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MythTV 0.17 Released
foobar01 writes "MythTV 0.17 has been released. Changes include Mac OS X frontend support, big improvements to DVB and HDTV support, "timestretch" feature (for changing playback speed but not the pitch so you can watch shows more quickly), firewire capture support for cable boxes with firewire output, and widescreen user interface support. See the changelog for the full list of changes."
Obviously this relates because of the native Apple Frontend, but is there any other reason this is in the apple section of slashdot? This project is still primarily a linux toy, is it not? (real question).
But a big mailman password flaw doesn't?
So the video is speeded up but the audio remains normal? Wouldn't there be sync issues?
Who's ready for a Mac Mini frontend?
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
That means I can watch 24 in 18.
I agree, frontend support for the mac was one of the bigger changes, but... it still will not record tv shows on a mac. it can only be used to watch already-recorded shows. Which is not much different than a video player, which is not the only function of MythTV
Cool program. This looks like a perfect compliment to the digital lifestyle. If this were part of the iLife suite, I bet a lot of people would jump at it. If Apple had put it in iLife 05, it definitely would have justified the $20 increase in price, and it probably would have sold better and could draw more people to the platform.
I was looking at the site earlier and didn't immediately notice anything saying if it was running as a native OS X app or through X11? I'd be really tempted to check it out at work, but, well...I'll let you guess the rest.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
"timestretch" feature (for changing playback speed but not the pitch so you can watch shows more quickly)
Or, if you're from the south, you can slow down the show for easier understanding.
Bah! I was going for a quiet weekend... Now I gotta decide whether or not my MythTV box needs an upgrade or not...
:)
ok what am I saying? Sounds like a fun weekend for me
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
... but the thought of going from component input to coax irks me a lot (I also like how my non-hd Sony tv is able to 'compress' the DVD output so I get more lines of resolution for example, which I don't think would happen off a wintv pvr-350), what do people here do?
I'd like to have a mythtv box in the basement, drops in a few rooms and some sort of wireless system to remote control it all from wherever, but if the video quality will drop noticeably it wouldn't really be worth it.
-- the cake is a lie
Not watch 24 at all!
I've got ya beat by 18 hours, plus I haven't suffered through a mindless, repetitive story about a guy who likes to yell at people.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
So say I buy a HDTV tuner card to avoid future issues w/the broadcast flag. Will I only be able to watch the HDTV content on an HDTV capable monitor?
Does that mean that I need to have both a regular TV-in card and a HDTV-in card to record both types?
After I posted, I remembered that way back Steve Jobs said something to the effect of "People want their computers and TVs to be 2 distinct experiences." Although the mac mini certainly represents several shifts in apple's business model so you never know.
I've been using firewire based HDTV playback/recording on a Mac for a year or so. Had it not been tagged as "Apple," I might have missed this.
Mistake or not, it works for me!
-Pie
I just got my MythTV system running 2 weeks ago. I'm still running 0.16 but it's still great.
I'm using a Pundit-R that sits beside my TV, and it uses a 802.11b wireless card to get programming data.
Since I've been using it for 2 weeks, it's totally changed the way the wife and I watch TV. We never miss an episode of our favourite shows, and never watch commercials.
The commercial marking function is like magic, it looks for blank frames in the data stream and flags that as a commercial. I'd say it gets it right 80% of the time, 15% of the time it will include the station ID clip, and 5% it will grab an extra commercial, but I'll just hit forward on the remote to skip it.
My favourite part is using it to watch a new show that's 'almost' live. I'll set it to record the show, but then start watching it 5-10 minutes after it's started. When I get to the commercials I skip over them, and by the end of the show I'll have hopefully synced up perfectly with the real time stream.
I did a quick search on google and found one knoppix based live cd but it seemed to be only the front end and still required the backend to be installed some where.
Is there a standalone CD that I can try out with Mythtv ready to go for my GeForce FX 5700 personal cinema?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Isn't that what's left after skipping all the commercials?
i watch 7 of 9 in 5
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Are you talking about the EyeTV 500?
