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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.'"
It seems great for cable, but how well does it interface with a satellite-based service such as DirecTV? Since in that case, all tuning is controlled by the receiver, MythTV would be helpless - unless you could wire an IR emitter to it. But even then, the software would still have only passive control over the receiver (what if it goes to change a channel, but the reciever is off?).
MythTV does support IR or Serial changing of the channel, but if you have DirecTV you'd be foolish not to use DirecTivo - at prices anywhere from free to $100 and direct recording of MPEG stream from the satelite (I.e. no transcoding, same exact quality as original) plus support for 2 tuners in each Tivo unit.
Of course DirecTivo does not offer anything other than recording and playback of TV, so you will still need something to play MP3s, video files, etc.
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
...there are alot of problems with this review.
Firstly, they try and compare software encoding offof any old bttv card to hardware encoding on a card like the PVR-250 (which Myth is more than capable of handling adequately). Apples and oranges.
They make almost no mention of the many plugins Myth has available, such as the web browser, RSS syndication, weather, music, every kind of video ever (through mPlayer and/or Xine)...
Almost complete non-mention of the way MythWeb (web-based MythTV control and viewing system) seamlessly integrates with the system, and allows you to do funky things with your Mythbox from work
And they also ignore MythTV's *real* strength in that you can cluster as many computers and TV cards as you want into a single cohesive entertainment system spanning your entire house, thanks to it's funky client/server architecture.
Very little objective/subjective comment on the relative merits of the interfaces
Frankly, I find it rather difficult that they could put an entire Myth system together in little under 4 hours, especially since they seem to know little about Linux (for instance, it is practically impossible to compile MythTV in 20 minutes - it takes aaaaaggggggeeeeessss. Methinks they meant download and install rather than compile).
Most of the review (and screenshots) seems to be spent on drooling over MCE's blue buttons. In short, not a very worthwhile or in-depth comparison IMHO.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Quoted: MythTV does not perform much better when video is downloaded at high quality, but we have the option to transcode, or re-render the MPEG stream into something a little more versatile.
This is what I was commenting on.
MythTV will transcode a recording after it is recorded into a different format.
So they are encoding a stream that was already captured in the background (I assume while other encoding could be going on) which would make for a SERIOUS CPU hit because they chose to save a couple extra bucks by not using the hardware MPEG encoder.
The PVR-250 (most commonly used hardware encoder in conjunction with MythTV) encodes into MPEG2 which is the codec they were taking issue with. There are MPEG4 encoders, but they mostly deal with DVB signals rather than standard analog cable.
Compressing to DivX/MPEG4 from MPEG2 can yield tremendous savings. I personally dont do it, but I understand those that do. I would rather spend the extra $$$ from the cpu on a (much) larger hard drive to host the recordings.
To be honest though... there's not much else to do with your CPU. If you have a hardware encoder on your tv capture, and a hardware decoder in your video playback.... what else are you going to do with your CPU?
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Pardon my cynicism, but this isn't totally unlike saying:
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Here's the thing, I've got a Hughes DVR40 that I've hacked to allow both a larger HD (120 instead of the stock 40 gigs) and a variety of network stuff (like extraction). You can do all this, leaving your original drive untouched meaning if you have a problem you're free to reinstall the original before calling tech support. As such, and considering the low level of work [esp. for a /. reader] to do these hacks, the ReplayTV is barely advantageous.
As for the commercials...the stock fast-forward command on the Tivo has three speeds; if I click to the second speed, it takes about 1-2 seconds on average to get through a block of commercials. Moreover, when you hit play after noticing that your show began again, it understands that you react a split second after seeing the show, so it actually rewinds a bit (and it may be looking for a black screen, I'm not sure). As such, its had a rate of well of 99% correctly jumping RIGHT to after the commercial break. I have a hard time believing the ReplayTV option is much better...
"Stumble before you crawl"