MythTV 0.19 Released

slummy writes "After much anticipation, MythTV 0.19 has been released. The release notes outline the new features and bug fixes, and the official announcement for this release is available on the MythTV site." From the release notes: "The major changes in this release [include]: LiveTV rewritten to support saving buffered content while watching. Signal Monitoring for DVB and pcHDTV recorders. Ending times may be changed while recordings are in progress. Playgroups allow for default playback options on recordings. Channel changes can be made across tuners without changing tuners manually first. New popup keyboard simplifies setup using remote. Preview schedule changes when making adjustments to recording schedules. Added ability to control MythFrontend through a telnet socket."

Comments

MythTV Usage?

[hunterkll]

I've been reading about MythTV, but was wondering, besides the bog standard DVR usage, what other usage people get out of it? Do you jack your game systems into it and record plays for later use? :) Do you play with vintage computers, and record demos? Do you have it record directly into an ipod compatable format? (can it do that?) What unique things can this system do?

Re:MythTV Usage?

[WTBF]

Do you have it record directly into an ipod compatable format?

I have mine encode certain shows ready for my iPod and they appear in iTunes as a podcast ready to put on my iPod.

I also enjoy how it can detect adverts, which is been getting better and better in recent releases - something that is unlikely to appear in some commercial PVR software.

The multiple frontend (and backend) ability is also great, as it means that I can record and watch a recording as someone else as watching something elsewhere in the house.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[zCyl]

Do you jack your game systems into it and record plays for later use? :)

With most TV capture cards, you wouldn't want to actually play the games through the capture card, since there is an added delay of around a second to a few seconds. For live TV this is not important, but that'd really mess with a gaming experience. But if you split the signal, play off of a TV, and route the spare signal through the capture card for recording, then you could do this.

What unique things can this system do?

One feature which I think is underappreciated is the networking ability. MythTV is split into a backend and a frontend, and multiple frontends can be connected to the backend at a time (although the number of sessions actively watching live tv is limited by the number of capture cards, a large number can watch recorded shows). You can even run MythTV via an ssh tunnel if you route port 3306 (for mysql) and port 6543 (for mythtv) through ssh. This means you can sit a server at home for your primary TV with a single capture card, and then watch recordings or live cable TV securely from any linux machine (laptop or desktop) that you have on a good network connection.

This is a convenient way to be able to watch different shows in different parts of the house without splitting the cable line or buying a lot of TVs, and also a convenient way to get access to cable TV in places that have good network connectivity, but no cable line or TV.

That's not a bad featureset for only requiring a $50 capture card and some time to set up MythTV.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Doug Lim]

Assuming you have a capture card that can capture directly to MPEG2 or MPEG4, you should be able to transfer and play MythTV recordings on anything that understands either of those. I presume a video ipod would be able to play MythTV recordings. (I've got a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 with hardware MPEG2 encoding and an EPIA MII 12000 motherboard, which has VIA Unichrome video for hardware accelerated MPEG2 decoding for playback).

"Bog standard DVR usage" sounds pretty mundane until you consider "standard" as the key word in that phrase. Last I heard, Tivos still used a proprietary video format unplayable on anything but the Tivo. I have a 45-60 minute train commute and I fairly regularly transfer recordings off my MythTV box onto my laptop and watch them during my commmute. Oh, and the program guide data feed doesn't require a subscription fee like Tivo does.

A MythTV setup is probably more comparable to commercially available hard-drive based DVRs that are starting to come onto the market for starting around $700, which is about what my MythTV setup cost me to build last year (WinTV PVR-350, EPIA MII 12000 motherboard, 512M memory, 120GB hard drive, 8x Dual-layer DVD+-RW drive, Venus 668B mini-ITX case). The cost would probably be slightly lower now.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please explain how you export shows?

If there is a web site you can just point to, that would be great.

I love MythTV but I haven't figured out yet how to get shows out, other than "write down the date and time the show was recorded, then try to figure out which file it is based on that."

Re:MythTV Usage?

[drig]

I don't have TV hooked into mine (no tuner card yet). I have a digital camera and we have tons of video and pictures of my kids. We also rip DVDs to the disk and play them later, and play mp3's. We're planning on getting a tuner card, so we'll also record TV. Plus, then we'll hook the camera into it and use MythPhone as a video phone.
We've had the system for only about 2 months, but we're finding it very fun and useful. It's definitely something we're going to keep, even without DVR capabilities.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Dot.Com.CEO]

With most TV capture cards, you wouldn't want to actually play the games through the capture card, since there is an added delay of around a second to a few seconds. For live TV this is not important, but that'd really mess with a gaming experience. But if you split the signal, play off of a TV, and route the spare signal through the capture card for recording, then you could do this.

