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MythTV Links Up with Program Guide Provider
Neil Campbell writes "As a long-time MythTV user, I found this announcement to be quite a surprise. A company by the name of TechnoVera has partnered with the founders of MythTV on an interesting project: A pay service for electronic program guide information rivaling that of Microsoft's Media Center. No more Zap2It surveys to continue using their free albeit basic service. The most important part of this is the fact that revenues from the service will be used to fund Open Source development; most notably MythTV. Registered Users will even have the opportunity to vote on feature enhancements that they would like to be incorporated into MythTV. I'm sure there will be some initial trepidation from the Linux community, but overall I think this should be considered progress. More attention and money for MythTV will result in a better product."
The company providing this stuff is LxM Suite but, unfortunately, according to their FAQ this is a US only offering.
Damn, I would be willing to pay for a decent service in the UK. Oh well, time will tell...
Everybody wins! The consumers win, the company wins (good publicity), and opensource wins.
All MythTV really needed was a well-funded and backed listing system. Zap2it was a good mid-point, but not on par with Tivo's or Microsoft's offerings.
Old (but very decent) PC hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper... (save for older ram.. but ddr is getting old too) So, for the enthusiast, MythTV just became a lot better..
If the price is right, this could definitely work out.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I personally see no downside to this, it's only 5 dollars a month, which is cheaper than the TiVo monthly fee, and that money will go right back into making the product even better, plus the 5 bucks returns a more professional scheduling service for the end user. So I see it as a win-win situation.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Tivo - proprietry, limited, not available (hardware and service) everywhere in the world.
MythTV - open, flexible, can do pretty much whatever you want with it if you are willing to put in the effort, will work anywhere someone has an internet connection, and where someone (else?) is willing to provide scheduling data.
I haven't even mentioned the geek value!
and it runs on linux!
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
TiVo is strictly unknow here in France. But MythTV/FreeVo & co ... users are still numerous (in proportion with the number of home linux users).
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
1. It costs money.
2. It is a subscription.
3. Only MythTV users will use this.
As far as I know, there are no retail systems based on MthyTV that would provide this service in some kind of nice package like Tivo or something. So there is no market presence (yet). So they have to rely on GNU/Linux nerds for income. This is a big problem. GNU/Linux nerds are notoriously cheap. And they hate subscriptions. Failure is immenent, I'm afraid.
All MythTV really needed was a well-funded and backed listing system. Zap2it was a good mid-point, but not on par with Tivo's or Microsoft's offerings.
Gotta disagree. Myth is nice but is still FAR lacking in many ways - UI and ease of development in particular (speaking from some experience).
The UI alone is a mess; examples: menus for eg setup descend and descend with zero context; similar settings stored all over the palce (see commercial flagging and transcoding); recordings organized by show but then loop endlessly; general ugliness (skins can only do so much).
Fix it yourself? See my second gripe.
I like Myth, but it has many warts, and missing program guide data is not one of them. ymmv.
they can link up with whomever they want. I just hope that the free and internet-independent program guide, which is sent alongside digital satellite broadcasts, gets some more developer attention.
You are only good for trolls.
And poor ones at that.
i think it's possible though that this will give it more attention making it more likely to be improved quicker than it currently is.
Here's a suggestion: Don't Subscribe!!!
Since my mind is numb from working my ass off today, this is all I could muster.
Although, when my ebay purchased Canadian hacked ReplayTV kicks the bucket and I'm forced to build a MythBox, maybe I'll have something more intelligent to say.
"More attention and money for MythTV will result in a better product."
...and lawsuits from the MPAA, etc. ;)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Not trolling, but I'm just wondering what is wrong with the existing UK RT grabber?
I'm using this quite happily (it was a pain to set up I must admit, but now its working, I have no gripes).
Personally, even if a UK pay service became available, I'd stick with the free RT service, as it's fine for what I need.
Thats $60 per year. This seems a high number
considering Yahoo music service is at $5 / month.
I think $12 per year would be more reasonable,
also considering free alternatives exists (although
they might not work as well).
Why do you need a commercial service in the UK? The Radio Times provides an excellent free listings service for mythtv.
You know, I don't pay anything for my Media Center program guide. It's just there, and just works. And clearly this could be taken as astroturfing (just look at my sig), but it's not. I use Media Center because it's cool and it works, not because my employer told me to (or anything equally silly). That said, I think it's really cool that MythTV will be getting a more fully featured program guide.
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
I intend to setup a MythTV sometime in the next few months, and have been doing some research.
Does anyone know if, in adding support for this program service, they have *removed* support for the free zap2it service? Because I dont *want* to give anyone my credit card to automatically bill me monthly, Id be much happier with whatever hoops zap2it wants for the no-money-involved option, and I would only be interested in a basic data source, I dont need whatever extras the paid service has.
That programming guide information is sent over both cable and terrestrial broadcast systems.
If you pay for what is already being sent into your house for free, what does that say about you?
"I can't code?"
Look at http://www.atsc.org/ for free specs.
WTF. Who in their right mind is going to pay for that. What a waste of money, there must be a zillion sites where you can help yourself to TV listings.
Gotta disagree. Myth is nice but is still FAR lacking in many ways - UI and ease of development in particular (speaking from some experience).
I find Myth pretty feature-rich, and it certainly seems to screw up and forget to record stuff less frequently than the Sky+ boxes some of my friends have.
You might be right about the UI to some extant - it's mostly ok for the techie but probably not so suitable for the general public (but then are the general public going to build their own Myth box or just buy one of the commercial PVRs?).