I've just started using that same device myself. Seeing as it already does a great job of giving you complete PVR functions in HDTV on the Mac, what exactly does MythTV bring to the table that we don't already have?
Just curious, is all...
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Are there any tuners available that can receive OTA broadcasts as well as via comcast (or whoever) cable? MythTV can do HD i guess?
HDTV support has been an absolute bitch for the last year. Now I can finally pull my computer (3ghz P4 computer I built for HDTV, $700) out of the closet and record some HD CSI!
With Lokitorrents getting taken down today, and left with a rather tasteless warning, I wonder if the MPAA will start looking to litigate the source of illegal content, like MythTV?
Do you (slashdot readers) think it's a possibility?
scott king
Of all the HDTV capture cards on the market, which will ignore the "broadcast flag"? Which ones work in Windows, and which ones work on Linux?
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
That'll get me to move from VDR.
Its free.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Any that will get cable HD?
The first rule of MythTV, don't talk about MythTV.
MPAA, RIAA, etc, please move along. There is nothing more to see here. No one uses MythTV, and there is no copyright infringement going on, don't worry about it. And definitely no laws broken in MythGame and MythDVD and MythMusic either.
Now the car chase scene in bourne supremacy can be really nauseating.
Disclaimer: I own a DirecTivo. I don't really know why I needed to declare that. I think I just wanted to sound important.
[1] Tivo is starting to look like it might become "beleaguered" much like Apple was declared during the years 1970 through 2005. Yes, Apple was called beleaguered by the tech media even before it existed.
[2] Tivo is (I think) Linux based. Making it compilable on BSD Unix is, like, what? Two man hours? What? Different motherborads? Ok, four man hours.
[3] Steve Jobs wants the Mac to be the center of our digital media warm fuzziness thing where we go for brief respites from the wacky demon haunted world in which we live.
[4] The Grammys have become dominated by hip hop and gangsta rap. Only a vast array of Mac powered DVRs spread across the nation can protect us from whatever.
It can't be any more obvious that that! You savvy?
You heard it here first.
You wanna have a mineral water with me?
The second rule of MythTV, you *will* fight with Tivo users. :)
Of all the HDTV capture cards on the market, which will ignore the "broadcast flag"? Which ones work in Windows, and which ones work on Linux?
I'm talking without any knowledge of what's out there, but if I were designing an HDTV capture card I would make sure that the hardware didn't do anything with any flags in the data stream except pass them on to the driver/OS and let them decide how to handle them.
There's no value to having separate hardware versions for each region the device is sold in, depending on whether the government there has tried to make it illegal for consumers to timeshift and format-shift broadcast content...
MythTV allows you to create a network of multiple sources, multiple outputs.
For example, you've got a big computer in your basement doing all of the capturing, encoding, crunching, etc. It's got gobs of RAM, a Terabyte RAID setup, and it sounds like a fuckin hoover sucking the entrails out of a cat... You don't want to have this in your TV room, or bedroom, but you would like to have a PVR that has access to all of this, and everything on the server (music, photos, whatever).
MythTV allows you to do this. You can ask it to record on your bedroom box, and it will record on your uber-computer in the basement, but play it when asked to do so on your bedroom screen, and it can even spread the recording duties across multiple computers and TV cards... This is where the Apple thing comes in. Apples are reputed to be quiet--especially the Mini. So, put the Apple in the bedroom, or the TV room, and voila. The Apple itself is not doing the recording (indeed, MythTV relies on vid4linux), it's just looking pretty and playing video. Point is, it's probably easier to buy a quiet Mac than build a quiet PC.
I suppose that if a compatible video interface is ever made for the Mac, it would work just as well for doing the recording and storing, but it's just not to that point yet.
Come out of the basement. That big yellow ball overhead is the sun.
Really.
Real life is less interesting than the crime lab in Miami but its real. The crime lab in Miami is fictional.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Because the next scheduled story is about a Microsoft messenger exploit.
So was the software that came with the the HDTV tuner.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Looks like it has been slashdotted...anyone have a link to a mirror?