Despite your authoritative tone, you are simply wrong.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can set up user jobs to do whatever you want. One of the variables you can use is the title I think. You could use this to copy to somewhere else and rename. Or you could have it encode the file to a different format.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[hunterkll]

Quite, I play my commdore 64 through my AIW card all the time, and I used to use my gamecube with it before I had a tv in my room. there's no delay whatsoever

Re:MythTV Usage?

[atrus]

Right and wrong. The capture card does not contribute significantly to the delay (there IS a delay though, but its on the order of ms, not seconds). The biggest delay is the recording spooling, which allows you to pause and rewind live TV. The encoder runs a few seconds ahead of the decoder/display to prevent any glitches. You'll see this in any PVR device. This is pretty much unuseable for games of course.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[NormalVisual]

No, actually he's not. I see the same behavior on my v18.1 system with a PVR-250 and PVR-350. The delay exists because the "live TV" signal that's displayed on the screen is actually played from the buffered data, and it takes a short period of time for the system to buffer enough data before it displays it. The same delay is seen during channel changes. In my particular case, it's about two seconds.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[RelaxedTension]

It does a bunch of things, not all unique:
- Split frontend/backend to spread the load around. Multiple backends can be slaved together for a lot of recording cards and storage, and lighter frontend-only machines can be used just for viewing. Or do both on one machine.
- Tivo-like recording tools, live tv pause/rewind, and commercial skip
- Play and rip DVD's, play video files (avi, mpg, wmv, etc)
- Play CD's and online music in various formats, as well as rip music to various formats
- Obligatory picture viewer
- Basic web interface
- Weather info
- Game interface for mame, snes, Linux games, etc.
- RSS news interface
- SIP compatible phone setup
- Extensible plugin architecture
- Web interface to most of the functionality

The plugin/addon part is where the fun is. A variety of people write stuff for it, like streaming recordings to a web browser, recipe lookups, etc. I realize there is a lot of etc.'s in this post, but that's the bestway to describe a lot of it, there is a lot more detail and variety available.

A lot of of people bitch about the setup, but using the right hardware and a good guide like Jarod's for Fedora Core makes it quite easy. And if you enjoy tweaking or full-on code and feature changing, then that is available as well since it's open source.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I rip all of my Daughter's DVDs to my Myth Box. This saves the wear and tear of having her attempt to put it in a DVD Player.

I have some of my shows re-encoded to an iPod compatible format. Using a script that runs after the encoding I create an entry via RSS and then access it via iTunes.

Great to play some emulator games.

Ability to stream audio/video.

I can use any PC and bootup the frontend from the Knoppmyth CD which will allow the ability to access all of my Myth box's features.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[inter alias]

I'd say it's way better than the average DVR. The client-server model is extremely useful.

I have 4 frontends (living room,bedroom,laptop,other pc), all of which stream the shows from the server.

By the way, take a look at the Retro theme and the interface theme made by the same guy, they're far better than the mythtv-supplied themes.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Pii]

Last I heard, Tivos still used a proprietary video format unplayable on anything but the Tivo.

Not true. Tivo adds a proprietary wrapper to an ordinary MPEG2 files for storage on the hard drive. This wrapper can be peeled off quite easily leaving a standard MPEG2 file.

Additionally, the new version of the Tivo To Go software has options to reformat the stored video to be transferred to an iPod or PSP.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I originally built my MythTV to be a fancy VCR as well, but its first major use was when my roommates downloaded Stargate SG1 and we watched it on the mythbox. Since then (its been a few years), its purpose has been storing roughly 600 gigs of TV shows, cartoons, and movies and about 20 gigs of music or so.

Now Myth's use is the downloading, organization, storage, burning, and watching of this collection, and its used quite often for this purpose. It's been well worth the cost of the project over the last couple of years and as of the end of the summer, I don't even have a TV tuner in it anymore, just use the front end as a fancy interface. I recently got a webcam for it, so hopefully it'll now be used as to communicate with my family.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[seann]

gc
n64
ps/2
xbox
nintendo

no delays

guys on crack

hook us up?

