Slashdot Mirror
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).
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!
The audio IS "speeded up", but the pitch remains the same. This is fairly easy to do with digital audio.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
"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
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
That'll get me to move from VDR.
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.
The second rule of MythTV, you *will* fight with Tivo users. :)
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.
...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
Visit the EFF broadcast flag page, scroll down about halfway, and look under the Linux/Windows/Mac sections on the left.
"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.
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
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
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...
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....