I think the main problem with the UI from my point of view is the recording priorities stuff - I don't like having to juggle integer priorities for all my programs and would prefer to just see a list of shows ordered by priority and be able to move a show up and down the list.
There is also some inconsistency with key bindings too - most of the UI looks in the key bindings database to find out which key is "select", whcih is "play", etc. However, some parts of the UI make assumptions instead - i.e. expecting Enter to be "select". But that's reasonably minor and probably doesn't affect most people.
I've not really done any UI development for Myth (just added a few controls to some of the setup screens...), although I did write some of the back end code (A/V synchronisation routines, etc) and can't say it was that hard to implement, despite not really being a C++ coder - I usually just use C so there was a slight learning curve there.
I like Myth, but it has many warts, and missing program guide data is not one of them.
I use the RadioTimes listings and I have to say that everything has got a *lot* better since RT started providing machine readable listings - the site scraper used to take hours and every so often they'd change something that broke it. There is still the occasional problem that programmes which are rerun several times during the 2 week period you get listings for sometimes don't have matching descriptions or subtitles so you get 2 recordings but for the most part it's not bad. Of course I'd like radio listings too (used to get them from the scraper but they don't provide machine readable radio listings).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
It's great for mythtv to have this potential revenue source. I hope it works out. It is a shame the service isn't available more widely around the world, but there are many methods to fill your myth database. Hopefully though this new system will do well and extend to other parts of the world. It needn't be expensive to run or to subscribe to, yet the volume of subscribers has potential to pay for a lot of development effort.
...TV! I'm using an old style terrestrial broadcast system and I have to deal with some signal noise - so I have a deinterlacer and a denoiser in my playback filter chain - this adds to the processor load. It's too much for the system to be able to simmultaneously record a showing and playback (current or previously recorded) showing without dropping frames on the playback. I think I might need a tuner card with hardware encoding. First I'll look at throwing in more RAM or faster hard drive setup if appropriate. You can have multiple backends and multiple frontends. Also more than one tuner card in the same backend. I'd really like to keep it all in the box under the tellie though, with the laptop as an occasional frontend.
I've just got my first mythtv system working 2 days ago and I'm happy as larry. The advert detection is working very well. Being able to pause a live show is great. The program guide and recording scheduling functionalitys make choosing what you want to watch easy. I find its best to record stuff you want to watch because the advert detection is so good. It is possible to do advert detection during recording. There are performance constraints of course. Another nice function is slowing down or speeding up playback without altering the pitch of the audio. When you watch Attack of the Clones you can speed up through some of the crappy stilted dialogue and slow down in some of the excellent action scenes!
It's a bit of a bitch to setup the whole system and it does take quite a lot of hardware resource but the results are so good that I really think this thing is going to attract a wider and wider audience. It's not just the TV....various plugins provide gaming, music, weather information, news, dvd playing, movie playing, photo viewing and importing. Altogether it makes an excellent entertainment centre in any living room.
I have an Athlon-XP 2.4 with 640Mb RAM, a generic SAA7134 (LifeView 3000) tuner which does no hardware mpeg encoding. Its got an Nvidia GeForce FX5500 graphics card with a Tv-out connected to my
Oh yes, I know I shouldn't reply to myself but a point I missed:
:(
There are no CAMs available for decoding Sky channels, so you have to use a normal Sky box to decode to analogue and then reencode to MPEG4 instead of just using a DVB-S card to suck the MPEG2 data straight off the satellite dish. This sucks but I don't think Ofcom (or whoever) is likely to force Sky to sell a CAM, which gives Sky+ a bit of an advantage.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
What's a good, cheap card for Myth TV. Neweggs got tons of cards under $80 bucks, so many it's hard to decide. I'm looking to replace my aging STB bt848 base card (it's got these weird wavey blue bars in the picture that're driving me nuts, doesn't show up in capture though, go fig).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
As long as this doesn't affect the XMLTV module I use for the UK. This grabs XML data from the Radio Times website (they provided the raw XML files as a goodwill gesture), it gives me about 2 weeks of data and enhances my TV viewing no end as I need not miss anything.
...and I don't like how I have to painstakingly re-enter my lineup (uncheck, uncheck, uncheck, uncheck), when it would be sooo much easier if I could just import my existing Zap2it lineup. But, I want to vote on new features - we'll see how this pans out. Only $30 for the six month pilot, not too much of a pain in the wallet for what we might get. Oh, and I'd really love to see the lineups tailored to individual subscription packages - THAT would makes keeping up with your sat/cable provider's constant lineup changes a bit less of a chore. We'll see if paying for it really gets you any more say...
Been using Myth since 0.15 in August, '04. With a PVR-350 in a Shuttle SN41G2 V2 box and 2x200GB LVM'd drives. Having a PVR really helped me to get the most out of my Dish subscription - hard to believe how cool it is to be able to record all those research and university networks in a managed way - you can take entire courses this way. And watching "Mosaic: News from the Middle East" has been an education.
For someone to start a company building and selling MythTV boxes. Put a large hard drive in it, DVD burner, etc... Ideally it would be region free, HDTV capable, PVR features, able to play DVD/CD/MP3/VCD/SVCD/JPG/etc... You could rip DVDs and CDs, store your music library, use as a WebTV, and so on. It would replace your CD player, your VCR, your DVD player, your Stereo (with a radio card). It would be the one-for-all media box.
If someone started selling these pre-made and ready to go, I'll be the first to buy. Of course, I could probably build one, but I KNOW the market is there to buy them if somebody steps up to the plate.
PK: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
That is only a small part of the cost. i have had my tivo for 5 years now and I can tell you that they are wonderful.