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have been using the system daily for a year or so.

1. We do the tivo-like thing. Works great, and just like tivo, changes the way you watch tv. Will throw the ability to blip commercials in there, too.

2. Great for sporting events - you have your own instant replay.

3. Watch at up to 2x speed without pitch increase. Sounds trivial to some, but I record 5 nights of Charlie Rose's hour-long talk show a week and get through it in about 1.5 hours after typically wiping one show and blipping bits of the others.

4. Watch TV on PC/Mac over the network. Access to live channels and the whole library of recorded shows this way. Great for when I want to have TV on while I'm working in my office on something that doesn't require high concentration.

5. Client-Server. Just got 2 HD tuner cards in, am about to construct the next-gen TV server for the house. Nice thing about this is I can build a big, beefy, hot, noisy, huge RAID TV server (with up to 4 HD tuners) and hide it in the basement, then build a none-too-powerful, none-too-big, silent MythTV PC for the TV room.

6. Server on 24x7 - this lets me also host my music library with the unrelated-to-MythTV mt-daapd server (looks like iTunes music sharing to iTunes on Mac/Win). Can set this up so I can tunnel into it from work and have my whole library at a distance.

7. MythMusic - but only if they've fixed Goom (visualiser) since 0.17. Goom is the best visualizer of any I've seen, and can work with MythMusic (which if the truth be told, needs a little work).

8. Weather - currently screen-scraped from TWC and MSNBC. Works great. Just like having the Weather Channel but without Zamfir.

9. RSS feeds - including: /.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Afrosheen]

The Retro theme has become the default skin for the OSD and the menus in Knoppmyth for a few point releases now. It's beautiful, functional, and a joy to use.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Afrosheen]

Setup, schmetup. With Knoppmyth it's dead easy, and there's a new release just around the corner. Cecil has been hard at working killing bugs in preparation for this very Myth release. Head over to mysettopbox.tv and read more.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[evilviper]

it means that I can record and watch a recording as someone else as watching something elsewhere

Wow... Just, wow.

Can anyone decipher that?

Re:MythTV Usage?

[evilviper]

No, actually he's not.

No, actually you are.

The delay exists because the "live TV" signal that's displayed on the screen is actually played from the buffered data, and it takes a short period of time for the system to buffer enough data before it displays it.

Bzzzt. You've got a MPEG capture card, which introduces significant delays. A standard capture card can be very near as responsive as a TV, although it's not exactly a simple task to watch it live and record it simultaneously.

Your second problem is MythTV is buffering far more data than necessary. Using something like MPlayer directly will vastly cut-down on the delay.

Ironically, he is right, even though he hasn't been modded up, while you are wrong, and have been repeatedly modded up...

Bad mods, no cookie!

Re:MythTV Usage?

[NormalVisual]

I'm pretty sure I was correct. The parent poster had implied that there wasn't a delay sufficient enough to interfere with gaming on a Myth system. In the several months that I've been using my Myth system, I most definitely have experienced a perceivable delay. I certainly could reduce it by cutting the buffering (at present, it's running at about 14 megabytes, or around two seconds), but I'd be doing so at the risk of running into problems if the system gets tied up doing something else long enough for the buffer to be exhausted (swapping, deleting files, etc.).

Simply playing through a capture card isn't the problem - playing through a system configured as a usable PVR is, and that's what the discussion was about.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[acid_zebra]

I've been using it for ~ ayear now, it's permanently got around 3 months of recorded TV on it (which gets scanned for commercial breaks, cut up, and then converted to xvid to save space), I use it (of course) to watch live TV (the 'pause' and tv guide functions rule) , it's got all my downloaded movies/series on it (it uses RSS+bittorrent to get new stuff automatically), it's got and plays my MAME and SNES rom collection, it indexes and plays my MP3 collection (from a network share on a different comp).

It also keeps the GF off my back (honey, you can't watch Charmed now (because I'm going to watch $SFSERIES) but I'm recording it for you :)

I don't have/plan on having a video ipod any time soon but as I can turn TV into xvid I can't imagine it'll be very hard to save a copy to ipod format, mencoder and transcode are some of the most powerful video conversion tools I've seen.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[edooper]

I love the frontend/backend setup of Mythtv. I have a xbox-based frontend (cheap, silent, great picture quality and portable), and a dual backend setup. In my server that is always on anyway I have one capture card, and in my desktop machine I have another capturecard. If there is more than one show to record at one time, my server (master backend) can wake up my desktop machine (slave backend) using wake-on-lan and have the slave backend record shows as well.

