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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...
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
...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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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.
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.
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.
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