However, space is so much more expensive then on a pc, you can't upgrade without voiding the warranty and to top it off, once you include subscription as part of the cost it suddenly jumps to a 400 dollars box, not cheap.
When my current tivo dies, i may just have to go with a myth tv option - it could be cheap even if i buy all brand new parts.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Great, now all we need is a full port to MacOS X. The Mac mini is small, silent, and good looking - it's almost a perfect HTPC platform, only lacking on the software side. I'm currently using it with MPlayer, iTunes, an ATI remote, but a real media frontend would make it much more grandma friendly.
Is anyone else here using a mini as a HTPC? What does your setup look like?
READY.
#
Everybody wins!
Well that depends on whether you see TV brainwashing and TV addiction as a good thing or not.
For those who see TV as calming pap for the unthinking masses, anything that makes the TV system slicker is not a win at all. In many ways the whole thing is Matrix-like, which is sad.
Nice to see open source peeps get some cash though.
On what grounds? As far as I can recall, you guys haven't overturned the betamax decission yet.
That hasn't stopped the MPAA et al from challenging one's "Right to Tivo".
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I think his point was that you actually get music from Yahoo. All you get from the TV listing service is.. Well, I'll let you figure it out. I don't want to spoil the surprise.
http://mythic.tv/ sells exactly that in their Dragon box. They also sell everything you need to just slot together a box to your specs, and pledge that everything will work out of the box with KnoppMyth. The guys who run the site are very active in supporting the MythTV community, and have been doing it for a while.
What's the point of a MythTV setup?
Sounds like an arguement for a Windows license.
Agile Artisans
I think it's $125-ish.
I'm very happy with it and it's fully supported on MythTV
although they might not work as well
Exactly the reson why $5 a month sounds very reasonable.
And the knowledge that they fear is a weapon to be used against them...
I'm all for good solutions for people willing to pay, but how will this affect the free (both meanings) solutions available?
I'm non-US, and right now we have a working, albeit not perfect, xmltv solution for getting listings. If the mythtv developers profit by forcing/coercing people to use the commercial service, what will keep them from removing or making the xmltv support unusable?
This is very similar to "the java trap" where free/open source software get dependencies to commercial/proprietary solutions and become unusable on a completely free system.
I'm a great fan of mythtv and all the work the developers have done, I just hope it continues to be a wonderful free alternative.
I am no MythTV programmer, but have played with the XML based menu system... Reorganize everything to macht your needs. It realy is that simple! My wife loves MythTV and she is not the type who knows what PVR stands for.
Cheers
Let me do some math here folks,
Get my point ?.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Can anyone compare and contrast the two?
Keep in mind that I already have 3 Gentoo machines running at home, plus 1 at my Mom's house, plus a Gentoo partition on my triple-boot laptop at work.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Besides not filling out surveys and having local movie times, there doesn't seem to be much difference between this and Zap2it. I can live with filling out an occasional survey and going to my computer to look up movie times. Maybe when the service offers more, I will think about it.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
How good is that information. Here in germany the DVB-system provides simmilar information. Some channels have absolutely good information, you can often not only read the title of the show, but also a summary of what will happen. Typically you get that about a week ahead (even on some news shows).
But other stations just do not air any kind of EPG, some only air a "now and next" guide. Some have only one show lasting 24 hours every day with the station name in it.
It might be interresting to note, that, thanks to a little hack done by the people at Grundig, europeans already have EPGs since the 80s. The teletext-system is able to carry 24x40 text-pages. Most TV-stations have their TV-guide in it. Grundig however, wrote some software for their VCRs to parse that. So basically you called the teletext-page, put the cursor on your show, pressed a button and your VCR was set to record that show.
As a mythtv user, I gotta say 60 a year is excessive to me. I realize organizing all that crap is tedious, but it just seems like too much for what I get from it.
Also, I loathe monthly payments. If they don't have a discounted like 30 bucks for a full year, I'm not interested.
Good luck with it though.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
like ppl (average reader here) are going to pay for a decent service when they can get a crap free one. Not to troll, but most people here use free stuff ( as in beer ) over comercial stuff even if the free stuff happens to be substantially sucky. I just don't see it. I do love my MythTv though.
this sig is deprecated
I'm sorry did I miss the part where Microsoft and Tivo opended up their source and made it easy for anyone to come on in. Myth is fairly easy to start writing code for, I started sending usefull patches within a month of using it.
The UI alone is a mess; examples: menus for eg setup descend and descend with zero context; similar settings stored all over the palce (see commercial flagging and transcoding); recordings organized by show but then loop endlessly; general ugliness (skins can only do so much). .19 come out (which Technovera the parent compnay of LxMSuite will be paying for). The looping shows of the left in the playback screen were to prevent you from having to scroll all the way back up to the top when you reache the bottom, it's a usability thing. And as for general uglinesss, pretty much every theme for Myth has been done by programmers. There's not a lot the theme system can't do when a real artist works with it.
I have no idea what menus for the EG referrs to, but you're right the settings section is pretty bad. Good thing it's been slated for a rewrite before
Fix it yourself? See my second gripe.
I like Myth, but it has many warts, and missing program guide data is not one of them. ymmv.
And right there you make the case for LxMSuite. Can't fix it yourself, or don't want to? Then join LxMSuite, let your voice be heard and you dollars directed on fixing things you care about.
All the program guide/movie data/theme stuff is only there to provide some sense of value for the sponsorship effort.
$60/year sounds too high to me too, especially compared to Yahoo's music service. What do they need all that money for? Is it really worth just as much as what Yahoo offers?
