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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).
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
Hopefully this new version will fix some of these issues, but don't kid yourself. Call me when it comes with a graphical installer and I dont have to edit conf files.
HDTV will work fine on your regular TV, as long as your PC can output to the TV. That is, the HDTV receiver hardware (I use pcHDTV on Linux, and eyeTV 500 on Mac) is decoupled from the output (I use an ATI video card with TV out on Linux, and the $20 S-Video adapter on my Mac Mini). For HDTV on my plain old TV, I get black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. I'll be getting an HDTV monitor (with DVI) soon, but even with my 3-year-old TV, the HDTV picture looks better than analog TV.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
...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.
KnoppMyth is probably the one you're talking about, but it's not trivial to setup. It's much easier than doing it from scratch and so long as you pick hardware that is receiving attention in the forums there, you should be fine, but there's a lot of options and configuration you need to do sometimes. A live CD backend wouldn't help too much, given that.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Steve also totally missed the digital music trend until it was almost too late. See the recent Forbes article. Jobs admits he totally missed the boat, and Apple had to scramble to design and release the iPod in a mere 9 months.
I wonder if something similar will happen with video? Steve Jobs is not always some great visionary - sometimes it takes him a little too long to catch onto what's going to be hot. But once he does, his company does it better than anyone else. Pretty amazing when you think about it that Apple went from being absolutely nobody to the dominant leader in digital music over a fairly short period of time. A few months later and they might have stayed a nobody.
Wow, you must be a bigotted pseudo-intellectual liberal snob, subsidized by mommy and daddy in some university near san francisco. Southerners are far far better people than anybody you'll find in san francisco.