I guess if you're dumb enough to think that's true, you're also dumb enough to think it's an insult.
...is that a lot of digital/HDTV cable customers will be able to use their digital cable box as a capture device, and plug into the MythTV back end host with firewire. This uses almost none of the host CPU as the cable box is spewing raw MPEG2 over firewire, and MythTV just needs to save it to disk.
That right there just tripled the number of channels I could record, and gave me HDTV capabilities as well as premium channels.
I'm one of the people scratching my head over why this was put in the Apple category where few people would see it. Most of the people running Myth are on PC/Linux platform.
I ran myth for over a year... it served its purpose for a while.
.nuv files on any other platforms. Oh, and good luck trying to transcode something to divx, that took way way way too long.
I have since put XP and Beyond TV on my box. The single biggest contributing factor to dropping Myth was the lack of a standard format. I couldn't view
Myth: Record to mpeg or avi!
no comment
How's the X86-64 support in mythtv these days?
Alot of video programs assume if you don't have X86 you don't have SSE/MMX, so they get really slow when they fall back to non-SIMD code.
Visit the EFF broadcast flag page, scroll down about halfway, and look under the Linux/Windows/Mac sections on the left.
Sounds incredibly useful if you are using a cheap, noisy AMD box running linux to do your video capture. However, the Mac G5 Towers run just as quiet as the mini, if not more so, which means there's no real need to hide the server in the back of your wine cellar.
Also, I could see why you would want this if you are using satellite or digital cable. The current offerings from El Gato (the company which makes EyeTV) really only support so many video formats.
Thanks for spelling out the real-world advantages of the code, instead of just giving boilerplate Stallmanist dogma about "libre" software. I don't think MythTV is the right solution for my set-up, but I can now see where it would be the ideal way to go for a lot of other folk.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Ported under darwin ports. with a native GUI, not X11. works better than my backend box for viewing.
"timestretch" feature (for changing playback speed but not the pitch so you can watch shows more quickly)
And there are already plans to support blipverts in the next version!
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
If by "fairly easy" you mean "there are existing algorithms that do this badly," then you're right.
If you mean "sounds exactly the same, only faster" then you're wrong. Considering the quality of these things now, I'm not sure I wouldn't rather just let the pitch raise.
The problem is how to represent pitch. Most of the time, this is done by converting to a frequency domain and doing a shift, or by convolving the signal with a waveform that causes a signal shift (the classical example of this is using a sine wave, as is done for RF encoding). The problem is that this technique is only really good for a signal that doesn't change over time.
In fact, even the best pitch shifters assume that the pitch can be modeled as function of time and are unable to deal with randomly changing pitches very well. Lots of artifacts are still introduced when dealing with an "instrument" as complex as the human voice (on the other hand, they work great for flutes). Of course, if you don't change the pitch very much, you can get away with less artifacts.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I wonder if the MPAA will start looking to litigate the source of illegal content, like MythTV?
MythTV merely turns your computer into a VCR. The movie studios lost that battle back in 1984.
my TV is connected to my digital cable box via component inputs, which is a heck of a lot better than the RF I'd be getting out of a 350
having mythtv would mean that I might be tempted to rip all my DVDs to avoid the constant disk shuffling, but I wouldn't be able to do that due to, again, the video quality issues.
The PVR from my cable company (which would cost me not that much more than a mythtv setup) although abysmal from the functionality standpoint does output in component *and* even downconverts HDTV to 480i: I'd much prefer to use mythtv but I'm starting to feel the pull towards that one instead, that's why I was asking if anybody knew of ways to fix my concerns.
-- the cake is a lie
What is the cheapest hardware you can get right now to run mythtv with hdtv tuner card? I'm looking to purchase http://pchdtv.com/hd_3000.html also what is the easiest ditro to go with?
to go out any buy myself a capture card and install MythTV on my linux box? I've been thinking about it for a while, waiting until the time is right. I already have a TV, so is the ~CDN$300-400 worth it?
I set up a box to run MythTV with a cheap DVB card late last year, but the configuration of the DVB channels left a lot to be desired.