...just my thoughts.
Maybe I'm missing something and one can have a really exciting time reading more in depth or whatever TV listings, but the lowly Zap2It seems fine to me. Improving Zap2It's service might be worth something like $2/month, if desired, but I've never noticed any problems with it doing my Canadian listings.
OTOH, improving MythTV itself might be worth a lot more. It is important software and if all the money really went back into Myth development then I might go for it. Subscribing to software will take time for people to get used to, including me, but in some cases, it might be the only thing that really makes sense for continuously developed and used software. For this purpose, I think $30/year is more reasonable -- that's $60 over 2 years, as opposed to $120 for 2 years, or $180 for 3 years, which might be the rough average lifetime for a non-subscription piece of software. I wonder what the reaction of people would be if you couldn't use MythTV anymore (or it was crippled with no listings or whatever) because it all of a sudden cost $180, but you got free upgrades until version 2 came out (or version 1 as the case may be), which worked out to about 3 years? I think people wouldn't like it, yet this is what $5/month would amount to for long-term users.
Sure $5 isn't much, but when everyone starts asking for it every month, it adds up. As a linux punk who legally pays for almost nothing on my computer, I am maybe more conscious about the money I throw mindlessly at software -- $180/3years would be more than I pay for Microsoft OS's (and I've been fortunate to avoid having to upgrade to WinXP yet,) and to me, they seem to have too many billions of extra dollars. Supporting open source with cash is great, but there's no reason why some trust can't be earned first at a lower price point.
There is also some inconsistency with key bindings too - most of the UI looks in the key bindings database to find out which key is "select", whcih is "play", etc. However, some parts of the UI make assumptions instead - i.e. expecting Enter to be "select". But that's reasonably minor and probably doesn't affect most people.
This is my biggest gripe with MythTV, and I disagree that it's reasonably minor: UI inconsistency is really bad. Having up-arrow mean something on one page and a different thing on another, for example, is a huge liability in terms of ease of use, and such idiosyncracies contribute greatly to percieved complexity and lack of professional polish. Before nearly anything else, keybindings need to be consistent. Second to that, key action needs to be consistent (eg, on some pages, repeatedly hitting down-arrow cycles through UI elements, on some it does not and causes form transitions instead). MythTV is a good project, but regrettably not yet a great one, and while the commercially available alternatives might not be quite as featureful, they blow it away in terms of ease-of-use.
The thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that there's no excuse for this, except for the choices made by the project leader. There's a lot to be read into the fact that users will now be able to vote on which features should be prioritized for development.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
More attention and money for MythTV will result in a better product
Which is definitely needed.
Don't get me wrong, I have been using and hacking on MythTV for a couple years now and it mostly works. It's just buggy as hell. Every time they fix something, they break something else. It's just awful. It's like a college school project.
What's the point of a MythTV setup?
Newer versions of TiVo are starting to incorporate DRM. There's also the fact that they track what you watch and some people don't like that.
With MythTV you also have more options with hardware. Running out of room? Just add a new hard drive. Or buy a faster DVD-/+R drive.
TiVo makes things easy, but some people want flexibility.
So, what would you have said 2 weeks ago, before the Yahoo music service came out (and so the nearest thing was 3 times more - and don't forget that's an intro price)? Considering that Tivo is $15 or so a month, that's a pretty good deal. And if you don't like it, use Zap2It and fill out the survey instead.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I was a long time TiVo user. I had a 14-hour Series 1 that I upgraded with a TiVoNet card, and two 120G hard drives (later upgraded to two 300G hard drives). Now, I use MythTV because it is more flexible that TiVo. Here are three examples that are important to me.
(1) I can have multiple tuners that are all controlled by the same sheduler. Currently, I have three tuners. This is better than having multiple TiVos where each TiVo controls its scheduler.
(2) I can RAID the hard drives. This is an important WAF item after one of our TiVo hard drives crashed and my wife lost many recorded shows.
(3) I can have HDTV tuners.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that there's no excuse for this, except for the choices made by the project leader.
:)
I don't think this is down to a choice my Isaac but simply down to the ad-hoc nature with which FOSS projects such as Myth are developed. Different bits come from different people and so consistency can be limited. What they actually need is a "UI guru" or a organised team of UI people to sanitise the UI and new elements as they are implemented, however that involves interested parties to have time to do that sort of thing and many (techies) perceive the UI as somewhat secondary to the "cool stuff" (I am often no different with projects I'm working on, preferring to play with cool new stuff instead of boring sanitisation of other people's work).
There's a lot to be read into the fact that users will now be able to vote on which features should be prioritized for development.
I must make a very important point here that many people (users) just don't get: with FOSS software, everyone developing it is freely putting their time into the project and getting nothing in return except the features they are implementing. This means that in general, developers working on a FOSS project will only implement features that they themselves want. So basically, if you want something doing then you may well have to do it yourself, you certainly shouldn't expect someone else to give up their time to do it.
Commercial projects, OTOH, are not bound by such problems and so a developer may well develop a feature you want. However, this only works to a point - larger companies (i.e. those who don't significantly benefit from a minority group buying a product) are unlikely to implement features for individual users and in many cases get too much input from the marketting people who want "cool" stuff people are never going to use or want to rip out functionality on the grounds that it "overcomplicates" it. When was the last time Microsoft implemented a feature you asked for?
