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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."
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.
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.
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).
I'm using the DVB grabber at the moment in the UK and agree that there is nothing wrong with the service.
I realise that the money can be put back into the development of MythTV to make it a better package - but where will the development occur? My guess is that it will be steered away from providing improvements on the DVB listings grabber so that the TechnoVera grabber can have a purpose.
I can't decide whether this is a good move or not!
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 use the RT grabber too and agree it's great value for money, being free and all. However it does have its flaws. It often doesn't contain episode names and numbers (making it hard for favourites to record just one copy of each episode), it doesn't use the "first showing" flag properly, etc. Basically it's fine for a barebones service but a pay-for service could contain much cleaner & better data.
I'd pay for a reasonably-priced UK service, just for the semi-guarantee that it's there to stay if nothing else. RT's feed has gone dead for several days at a time & you never quite know whether it's gone for good.
I should point out don't use MythTV; I use SageTV on Windows (ok now throw the rotten eggs). In my defence I do grab & parse from my Linux box...
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
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.
#
I actually watch far less TV since setting up my Myth system last August. Even my wife watches less TV now.
I just record everything we might like to watch, rather than watching any old crap thats on. And no time wasted watching adverts.
One advantage this has over TiVo's model is that they have no hardware costs (nor related hardware R&D costs) for the product. Which means they probably need a much, much lower subscriber base to cover their costs. Although, I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing them putting together some pre-fabricated MythTV boxes for the masses.
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
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
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.
The cost may be even less when compared to Tivo than many realize. If I am not mistaken Tivo and ReplayTV both charge their fee per unit. If this is $5 a month, can work with multiple machines in a household, instead of $60 a month for 4 tuners, it would be $5.