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PVR's Head-to-Head: MythTV vs. Microsoft MCE
asciimonster writes "AnandTech has completed its second review of set-top box Personal Video Recorders. After checking out the Linux-based MythTV, previously covered here on slashdot, they compared it to Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004.
'Our analysis has proved that though Media Center Edition 2004 is a boxed package that is easy to set up and configure, it looks amazingly beautiful, has great features such as On-Demand content, and is fully supported by Microsoft. However, for the enthusiast, MythTV takes the gold for its greater support for a variety of hardware and software codecs.'"
If you're channel-surfing the traditional way (up, up, up, up, up, up, up), then yeah, the IR transmitter sucks. There's a good 2 or 3 second delay before the new channel comes up.
However, if you use Tivo the way it's supposed to be used, via the on-screen program guide, or even better -- time shifting -- it's not as much of an issue.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
By using Zap2It
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
If you can get output from your cable/sat device into your Mythbox capture card, then yes it's compatible.
There are instructions on how to get your Mythbox to change channels on your cable/sat box in numerous tutorials all over the web.
KnoppMyth is a good way of getting Myth up and running quickly, although most seasoned Myth users seem to prefer to use a full fledge distro in order to give easier configuration of all those peripheral devices. Gentoo, Debian unstable and FC1/2 are very popular choices.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
...programming guide is implemented similarly in both instances. ...
the feature that puts MCE on top in this screen is the live display on the bottom left.
they must not have used mythtv much, if you enter the programming guide while watching tv, you get a miniature tv display in the corner as well.
No, seriously.
I speak as someone who put together a Myth box. Used a Via Nehamiah chipset, 120GB HDD, CD ROM, Hauppauge 350 PVR card, all in a box the size of one of my programming texts. And running Gentoo (found some really nice Gentoo specific kernel patches and ebuilds).
Total cost was over $700. Biggest problem I had was that the Hauppage 350 drivers were literally months old. Yes, my Myth box kicks much arse. The web interface is slick, there's plug ins to do MP3 and video (and soon DVD IIRC), but for the amount of $$$ and time invested, a TiVo would have been so much easier.
Bear in mind the following:
1) I got the (dual 633mhz PIII) PC with TV-out for free. It isn't *quite* fast enough sometimes. Most (95%) of the time it's fine.
2) I got the TV Tuner cards with hardware MPEG encoders for $50 each... 1/3 the normal price.
3) I traded a laptop hard drive for an ultra quiet Seagate Barracuda V 120GB
4) The other $50 was for an I/R keyboard.
My machine is definitely is not quiet, but it can be done (for more money).
Case wise, a lot of people are happy with the ASUS pundit. A lot just use something painted gloss black.
A few people have reported 802.11g to have enough bandwidth to handle video playback. 802.11b will definitely not cut the mustard. I got rid of my wireless gear after getting MythTV and wired my house up. It is (much) cheaper than getting wireless gear, and now I can copy the 2GB video files off at a decent speed. Wireless (802.11g) was SO slow. And the microwave next door or a cordless phone would kill it.
But yes, MythTV is pretty mature these days... In fact, my hardware let me down before the software did. (old 10GB os drive died).
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
I fully understand that for other people, other solutions are more appropriate, but I really prefer a dedicated ReplayTV unit right now, especially for the consistency and reliability, not to mention the cool remote, though I may roll my own when I eventually move to HD (there are no Replay HD or Replay+DVD offerings announced, and Tivo's HD is too encumbered out of the box for my needs).
.mpgs or weird versions of mplayer, unlike Tivos, again.
Not to beat a not-dead-yet horse, but ReplayTV recently dumped a lot of their 5040 units for $50 each, or $30 with a special coupon code (the latter seems to have been a mistake that they cancelled quickly). These are previous-generation models that can transfer shows to other Replay units of the same 50xx model line, something Tivo has not been able to do natively, before, and which is unfortunately dropped in the 55xx line. The 50xx line also has the controversial commercial advance feature, which was dropped on the 55xx line for legal reasons(it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, but is nice when it works). With lifetime activation at $299 (or monthly fees that now vary depending on number of units), that means RTV is still a platform worth comparing against. Especially when you consider third-party tools like DVArchive (java-based!) that exploit the XML interface of the units to copy programs off for safekeeping and later streaming, without any hacking of the box or transcoding of the native
Oh, one more thing: people outside the US have managed to set up their legitimately-subscribed ReplayTVs with another tool called WIRNS (which you can find in AVSForum, to scrape local show listings. I mention this because, even if ReplayTV as a company dies, owners will still have alternatives to keep their schedules from going dark. And a lot of owners are also joining Poopli, a website with the objective of making transfers between Replays easier.