I think there may well be an advantage in FOSS projects which have commercial backing so long as the commercial side doesn't have _too much_ influence over the featureset, etc (Asterisk seems to be a good example of an FOSS project with commercial backing)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Tivo's can be upgraded for the cost of a hard drive. First thing I did when I got my Tivo was drop two 120 GB drives into it. Yes, it does void the warranty. But MythTV doesn't have a warranty either.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The word monopolist gets used quite a bit here on Slashdot in conjunction with the word Microsoft, and usually with an implied (or not so implied) connotation of "evil." Yes I realize that "Microsoft is a convicted monopolist!" and that they use business practices that many find distasteful, but these two things are not necessarily intertwined. Any company with billions in the bank and a revenue stream to match could use that revenue to "underwrite the costs of their media pc, thereby making their system artificially attractive and hurting competition with other offerings," regardless of whether they are a monopoly.
I am not trying to excuse Microsoft's behavior. I'm just trying to promote some critical thinking with regard to language. For example, try replacing monopolist with company in your last sentence:
If a company overcharges you and then kicks back a token couple of bucks, why on earth would you be happy about the situation?
How does using the word monopolist do anything to advance your point? All it does is reveal your bias against monopolies.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
Why should I be nickel-and-dimed by some startup who will be dead in a year or two and then I'll have to get a Tivo anyway? Personally, I have no problem filling out a short survey once a quarter.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
The UI is indeed a mess, and configuring the fonts to look properly on a tv is a nightmare (you have to get your X DPI *just* right, then change settings in the frontend for Qt, and after all *that* you have to manually adjust 6 or 7 files for your particular theme, since themes specify absolute font sizes).
:)
That said, the reason the latest Myth release was so close to the last one is so Isaac could 'get it out the door'. The plan, so far as I understand it, is to revamp the entire UI for the next release.
I must admit watching my brothers Tivo I am extremely jealous of the it's UI. My mythbox completely trounces it on useability. I can tell my mythbox *exactly* what I want to watch and how I watch it.
Give a newcomer a chance.
-- I have fans? Wow.
I burn 2-4 candy bars a session when I'm coding, and countless cans of DP. If I told you that by giving two candy bars a week to MythTV, we could polish it into the true omniscient media solution that we all want, would you do it? That is the cost. In exchange we get a company that, unlike most, puts money back into open source, hates MS, and worked with the devs instead of hijacking the app for their own commercial gain! These guys are willing to pay for something they could have gotten for free and make it better for all of us!!!! They were the first to pay for something that they could have gotten for free, and now they are offering a solution that benefits us and we all throw stones and ask for a discount! I'll bet they could offer it for $30.00 a year if they keep all of the money for themselves instead of funding open source development, is that what you guys want????
Where are the JetCars and Teflon Suits I was promised??
Right now MythTV users get their guide data for free through these same people, in exchange for filling out a survey every few months.
By the way, representatives from this company have been on the myth list discouraging people interested in finding alternative ways of getting guide data.
Now this same company has rolled out a subscription service.
What do you think is going to happen next?
SURPRISE! Your free data feed just went away. Pay up, suckers.
It'll be chaos; mythtv will "break" for all its users and most will fork over some dollars for a quick fix rather than wait without service for a few weeks for someone to cook up a half-baked web scraper to replace the XML feed. Quite a few people had no patience for the "scraper wars" in the first place.
The company doing this is probably not paying a lot to license the guide data, and this little scam will net them a small profit, I'm sure.
"The thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that there's no excuse for this,"
You have the source code so change it! Really this is what drives me nuts is some ne will write about how a FOSS program does this little thing or that little thing wrong but will do nothing to change it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't want to pay a monthly fee....I hated that with Tivo...did the lifetime thing on that. One of the main things that was appealing about Myth...was the 'free' guide service...
I didn't see anything in the article or on the MythTV website saying if you'd have a choice where you got your guide information.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If I wanted to pay a monthly fee for PVR service, I wouldn't have built a MythTV box - I would have bought a Tivo.
The article states: the guys at MythTV seem to have responded well, posting a rare interim release (MythTV 0.18.1) to avail all its users of the new functionality. This isn't quite true, the 0.18.1 branch was an undertaking by the myth developers to have a stable branch of myth with fixes backported to it from CVS, it wasn't created just to enable LxMSuite, although LxMSuite was incorperated into it.
Listings are not provided outside the USA.
And getting it ALL working at once is a bitch!!
I've been struggling for about 5 months now, to get my PVR250, Audigy card...to work with Myth, and produce SOUND with video.
I can play .flac files off the harddrive through myth..sound card is just great. But, when I record video through the PVR card...get good picture...but, no sound at all....and even with the mailing lists, and all...haven't found a solution yet....kind of depressing. I'd like to get it working, and give my Tivo to my Mom.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
My Tivo costs over 10.00 a month. Maybe with the money from the subscriptions they will make Myth actually easy to setup and operate and then you won't have anything to WHINE about!!!
Where are the JetCars and Teflon Suits I was promised??
The overcharge is on the monopoly product (the OS) and the kickback is on the new product.
In the material world, this is called dumping.
Something the US has problems with Canada doing with lumber, the EU doing with food, China doing with cars, Taiwan doing with memory chips...
To be blunt, all "free markets" are against dumping. If you have a large warchest and/or a low burn rate, you can sell at cost, driving competitors out until you have a new monopoly. One that your tied-in customers elsewhere have paid for.
I must make a very important point here that many people (users) just don't get: with FOSS software, everyone developing it is freely putting their time into the project and getting nothing in return except the features they are implementing. This means that in general, developers working on a FOSS project will only implement features that they themselves want. So basically, if you want something doing then you may well have to do it yourself, you certainly shouldn't expect someone else to give up their time to do it.
