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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...
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.
"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.
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
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.
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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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
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.
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.
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...
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
can you post a link to some folks that are working on this? I'd chip in if I knew more.
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.
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
-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.
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??
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.
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
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.
I look at it this way: If the original developer had DONE IT RIGHT in the first place, nobody would have to go through and re-write it now. If there's a configuration file that tells which keys are mapped to which functions (going by previous posts on this thread), then why isn't it used consistantly by EVERY screen?
It's great that OSS lets people fix things like this, but it should also let people slap bad programmers in the face. "You put in this menu and didn't use the right key binding, slap! No cookie."
Comment of the year
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?
"It's great that OSS lets people fix things like this, but it should also let people slap bad programmers in the face. "You put in this menu and didn't use the right key binding, slap! No cookie.""
Hey you get what you pay for. He wrote it for himself so he must like it.
If you do not like it.
1. Help him make it better.
2. Don't use it.
3. PAY him to make the change.
That is what gets me. You never gave him a cookie you are a free loader. If you do not like you have no right to do anything.
I had a problem with KDevelop. It is hard to figure out how to get a project to link with external libraries. I posted that it was harder than Ajunta. KDevelop is a great IDE for people not doing things like FLTK development. For KDE, QT and GTK it is wonderful. But I have no right to slap them because it does not work the way I want it to.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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..