(No, I don't work for anybody making or selling these, nor do I own any of these websites. I'm just an owner of a 50xx that I've bumped up to 200GB with a simple patch-and-swap, very much like a Tivo owner would do. Before I bought my box, I had almost given up on tv entirely. Now, I'm looking forward to my next hard drive upgrade. And I really regret not buying another unit on sale).
Get off my launchpad!
Most responses to this post so far mentioned XMLTV, which is an icky solution that's no longer supported by MythTV. The far more elegant one is to use MythTV's relatively new Zap2It support.
All XMLTV did anyways for North America was query Zap2It, and the DataDirect service of Zap2It that Myth uses now is much less errorprone and much faster, although you have to take a survey every 3 months if you want a free account there.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
MythTV wasted a month of my life (I was somewhat roped into installing it, otherwise I wouldn't get a replacement system for my aging laptop)
Just off the top of my head you need to set up:
- XMLTV grabbing and channel numbering. In the UK this is murderous... I ended up writing a scraper for the NTL EPG called tv_grab_uk_ntl, I'll prolly post it to the xmltv mailing list or summat.
- Dual head X. nVidia makes this easyish if you're happy with XF86Config but running GNOME alongside is absolutely infuriating. It insists on drawing those damn bars on the TV display as well, and Myth needs to be focused to work properly. I still haven't found a solution to this. Not being able to use a desktop alongside is kind of a no-no. This is unforgivable because marking a window Always On Top makes it go above the bars. Why doesn't Myth do this.
- Infra-red is a nightmare. You have to muck about with settings.pro to make it link against lirc (ever heard of autoconf?), and there's no graphical toolkit for it so you have to edit lircrc and restart and try it and edit and restart and... Oh yeah did I mention the keyboard interface is REALLY damn hard to usefully map to a remote control? It doesn't even have an explicit PLAY button ffs!
- Infra red part 2. This isn't so much a problem with MythTV but setting up an infra red blaster to work with a cable box is also a pain. I subscribe to NTL so I bought something called RedEye (google for Pace Redeye) and modified the software that came with it a bit to run as a daemon that listens of a FIFO to avoid the startup delay on the device every time the channel needs to be switched. I shall release that patched version back to the owner too once I've got some time spare.
I think this is more to do with LIRC, but LIRC as it is now really feels like some sort of hobbyist kit (complete with the circuit diagrams for rolling your own IR hardware... I just went with an Irman and Redeye to save the hassle). Some GUI setup tools would really not go amiss.
- PAGES AND PAGES AND PAGES of settings, the defaults for which don't make much sense usually. Here's a suggestion, when in doubt do what TiVo does. The default ffwd/rewind behaviour is unusable, it doesn't remember where you left off watching a programme unless you tell it to (why not?). To name just two problems.
- Weird menu system. The setup menus are split almost arbitrarily between mythfrontend and mythsetup, using the system from a remote is very strange (menu navigation and channel switching seems to collide). There is no warning about scheduling collisions so you always have to check the recording schedule. There's no at-a-glance "season pass" editor, so if you want to cancel a season pass you have to find the next instance of the show. Many many minor niggles like this.
- Inexplicable encoding weirnesses everywhere. It either skips and stutters or records in awful quality (on a 2GHz hyperthreading Xeon with half a GB of memory, which the site claims should be able to record TWO streams in MPEG4 at once AND play one back at the same time). Or you spend ages messing about with the recording profiles to get it just right (would it really be so hard to add a 'PAL/NTSC/VGA/Custom' resolution option instead of having to guess that the encoder will only be happy with 740x578 or whatever the hell it is?). I got frustrated with this and got a Hauppage MPEG2 hardware encoder. After getting IVTV up and running on Linux 2.6 with some oddball patched version it then encoded great... except the A/V then began to drift. Back to another round of messing with the settings then recording another programme to test it then messing with them again. Yes I have messed with all the AV sync settings. Should this REALLY require user intervention?
- NUV format with opaque filenames. WHY? Okay if you have it set up to use RTJPEG/NuppelVideo for realtime encoding then yes I can understand this but why use the container after transcoding when the data is in MPEG4/MP3? I know about mythtranscod