This is a commonly-held belief which is shortsighted. When your user base is a small handful of people, then sure, you can do whatever you want as a developer. When your user base is tens of thousands of users, deciding that you want to do one thing or another without consulting them, or, more germane to MythTV, in vocal defiance of their requests, is arrogant.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
"Is LxMSuite available outside the USA?
TV listing information is currently limited to the USA. If there is enough demand for listing information outside of North America, we can make DataDirect::TV data available to European users."
Come on guys! The USA is not North America. As a Canadian MythTv user I would definitely consider the service if offered here. Just don't tell me I'm actually in the US.
Tivo is the solution for noobs. The whole reason MythTV is around is because it's a free service. They go through days/weeks of building a box to get a free service.
Tivo noobs open a box and plug it in and are willing to accept a monthly fee. These are usually middle aged middle class people.
MythTV users are mostly made up of 18-25 year olds with little money and alot of time.
The only way I can see this working is if it's about $12-18/year. That's what a 30 page magazine's subscription costs. Why does it have to be 4* more expensive then that???
Really? Funny, the only discouraging I've seen has been MYTH DEVELOPERS trying to explain to people why their hairbrained ideas to do away with DataDirect will not work from a technical standpoint.
The company doing this is probably not paying a lot to license the guide data, and this little scam will net them a small profit, I'm sure.
Gee wear a tinfoil hat much? Or are you just an AC troll?
In their FAQ they state :
:
:)
Is LxMSuite available outside the USA?
TV listing information is currently limited to the USA. If there is enough demand for listing information outside of North America, we can make DataDirect::TV data available to European users.
Since I live in Canada, which is in North America, I was wondering if the listing would be available here. So I emailed their support and here's their response
There was a last minute contract snafu that led to support for Canada being dropped at launch. Canadian listings should be available via LxMSuite very soon.
Thanks,
LxMSuite Support
Just an FYI for us Canadian's
Having a company start charging $5 per month for the same service Zap2It provides only serves to encourage Zap2It to begin charging real-life cash for their service as well. And in the end, that means fewer choices, not more.
Want me to call the WAAAHmbulance for you?
TiVo charges $12.95/mo for their service fee. DirecTV and Dish Network both charge $4.99/mo for their DVR service fees. The reason this is a big deal is that MythTV users can now get high-quality, automated guide delivery (as opposed to the basic service provided by Zap2It) at a price in line with the rest of the DVR industry.
Nathan
Geez, if you're gonna make something up, get your facts straight.
You could've hired me.
I'm not throwing stones, just concerned about them getting a suboptimal price, for themselves and their customers. It seems like premium/charity pricing to me.
I think this world very much needs more successful open source companies and hope they find good ways to get money, so that they can 1) eat from their efforts, 2) make great open source software, instead of average hobby software, and 3) have muscle to lobby and litigate for sanity in things like software patents.
I can think of a couple that I was impressed by and I'm sure there are others: JBoss.org, Torus Knot Software (the Ogre3D dev's consulting company). Both of these offer free software, and offer consulting services. TV Listings seem to me to be close to a core functionality of the software, and think it would hurt the userbase to charge a lot for it, so I would hope they could find something more useful to sell as a premium/charity service, like a BitTorrent server network to exchange TV shows. I'm sure the TV distribution people would hate that, but it's an idea.
Instead of taking sides of holier-than-thou vs. cheapskates, let's be pragmatic. While it's noble and idealistic to give loads of cash to poor open source developers who have no lives because they're busy making awesome software for us, I don't think charity or charity pricing will work in the long run. TV Listings might be worth $2/month, so if they're going to charge, they should charge that, and not complain when a lot of people opt for listings that are free + filling out a survey every once in a while. That's capitalism. And to monoplize the service by hard-coding Myth, well that would be evil by my standards (I'm not sure the typical American business standards would agree. 'All's fair in love, war, and business.')
We've seen how much of a distorted reality the MPAA and RIAA live in when a disruptive technology disrupts their business model -- the last thing the open source world needs is its own reality-distortion people. The only strategy that works in the long run is to find a good, honest business model, period. Asking for donations or charging charity prices for tv listings can be a possible business option if there is enough goodwill, (and premium prices if there are enough rich geeks who spend time setting up Linux PVRs when they could buy a TiVo -- don't think there are many of these people).
I'm just saying whoever is running the business should know what they're doing (value pricing, charity pricing, premium pricing) and not cry when the public doesn't bite for something that doesn't provide the value they're looking for, or when open source developers don't rank as high on the public's charity priorities as they had hoped. (Example: in the time it took me to write this, about 30 people were infected with AIDS, and 18 died from it.)
I was planning to house it in a Silverstone LC08 case, with a slimline DVDROM drive and bring the YPbPr signals out to extra connections on the back panel. The case can also accomodate a 3-1/2" hard disk drive, but that might run too hot without active cooling.
Still, the idea of using networked Myth backends with PVR250s, pre-ripped media, with HD playback capability at the front-end is appealing.
You could've hired me.
What I'd like to see is a company offer a point and click install for mythtv along w/ support. That is something I'd pay for.
Another idea...
Keep the core of MythTV free, and have a deluxe edition for $30/year that provides bonuses like themes, the extra modules (weather, news, web, games), etc. $30/year would generate a lot of money for the Myth devs, and I'd certainly go for it, even if I didn't really need the deluxe edition. I wouldn't like to have $60/year sucked out of me for listings, but I would pay $2/month and $30/year for a spiffed up edition of Myth.