Particularly troublesome were time shared channels that only broadcast during part of the day, as the mechanism to insert channels would feed incorrect values into the various fields. Even when I correct this when the channels were on air didn't help with a coupld of channels. I hope this mechanism is better.
I'll have to spend the next week or three re-loading this box, as I've had to recycle it as a temporary Windows machine.
but it's been Slashdotted.
Can you have network playback? I can have one PC in a corner with a few TB of drive space and n TV tuners...and have n small, cheap, quiet PCs feeding signals out (or more if some happen to be watching archived shows).
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
What providers offer FireWire cable box? Have I been living in a cave?
I have Comcast digital cable in Massachusetts, which is about 700 channels (including 100 or so of just music and a handful of HDTV feeds). The cable box is Motorola, black, but I've seen some silver ones at friends houses. Are these the FireWire ones?
I posted this to the Television section, since that seems to be where MythTV-related articles generally go. Someone at Slashdot must have changed it to Apple.
What's the status of a MythTV Win32 frontend?
I've got a PowerBook and a PC...and I'm thinking of building a machine to become a permanent Linux box -- if I moved my TV tuner over, could I watch TV on my gaming PC and/or my PBG4?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
HDTV tuner card vendors must be very happy with the EFF stance than can only boost their sales.
This sounds just like those TV commercials: "Offers valid only if you call during this commercial"...
My ass, theres always another Sales, its never the last chance...
And in this case, how much would you bet that after July, there will be hacks to disable the broadcast flag, discretly provided by manufacturers through back-channels, just like there are hacks to disable region code or macrovision on DVD players....
I'm sure some guys are buying several of those cards hoping to be able to resale them at premium on eBay after July....
"Are you talking about the EyeTV 500?"
I'm actually talking about HDTV Cable. The FCC mandated that last April *all* cablecos had to deploy a firewire-enabled cable box to allow recording of HDTV. Copy Protection occurs via 5C / DTCP, but some cablecos dont have it on... allowing recording to any firewire capable Mac/PC.
MythTV's features suggest that it will work in this regard (ie "Firewire Enabled"), but I won't know till tonight when I test. The previous software for the Mac was something called VirtualDVHS, a sample program delivered with the Developer Tools... It's beta and leaks memory like crazy... but it works!
So in my case, I actually do not have any tuner card, just a stock Powerbook. I do not watch the HDTV on my screen either. I simply record from the Cable Box and playback to my Firewire-enabled HDTV (or Firewire-enabled D-VHS deck).
-Pie
I never did understand why it's database driven. I first got into MythTV because I wanted to record shows at work (better cable service) and watch them at home - an never have figured out how to do it because of the database integration. I've been told Freevo may meet my needs better, but Myth is so nice...
T.J. Schmitz - the man, the myth, the legend - o
look at the list.. its in television
they just put it under apple and linux also
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Can someone post the changelog?
And why put a changelog (which should be pretty static) behind a CGI?
More like 5 gig per second max.
Its raw, uncompressed digital frames. 165 megabytes per second just for the base video data in a 720P stream. Slightly more than that for 1080i.
That 20mbps figure is low for even the compressed bitrate.
Mythtv works perfectly decoding nagravision for dishnetwork and bellexpressVU. It even pulls down the EPG so it does not even need the internet connection. I am using it with a Twinhan DVB card. It was a bitch to install that card.
Here is a hint to get it working.
SASC
and
http://dvbn.happysat.org
pcHDTV 3000
This card is the successor to the original pcHDTV 2000. Its chipset allows you to record either standard over-the-air NTSC or digital over-the-air ATSC. I believe that drivers are in the works to allow you to record unencrypted QAM channels from digital cable.
Air2PC
This newer card allows you to record digital over-the-air ATSC. It allows you to record unencrypted QAM channels from digital cable.
From what I've heard, there's no clear winner for which of these two cards is better. The pcHDTV 3000 can be purchased at the pcHDTV web site for $189. The Air2PC is on sale here for $169. If you plan to purchase, do so before July 2005. After that date, it's questionable at best whether they will still be sold.
