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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.
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.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
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.
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.
From one of the links that you probably can't get to by now:
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Open Standards Portal
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
I certaintly can't answer for the rest of the Linux PVR community, but I for one think my Linux PVR works great! I don't watch nearly enough TV to purchase a TiVo, and since my PVR was frankensteined from dead machines I had laying about, it cost me nothing but time. Of course I enjoy configuring and tweaking systems in spare time. :)
The sum and substance is: If you like playing around with this kind of stuff, go for it, and enjoy the fringe benifits of having some level of use. If you don't like spending the time, then buy a TiVo and support an emerging company. It's all about choice, and having a choice is just awesome in my opinion.
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
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!"
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.
One thing the author didn't do was list the price of a base-model TiVo machine. For those with a limited income, forking out $199 for a graphics card may not seem as beneficial as paying $199 for an entire unit. They may even be able to scrimp with the monthly fees.
I have a ReplayTV myself, the base $149 model. I liked the built-in network card and available 3rd party programs that allow me to stream media from my PC to the ReplayTV box, or vice-versa.
I think it's good that this article showed up to list the alternatives. I really don't understand why TiVo is so popular, especially when you compare the features of it to ReplayTV. But I guess that they've got on hell of a marketing team.