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Freevo Developers Interviewed
prostoalex writes "O'Reilly's LinuxDevCenter features Freevo, 'a media platform that brings together various applications for video recording and playback.' They interview the developers, and talk about the current plans for the project. Freevo is not just a standalone product, it's a platform to which other developers, interested in home media on Linux, can plug into."
I am considering building a Linux "Media Center" PC soon and one reason I like Freevo more than MythTV is that for the most part it is written in Python. It seems that Freevo would be far easier to modify and write plugins for than Myth (which mostly written in C). Even the creators of Freevo claim they did not know Python before they started.
Informative? I think the parent was joking.
I think DRM is going to slip itself in to many aspects of downloading/playing songs and movies without people complaining about it. This is because your average customer of this software and equipment doesn't realize exactly what it can do. I think there is going to be a backlash when people figure out that all DRM means to them is the inability to play a media file. I'm still waiting to hear about an actual feature or benefit this gives to the end user.
I know there is Xbox Media Center http://www.xboxmediacenter.de/ but i'd like to have something (easier for me) in Python like this to work on and not something depending on the copyrighted Xbox library... Linux can run on an Xbox, can Freevo too ?
I read the article yesterday, and the do mention MythTV. I haven't used either system much, but I do know that Freevo is also easy to install.
The developers say that on one hand, they dislike the reliance of MythTV on X, on the other, they envy MythTV Broadcast Pause feature, something they are still trying to get right.
Now maybe their fear of X is as uncalled for as people who say X makes the desktop slow, but they are aware that MythTV has more features. In all Freevo seems to follow the Unix tradition of assembling small, seperate tools into a loose mass, which is often hard to get right at first than a more monolithic approach.
Spencer Ogden
All this linux machine as a DVR stuff is great, except that I can't seem to find a video card that will work with my TV. I just want to display 1080i and 720p without any pieces of the image cut off. I have a nVidia card with DVI outputs that I can't find any information on how to configure correctly with my TV. I would buy a new card if I know it will work flawlessly, but no one seems to have information on what cards are good, or how to get the timings to configure X.
Not that I've played with either (my HTPC has always been running on windows), but this sounds like a good alternative to us all using DVB captures instead of crappy analog captures (once you try DVB capturing, you never want to go back). Sounds like this could go nicely with VDR (unless VDR already has those kinds of things in it already?). It seems that the only kind of digital capturing that any companies are interested into is for OTA HDTV, but it would be nice to have something for digital cable or satellite (well, we already have DVB-S covered). For once, microsoft might be the only ones with enough money and power to convince big media companies to let them record the decrypted digital signal directly, as long as they use their DRM. At least you'd have good quality timeshifted/recorded shows, but that's never gonna happen. In some PVR software reviews, I remember seeing them mentionning how they've designed it to accomodate for things like rabbit ears (and analog cable). Here, everybody I know has either satellite or digital cable (probably twice as many with satellite).
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Has anyone tried Freevo on OSX?
Freevo's operation relies on scraping content off third-party websites without permission. Not only is this a dubious practice from a legal and ethical point of view, it's a bad long-term strategy. Should Freevo become popular, then the owners of the content that Freevo lifts will either take steps to cut off Freevo access, or will disappear because their business model is being subverted.
I've been in contact with some of the authors of the Freevo project regarding this issue; their attitude seems to be "we are able to do it, therefore we will." What about should? Is it a good idea to bite the hands that feed you?
I've been thinking of putting either a MythTV or Freevo box together for some time. However, before starting out, I want to find some decent HW that won't bankrupt me. A friend of mine reccomended an ASUS Pundit box, but I'm wondering what others have found? Anything cheaper or smaller?