Search the MythTV user group mailing list archives for more information about these cards and support in MythTV.
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
During Christmas I bought a DirecTV TiVo PVR and returned it the same day because it was too loud (it's got a fan).
What kind of computer should I buy for MythTV that we wouldn't have to listen to while we sleep? How much would it cost (more or less than 300 USD)? Would it fit on the shelf next to the DVD player?
Did you miss Save Betamax?
Just checking.
For context, click Parent.
Yes you can. I run MythTV on a stationary PC, while running only mythfrontend on a laptop, so i can watch Star Trek while taking a dump. :-)
It's strange that the changelog in .17 says that it won't change the channels on a 6200 yet, but in .16 it says: "A small program (6200ch) has been added to the contrib directory for changing channels on a Motorola DCT-6200 cable box via a 1394 (aka. Firewire) connection. See the README for compile and usage info."
.17 successfully?
Anyone tried that app with
Well I've seen articles detailing that the mac mini's radeon 9200 can handle 12x10 res, but not 16x12 (and therefore not 1920x1080 aka 1080i). Yes, you can turn it up that high, but OSX has problems at that res. So I'd *guess* that the 1280x720p would work fine, but not 1920x1080.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
and generally accept copy protection. Best to make MythTV work well before Apple gets all the fanboys with iHDTV (Lets you keep the Sopranos a whole week!)
sulli
RTFJ.
Time stretching and compresionl algorithms have been around since the early Eventide Harmonizers from the 80s. Originally designed for broadcasters to trim a 63 second commercial to 60 seconds, and later systems were developed to sync with video playback systems to allow TV stations to cram an extra commercial in to a 30 minute program segment.
"Considering the quality of these things now" - I bet you've never noticed it when it's being done right!
All you examples are *not* how it's done by real audio hardware and software these days. It's all about loading a bit of the audio into memory, and reading it out faster or slower than you put it in, and intelligent algotithms to determine what to splice out or what bits to loop to stretch it out.
Are you aware that most CD DJ style turntables (including most of Pioneers) have independent tempo and pitch control? They sound pretty damn good for complex music even at 18% faster or slower playback.
If you -programmed- on a couple of Apples, you'd do it this way :-)
if([[article description] rangeOfString:@"Apple"].location != NSNotFound) {
[article setCategory:@"Apple"];
NSLog(@"[TODO] -- needs to extend SteveJobsRealityDistortionField");
}
Of course, you would have written a category for NSString by now:
@implementation NSString (SlashdotAdditions)
- (BOOL)containsString: (NSString*)string {
return [self rangeOfString: string].location != NSNotFound;
}
@end
English is easier said than done.
Nope. Only Fox and ABC use the 720p format natively. NBC, CBS, PBS, WB, UPN all use 1080i. Dish Network and DirecTV also utilize 1080i, but that doesn't matter in context of MythTV anyway, since there aren't any (legitimate*) satellite cards for receiving sat programming on computers. Incidentally, our local ABC affiliate WFAA in Dallas/Fort Worth upconverts their 720p network programs and broadcasts 1080i, leaving the Fox station as the only one in our broadcast area that actually uses 720p.
;-) )
By the way, what you heard about signal degradation reducing DishNet 1080i quality to lower resolution doesn't make much sense. It's 1920x1080 interlaced MPEG digital video stream so it either will have full resolution or you won't have any picture at all. Now, Echostar may be applying some filters to the video before they uplink it, but there certainly won't be any quality lost beyond that as a consequence of signal degradation, and the bitstream will still be full 1080i resolution.
Anyway, one thing I know for sure is that my HD package from DishNet looks very good. (especially Monday nights on HDNet.
* - It is possible to receive Dish Network with appropriately configured DVB-S card and smart card emulator, but that puts any US citizen in violation of the DMCA.
You can also get the air2pc from http://www.cyberestore.com
I don't need capture hardware - I have a firewire enabled Moto box. So in theory my Mac Mini can do all my MythTV needs, right?
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
What hardware are you people using? I'd like to build one of these bad boys!