This way, Myth would have my goodwill, rather than being another business entity that tries to get away with leeching more than it's worth (RIAA and Microsoft come to mind). If enough people feel like I do, and won't put up with having $60/year sucked out of them for something basic, but would gladly pay $60 every 2 years (a fairly standard if not high price for a typical software package, IMO) for a top-of-the-line PVR suite, then they might make a lot more money and grow (rather than shrink) in popularity, by taking the general approach of my example suggestion.
I don't know about the US but all my guide data is available over the air as part of the DVB broadcast. I don't even need an active internet connection to get it so the concept of paying for this data or even having to fight to get it seems strange.
I really, really wanted to use MythTv, but the problem that I ran into was a lack of drivers for my video card, which admidittly is not the best- ATI's AIW 9000, but shouldn't I still be able to use it? Eventually I had to come to the realization that in this stage of mythtv's development at least, MS's MCE was the best choice. There are things that I don't like about it- but the most important aspect is that it functions. I've not encountered a guide to rival MCE, my remote wonder works flawlessly, and I installed and had everything up and running in a few hours, and I even had to used "hacked" drivers... Its been about a year since I tried to use MythTV- but other than this guide enhancement has there been any other improvements? Is it worth revisiting?
Pythagoras would be so proud of us.
I've pumped out biggers ones then that.
They can't touch fair use devices.
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
Shows how little you know. This is slashdot, everyone has something to whine about.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
I think MythTV badly needs an Edje UI. That would be a match made in heaven.
(For those unfamiliar with Edje, it is the UI library used in E17 and EFL-based applications like Entrance.)
Am I a hipster-doofus?
1. An edit list that just removes all of the commercials.
2. Control the audio volume and can bleep.
3. Rearrange scenes in a program.
4. Replace the soundtrack with a different audio file.
5. Mix scenes from multiple video programs, or user generated video/audio.
6. Specify fades and disolves; and MythTV can compute them in realtime. (ouch)
7. Contain menu information for generating DVDs
One problem is how to find the starting frame ( 0:00:00.00 in the edit list) in all of the file copies of a program recorded on all the instances of MythTV.
Note that an edit list never contains any copyrighted material, just uniqueIDs to video/audio programs and timecodes.
I agree. I'd readily part with $1/month for such a service to save a little hassle. Anything more and I'd probably put the effort into getting the listings for free.
(Note: I haven't yet built my myth box. See this post of mine if you have some experience, I would appreciate any input.)
Wow. You have no clue as to the TiVo userbase, do you? (Rhetorical question. You don't) TiVo has barely broken out of the "early adopter" phase. Early adopters are technically inclined and savvy people who aren't afraid of technology and know how to use it. Sure, "middle aged middle class people" have more and more TiVos now, but mostly because they're related to or know early adopters who turned it on to them. If TiVo users were predominantly "noobs" there would be certainly no market for a book like this either.
And that's the trial price? What a rippoff. Anything over $19 a year is a scam. $19 a year will easily cover 52 weeks of downloads for the average user.
So let me guess $60-$75 a year once its final? Great add another yet another monthly bill to the pile.
See I say screw that. If your going to bother with paying for a sub just buy a cheap tivo and pay them. That or save your pennies and by MCE which has Free sub.
I understand these people want to make money but anything more than $19 a year per user is a ripoff and an added expense on what is freely available elsewhere. Doing a survey for 5 minutes every few months from zapit is a much better proposition then this and if mythtv moves to only supporting this pay service they are screwing over users and negating the whole point of Free software.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Sorry, I was living in my alternate reality again. Back to the real world and pleasing some of the people some of the time.
Where are the JetCars and Teflon Suits I was promised??
..MythTv there is always interact-tv.
You can still develop for it and the guide is free as well.
I for one haven't decided which one I should get.
Ok, then how about Canada?
Or any other non-USA country.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Marke me as a troll/flamebait but...
More money and attention DO NOT make a better product. How many times has this idiocy been perpetrated on the public. More money and attention MAY make a better product. Probably will make a better service. But far more commonly it retards revolutionary ideas and merely fine-tunes current ideas and implementations.
Need evidence? Look at the companies with money and attention. What was the last revolutionary thing developed in house by Microsoft? How about Cisco? Revolutionary ideas are always from little startups with no money and even less attention.
Need more evidence? Think about good products. Which was developped with more money and attention, Linux or Windows? Rather than say one is better, that comparison shows that there is at least no difference.
----------------------
Sig? Me angry, no sig.
Sounds like a great offering, but seriously LxMSuite? Come on guys, how do you expect to market a name like that?
I'm sorry did I miss the part where Microsoft and Tivo opended up their source and made it easy for anyone to come on in.
.19 come out (which Technovera the parent compnay of LxMSuite will be paying for)
No, you did however invent an argument I wasn't making. I replied to a parent suggesting new program data was all that myth needed. Read it again.
I have no idea what menus for the EG referrs to
Sorry, a poorly punctuated shorthand. Read it as 'menus for, for example, the setup section'...
but you're right the settings section is pretty bad. Good thing it's been slated for a rewrite before
Great news, I am glad to hear it is a known issue.
And as for general uglinesss, pretty much every theme for Myth has been done by programmers. There's not a lot the theme system can't do when a real artist works with it.
I agree and can relate! I'm sure this is the case with most open source apps.
Then join LxMSuite, let your voice be heard and you dollars directed on fixing things you care about.
I know Slashdot is full of armchair experts on open source apps, but I do intend to help out. I do happened to be biased towards the language that other linux PVR app uses, and they seem to be starved for developers..
cheers..
I think MythTV badly needs an Edje UI. That would be a match made in heaven.
