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

TiVo uses Linux too!

[mdrejhon]

This is great -- more PVR software to help innovate PVR along.

But remember, TiVo uses Linux too! There's a TiVo hacker forum here.

Re:TiVo uses Linux too!

[Moofie]

What does the GPL software have to do with the totally proprietary hardware system they have developed?

Want a better hardware implementation of TiVo? Take the software and port it to your toaster. Quit whining that they're not doing what YOU want them to do. DIY.

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?

[elykyllek]

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.

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 ?

Actually have

[DrWho520]

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.

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.

Mythtv Setup Guide

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The saw us comming ...

[enrico_suave]

lol... you got me there =)

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 /. 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...

e.

Linux PVRs can be a pain!

[truffle]

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.

Re:Windows Media Center Edition?

[Riskable]

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.