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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...
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.
Why do you need a commercial service in the UK? The Radio Times provides an excellent free listings service for mythtv.
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.
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
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
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.
No, the zap2it support still exists in MythTV. The new listing service even says in their FAQ that their service will only be one of many options, including XMLTV and zap2it, for finding TV listings. Their goal is just to sell a more complete set of listings that "just works," contributes money back to MythTV, and has an eye toward continued development based on what subscribers request.
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Hauppauge WinTV 150 are supported in the devel ivtv branch and it's very stable. 250 are supported in the release, but are more expensive.
ivtv is the drivers for the cards that use the same chipset as the hauppauges.
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.
Of course, you said full port so I assume you also mean the backend. That would require two things. First, a video input (which the Mac mini may have, I just do not know). Second, the encoding would have to be handled via software as I do not think there is any encoding hardware in the mini.
From a form factor standpoint, it is perfect.
Get a tuner card first - especially something like PVR-350 that can encode TV to MPEG and simultaneously decode MPEGS to S-video/composite for playback.
:-)
My 1.2GHz machine uses 10-15% CPU encoding/recording one channel and, at the same time, playing something previously recorded at 1366x768 (with ads removed of course
Also, unless you have done some significant work around dealing with heat, you have a pretty noisy machine in your living room. Ick.
If anyone starts this type of project, get a low spec and very quiet machine, such as one based on an EPIA MII10000 (1.0GHz) or fanless Eden600. Add a PVR-350 and a *quiet*/fast/big disk (I have 550GB), and you are away.
Oh, and use KnoppMyth for a quick and painless install.
I do, although using OSX and the frontend port only - the Mac Mini, IMO wouldn't be up to the task of being both the frontend/backend due to not having an encoder, video in etc - you can use an external tuner true, but still. I have an backend on an mini-ITX motherboard somewhere in the house, and the Mac Mini connects to that.
The PVR-250 or PVR-350 are good choices if you want to use KnobbMyth or follow the Fedora Myth How To.
The PVR-150 is a good single tuner card, or even better, the PVR-500. The 500 is detected as two 150s (so you can record two programs simultaneously), takes up only one slot, and splits the coax input internally.
However, the 150 and 500 cards are supported only under the IVTV development branch (0.3.4). Although very stable, the driver is changing daily and requires more effort when compared to Fedora MythTV or KnobbMyth.
I never tried the knoppmyth, but gentoo myth was a sinch to setup. I had more problems with card drivers than anything. Also works on amd64.
As for that guy who was having dropped frames, he could probably get rid of them if he removed a filter or disabled the commercial detection.
I found that the commercial detection added about 20% cpu usage on my amd64 3400+, the deinterlacer added about 10%. As it stands with both commercial, deinterlacing, recording, encoding to mpeg4 and playing back a recording, I use almost 60% cpu, which means I can emerge my system or do pretty much anything else in the background without any problems.
A few rebuttals:
MythTV is packaged just like many of our favorite complex programs. KDE is a bitch to set up, but it's pretty easy to do "apt-get install kde"
Similarly, atrpms and others package MythTV for easy installation.
Installing MythTV is a 5 step process from bare hardware.
0.) put together an old box (I'm using an Athlon 1.4ghz in my recording box and and a Via M10000 in my playback-only box) and a cheap tuner card. The Hauppauge WinTV-D series for around $40 on ebay works great. The WinTV PVR's will work even better because they offload encoding from the machine, but they're not neccessary.
1.) Install Fedora Core (any version)
2.) Install the atrpms kickstart package
3.) apt-get update
4.) apt-get dist-upgrade
5.) apt-get install mythtv-suite
Voila, you've got a working MythTV install. The setup program will walk you through initial tasks like choosing a provider for XML tv listings.
To address the problems you're having with your machine, a few possibilities are:
* You're encoding at too high a resolution. - NTSC tv really tops out at 480x480. Using more pixels provides diminishing returns.
* You're encoding with too intense a codec - RTJpeg is great for low-processor encoding. That said, I'm using MPEG 4 at 480x480, 2400 bitrate for both live and recorded TV. This is on a 1.4ghz, and I've never seen a dropped frame.
* You may not have the proper video driver installed for X. I honestly don't know how the default drivers are for NVidia cards, but I know you can get a kick ass driver from *gasp* the vendor for most distros. I had this problem with my VIA chipset until the opensource unichrome via drivers became part of the X.org package. The default VESA driver just couldn't keep up with playback.
* You may not have DMA enabled on your hard drive, making it choke on simultaneous playback and recording, especially if using a low-compression or high-resolution (read: big files) codec.
* 640mb ram is overkill. I've got one 256 meg chip in my machine. It can't hurt to have more, but don't throw more ram at it.
* The denoiser may be part of your problem - but the deinterlacer works just fine for me. The noisy signal *may* be what is causing your jumpy recording, as the encoder has to treat each new frame as a whole new scene, due to so many pixels changing, but I'd be suprised if that alone could cause a 2.4ghz to frame-skip.
Hope some of that helps!
I run a Hauppauge PVR-350 in my box. It runs in a PIII 500 with 386mb ram and the processor is hardly ever even touched. Hardware encoding and decoding are done on the card itself. It's somewhat expensive (about $180 depending on where you get it), but if you have old hardware it's worth it to not have to build something with more power (although that is fun too).
I'll also be adding a PVR-250 (hardware encoding only) to my backend system as a second tuner eventually.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
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 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.
IMHO, there is no comparision. Simply put, KnoppMyth is the easiest and quickest method to get a MythTV based set-top box up and running. Of course, I am biased as I started KnoppMyth. KnoppMyth offers "out the box" support for the Hauppauge PVR 2/350, pcHDTV 2/3000 and the Air2PC. Once you have a backend running, you can even use the CD as a frontend! We also include, MPlayer, Xine, NFS, Samba, CyberMediaGate (uPnP server) and much, much more.
Kind regards,
Cecil
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
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
First off, the problem with the AIW cards is that they have broken, half-implemented Linux drivers, its not MythTV's fault.
And yes, there have been TONS of improvements over the course of the past year, its definitely worth revisiting, but not with an AIW.
Jarod Wilson, Mythaholic
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..