I am not sure about all of the MythTV features such as watching DVDs or listening to music but, from what I understand, if someone purchases an HDTV video capture card before July 1, 2005 it will remain legal to keep using that card. After that date it will only be illegal to manufacture or import DTV tuners unless they include the new DRM technologies. Here is a link to what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about the subject:
. ph p#step7e store.com/product_info.php?produc ts_id=103
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/
I do not know if anything else that MythTV does is open to challenge or not. I personally do not believe in illegally sharing music or movies and have never done so. I hope that it is still legal to build my own Linux based multimedia PC for my home network (at least if I do it before July 1st). I have dozens of DVDs and also some music CDs which I legally purchases. I have never owned a CD player or DVD player and have always just played them on my Linux Computer (I do not use Windows). I would also like to use my Linux computer as a Tivo or VCR like personal video recorder. I live in the USA where where these kinds of things may or may not still be legal. Do I have anything to be concerned about?
The HDTV video capture cards only work for the new over the air broadcast high definition TV signals or the older lower quality NTSC analog signals. The capture cards do not work for HDTV cable or satellite. I do not have cable where I live so despite the high computer processor requirements I am considering building my own Linux based personal video recorder before the July 1, 2005 deadine. I am considering purchasing either an pcHDTV HD-3000 or an Technisat Air2PC ATSC-PCI HDTV card. Here are several more links on the subject:
http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/cookbook/guide
http://www.pchdtv.com/
http://www.cyber
From what I've seen most mac users are very happy to use them, so yep, you're right...
Hang on, that's not what you were implying...
I've got one digital TV capture card, and one analog TV capture card in my MythTV box. Both record as MPEG2. I've been able to play the files everywhere that I've tried, including Windows. VLC works well.
If you try hard enough, and ignore all of the advice offered in all Myth sites and forums, you can buy hardware that doesn't save as MPEG2. But that's a reflection on you, not on Myth.
Since when is "a few TB of drive space" cheap?
If I want to archive shows, I'll burn a disk.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Cool.
I don't subscribe to cable, so I'm using the EyeTV tuner to get terrestrial-based HDTV (and digital SDTV) broadcasts.
It tunes in the signal and feeds the MPEG-2 signal to the mini, which can cache and/or record just like any other PVR set-up, and then outputs the same digital stream via DVI cable. It's pretty slick, but if I had cable it would not be much use, since it's only built for tuning in HD over the air.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It's called Virtual DVHS, and is part of their FireWire SDK. It takes a MPEG2 transport stream from the FireWire & records it to the hard drive (and plays back, too, of course). It'll run on any OS X capable box -- I record HD content using a 300 MHz Blue & White G3 I got for $100 on eBay.
looks like the direct link to my wiki made the linode server it's hosted on explode.. moin isnt exactly the most resource friendly either. Looks like i'll be finding some diffrent hosting soon
Interesting thread. I looked into setting up MythTV a few months ago, but a few problems (me being a MS kiddie and knowing zilch about *nix, and being Australian, where the program guides were something of an issue at the time) foiled my attempts.
:D) have sinced moved to a new house, and the TV now sits in one of the spare bedrooms. Our antenna has several missing elements, so free-to-air TV is fairly unwatchable... so we download most of the TV we want to watch, and occasionally stream it via the xbox.
;)
My partner and I (yes, a girl!
End result? We watch a *lot* less TV. And... it's bloody great. We've gone from, say, 4 hours a night of TV - 28 hours a week, over 9 hours(!) of ads - to maybe 8 hours a week, no ads.
Break your TV. Cut off the cord. Move it to another room. Give TV a break... it's phenomonal what you can acheive without it - PetRescue is my example.
Finally, and a little more on-topic:
"timestretch" feature (for changing playback speed but not the pitch so you can watch shows more quickly)
So can you slow it down, for the stoners? Damn cartoons are getting too quick for me....
What are Windows alternatives to MythTV? I have a Linux box but nowhere to put it, so I'm stuck with my Windows machine. And Beyond TV doesn't qualify, since it's not free.