You bring up an interesting point. Here and elsewhere, I haven't really seen anyone defend Myth's UI. Based on replies it looks like improving some of the UI is a priority for the next release. But as we can see, users (and developers willing to spend time) have different preferences.
The real interesting thing is that a while back Myth split the 'front end' and 'back end' into distinct components. I believe the driving motivation was to decouple the backend from the playing unit, such that there could be multiple back ends and multiple players. What would be a great extension of this would be to see an alternate front end to the stock one. Say one written in a different language or with a different playback mechanism.
The impression I get is that the separation of these two components is not quite there yet. For example, I recently ran a 0.17 frontend with an 0.18 backend, and as a result the new front end was no longer usable (extra columns in the DB). At the very least, it is possible for these components to trample on each other. An API written to expect homogenous frontends (and not just THE Myth frontend) might help here.
cheers..
The UI is indeed a mess, and configuring the fonts to look properly on a tv is a nightmare (you have to get your X DPI *just* right, then change settings in the frontend for Qt...
:)
:)
Give a newcomer a chance.
Yeah, I agree. I'm sure a lot of the UI stuff in particular does not fall entirely in Myth's domain. But there are at least some problems to solve
I must admit watching my brothers Tivo I am extremely jealous of the it's UI. My mythbox completely trounces it on useability. I can tell my mythbox *exactly* what I want to watch and how I watch it.
I dunno, I still find missing functionality daily. Like, batch operations for transcode/delete/etc/.. and so on.. Or consider watching 'live tv' while your tuner is recording: on a Tivo, you hit live tv and you get the program that is being recorded. On Myth, you get a warning that says 'Go back to Media Library -> Manage Recordings, find what is currently being recorded, and select Play there' -- when it clearly has the technical ability to do exactly what the tivo does.
I'm willing to see how 0.19 improves things and also willing to put in some dev work, so I'm sure the UI issue will be due for a revisit in a little while -- I'm willing to wait.
Yeah, I had to set up my MythTV seven times yesterday.
Now that I have to pay to set it up, I've forgotten where I was going with this mocking reply...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I don't understand this idea that poor UI design is "OK for techies." We all benefit from good design, even power users. And in many cases, a power-user will notice a poor UI more, because they can easily see what is wrong with it. Guess it depends on what kind of "techie" you are.
... and then they built the supercollider.
How many of the cards on the market support PAL? All of them, or are some NTSC-only?
Are there any cards which can tune and change the channels on our local cable networks like Foxtel or Optus? Not that I really want cable here, but I have friends who do, and I could build a box for them, so I can get share cable content with them.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Yes,but if you buy the $300 lifetime service and something goes wrong, that $300 is just gone. I suppose if you pay monthly at first or...or...
Again, i love my Tivo but for the price of a new tivo + lifetime service I personally can build a computer that is far more upgradeable, a system that can grow as I want it, that I can add what i want to it, that can do far more then a tivo and that I can repair much easier than a Tivo.
For me, as a geek, the Tivo is almost certainly NOT the best option IF i want to spend the time to set it up. Since my time is almost worthless, this is likely what i will do. For almost anyone else, a tivo is a better option. Like everything else, different strokes for different folks.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Never noticed that about the livetv issue. Yeah, that's definetly silly now that you make me stare at it. :)
Meanwhile, batch delete can be done with the (and talk about UI nightmare) playlist option. Add everything you want to delete to the playlist, then press M, playlist options, then delete.
-- I have fans? Wow.
That's great! I can vote for an installer and drivers that actually work.
Or at least, I could vote if I register. Which I might do, if I could ever get my installation and drivers to work.
By noob I'm talking about the standard AOL type noob. A techie wannabe or someone that doesn't have the time or patience to deal with MythTV.
The customer base is completely different between TIVO and MythTV. I know many many families that have a TIVO, but no one except for extreme geeks have even mentioned MythTV. Most TIVO users are not technical (can't build their own computer). Hell, just go to the community website. Most of them are complete morons when it comes to discussing the architecture/modification of a TIVO.
I don't understand this idea that poor UI design is "OK for techies." We all benefit from good design, even power users.
Yes, techies benefit from good UI design too. However, techies can get by with an over-complex and inconsistent UI whereas non-techies would probably just get confused, frustrated and give up.
To most techies, having a feature-rich application is often more important than having a really simple UI, whereas to most non-techies they are happy with not so many features and a really simple UI.
Of course, "feature-rich" and "really simple" don't always (often?) go together very well. I think the current trend in Gnome is a perfect example of this - they're ripping out all the useful functionality because they claim it complicates things too much. (I used to use Gnome exclusively... then it lost all the features I liked so I stopped).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Well, you're not just paying for the tribune EPG data service there's the element of the fund raising to funnel back funds back into development of OSS projects (in the form of feature bounties/etc)
There's also probably an economy of scale (I'd hope) that if there's a market for this and people find it valuable that as enough people came aboard the price could drop (this is my thining, I have no idea what the official LxMsuite folks are thinking officially)
I'd also hope/think maybe they'd be able to offer listings for other countries at some point if it takes hold.
The main point is that they are providing an alternative you can still use zap2it's free survey driven EPG data or the XMLTV screenscraping utility of your choosing. It is also an interesting proof of concept of a business model of serving the needs of an OSS community directly.
do I think it's at a magic price point? No... do I think there's a real value in offering listing data ala carte to individual consumers? Absolutely. What if (work with me here) you could buy a subscription to alternative Tivo listings, but not from "tivo" and it was cheaper than Tivo?
e.
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