But for some, it may not do everything they want. For that, there is MythTV! Of course, it's not for the technically phobic people...

Re:Does this really apply?

[Lumpy]

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.

I highly doubt it. and is one of the major reasons I gave up and abandoned my MythTV box for a replayTV box. It took me 3 days to find a working "subscription code" for the zap2it.com page and finally found one not with mythtv's forums but in the XMLTV user mailing list. the whole thing leaves a really bad taste in my mouth coupled with the fact that it becomes a maintaince fight getting everything working well. Besides XMLTV's US data scraper has also changed to that data source...

My three requirements for a PVR, that drove me to mythtv was Ability to extract the mpeg's, upload my mpegs, and no subscription fees.

I can see enough into the future to know that zap2it will certianly start charging fees by the end of this year. It's not worth the fight. I had spend at least 1 weekend a month updating xmltv every time the guide data breaks as well as other "updates" to the myth platform.

I'm switching to a replayTV and the assorted software that make it really stinking easy to do what I want sans the free guide data..

so yes, $13.00 a month is worth me not having to screw with it, and $100.00 for the replayTV new cant be even touched by any of the linux PVR's.

I look at my $13.00 monthy bill as a "dont have to screw with it" payment.

Dont get me wrong, MythTV is the best linux PVR out there... 3 times faster than freevo (I tried for months to get freevo to work smoothly and fast.) and really easy to get going if you follow the docs...

but the guide data is going to be the death of them all, zap2it is not going to keep giving out free data forever.

Just you wait...

[lukewarmfusion]

From the front page of www.byopvr.com: "I'm very sorry that our modest hosting buckled under the strain."

As a result of the CNN/Yahoo article(s), no less. Just wait until they see what Slashdot can do!

BTW, this is the exact site for me. I've been talking about doing this for a while, and every time I see an article on Slashdot I get a little closer to actually building one. I'm really excited now.

Advert skipping

[Anonymous Coward]

do any of the the nix PVR's have advert skipping ?
as in advert skipping where it doesnt record the adverts (as apposed to fast forwarding)

i know its difficult but usually there are cues in the TV signal itself (bars etc) (like the film companies used to use markers to tell the projectionist when to change reels)

be a nice challenge, or even for the future using bayes filters to train what is an advert and what isnt

thoughts ?

Article is not broad enough

[tjasond]

This is just not broad enough for people to actually see the differences between the various htpc alternatives. Many of us htpc fans started over a year ago here or here or here . This review, frankly, is inadequate. There are far more issues than meets the eye when making your own htpc, whether myth or xp mce. I'm not advocating either one, I'd just like to remark, after building my own htpc from scratch, that this article tells little to nothing about the pain and suffering of completing this complex task on your own.

Re:Don't forget pcHDTV

[palutke]

. . . and has Linux support thanks to the HD-2000 [pchdtv.com] card, which I'm happy to report has no support for Windows.

Why would you be happy to report that? It just hurts their chances of staying in business.

PVR with digital cable

[Openstandards.net]

I thought Myth TV looked awesome. However, I discovered that it can't support digital cable. But, it's not the project's fault, or even a Linux issue. I read that there are currently no PC video capture cards on the consumer market that can support digital TV.

Is this true? Can we ever expect a card to come out? Are cable and other companies using proprietary protocals? Encryption? Does this fall under the DMCA?

I just can't see using a PVR that doesn't support digital cable, as most of the channels I watch or would want to record are only available on digital. This includes most of the movie channels.

Windows Media Center Edition?

[altek]

Yes, this article is about Linux PVR's, but how do people feel that the popular ones mentioned (Freevo, MythTV) compare to Windows Media Center Edition's PVR functions?

Don't treat this as a troll (I still expect usual M$ backlash from /.), but I'm really curious. A few things I know already about Media Center:

1) records in proprietary format (dvr-ms?)
2) no skipping of commercials (except of course fast-forward)
3) doesn't require a TV-tuner, can use any vid card with video capture (S-Video, RCA, coax, etc)
4) generally comes with a remote for all PVR functions and a IR transmitter to actually change your cable box channel
5) supports other media-ish functions like music, pictures, etc
6) It's Windows for chrissake

Please add/subtract/multiply/divide from this list. Just trying to get an idea of how MS's (cruddy) product stacks up to the free competition.

Re:Linux PVRs can be a pain!

[Spoke]

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.

You must be doing something wrong if you can't get a Duron 850 running well, especially when using a hardware encoder. I'm even tempted to replace it with a Via Eden system so that it uses less power and runs quieter (no more CPU fan!)

I've got MythTV running great on a Duron 800, 512MB of memory and a 80GB 7200RPM drive with 2MB of cache and 2 PVR250s. Not exactly state of the hard hardware, but it works very well.

Now, if you were using software encoders, you would then need a lot of CPU power if you wanted to record multiple shows at the same time, especially if you want to record directly to MPEG4 format.

IMO the following is most important when building a MythTV system (not sure how much applies to other Open Source PVRs):

A decent amount of memory. 256MB is bare minimum for a combination frontend/backend system. 512MB is good.

Lots of hard-drive space. I thought that 80GB would be plenty, but every now and then I get a number of shows queued up and fill up the drive. 160GB would be better. The drive doesn't need to be fast, even the slowest drives are fast enough to stream multiple live video streams off of them. 5400 RPM drives suffice if they are big enough. More important is to put the right filesystem where you are storing your recordings. EXT3 is a lot slower than JFS or XFS when it comes to deleting large files, it takes 3-5 seconds on my system to delete multi-gigabyte files. JFS or XFS can delete large files almost instantly.

Re:PVR Distro

[Baseclass]

I've been using Knoppmyth for several months and am extremely happy with the results.

Although I've dabbled in Linux off and on for several years, I'm hardly proficient. MythTV has renewed my love of Linux in a big way. The Knoppmyth distro proved to be a perfect catalyst. The install is simple and straight forward (do your research on supported hardware first!) Check out the forums at My Settop Box. It's based off Debian (all hail apt-get!). The developers did an outstanding job of setting up the bare essentials and they keep pace with stable MythTV builds. This has everything the commercial PVRs have and much much more. My dad has been a devout ReplayTV user for sometime and was blown away by the freedom MythTV provides. Since it's Linux you are free to do anything your heart desires. My 7 year old has become very proficient at pulling up his favorite Futurama episodes (yes I've taught him well), music, pictures...you name it. He's actually a better navigator than the mrs. :)

Please note however, it's still under heavy development and shouldn't be attempted if you aren't a geek who enjoys hacking config files or aspiring to learn Linux.

The only major problem I've experienced is that everyone who sees mine wants me to build them one.

The TiVo double standard

[Call Me Black Cloud]

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.

Apple releases a new DRM scheme for iTunes and people are all over it trying to break it. And Apple is pretty liberal with what you can do with purchased music.

I just don't get what's so special about TiVo that there isn't more work being done to open the system.