I have been using MythTV for about three years now, it is absolutely rock solid.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

it means that I can record and watch a recording as someone else as watching something elsewhere

Can anyone decipher that?

It means that the myth box can stream shows over the network. Basically it's a network file share with movies on it + the ability to record shows from the tuner cards.

But only with a wireless LAN and a laptop will the true decadence of this system be fully realised!

Re:MythTV Usage?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

That's not a bad featureset for only requiring a $50 capture card and some time to set up MythTV.

If by some time you mean about three weekends work that requires an almost sysadm level of linux knowladge, then no, the feature set is not worth what the hassle I could avoid by purchasing a TiVo.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[rogabean]

Using mythstreamTV you can stream anywhere with a net connection as well. I use my mythTV box to stream recorded TV and Live TV to myself at work during ummmmm "breaks" *wink*

The best solution I could find for doing that with a Windows solution was using Orb.com, but the experience wasn't as nice and had issues with some firewalls.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[dheltzel]

Not me. My brain came back with:

Parse error: core dumped

It took 3 minutes to get my brain rebooted, then I read your post and the quoted part made it happen again!

I need a hardware upgrade, but I'm holding out until the dual core Opterons get cheaper.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[idonthack]

One feature which I think is underappreciated is the networking ability.

Ohhh yes. This is amazingly convenient because all of the PVRs or computers connected to the server have all the same settings and videos. If I'm in the middle of a show and someone wants to use that TV or computer, I can go to any computer in the house and just resume where I left off.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace "else as" with "else is" and clarity will coalesce.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

Tivo adds a proprietary wrapper to an ordinary MPEG2 files for storage on the hard drive. This wrapper can be peeled off quite easily leaving a standard MPEG2 file.

I believe this "peeled off quite easily" only applies if you are running Windows. Am I wrong? Similarly, the TiVo To Go only is for Windows, therefore, to reformat for iPod I would also need Windows.

Therefore, while I find my TiVo to be wonderful in the living room, I can't get useful video from it unless I either

1. Hack my TiVo
2. Run Windows and the TTG and other software to do the "peeled off quite easily".

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[PrettyGirl]

I've spent hours trying to get rid of TiVo's proprietary wrapper but it just isn't working for me. Would you mind telling me your secret?

Re:MythTV Usage?

[evilviper]

I certainly could reduce it by cutting the buffering (at present, it's running at about 14 megabytes, or around two seconds), but I'd be doing so at the risk of running into problems if the system gets tied up doing something else long enough for the buffer to be exhausted (swapping, deleting files, etc.).

I believe you've completely and totally missed my point.

Simply playing through a capture card isn't the problem - playing through a system configured as a usable PVR is, and that's what the discussion was about.

My system is configured as a usable DVR, and it can playback just fine without any buffering. It does not run MythTV or Freevo.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[evilviper]

Ah hah!

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Sven The Space Monke]

MythTV, when playing live TV, has a "Minimum Buffer" setting. Video won't play until the buffer has that minimum amount, then it starts playing at the beginning of the buffer. In 18.1, the default is 50 megs (I leave mine at the default). This is what causes the delay.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[Sven The Space Monke]

The RSS + bittorrent thing sounds pretty cool - got a link to how you did that?

Additional firewire support

[Mean_Nishka]

Since I am stuck with lousy Scientific Atlanta boxes from Comcast, I thought this was the most exciting new feature:

Added firewire and external channel changing support for SA3250HD

Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Plug]

Ubuntu Breezy packages for MythTV can be found at http://deb.thehunter.ws/. Huge thanks to those Drunken Caffeinated Monkeys.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[ThreeE]

This would seem to be a bad idea -- installing .debs from someplace random... YMMV.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Bronster]

Yep, around about as stupid as installing .tar.gzs from someplace random. Besides, you can always download the source files and build the .debs yourself after satisfying yourself that it is indeed the same source code.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[ThreeE]

There's a big difference from installing from the MythTV site than, well, someplace random. Some guy named "TheHunter.ws"...

But hey, like I said, YMMV. And you are right -- building the debs yourself from the MythTV.org CVS is a much better idea. Plus, you can get the debs from Ubuntu anyway -- they'll get the latest update sometime soon...

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if your compiler has been comprimised? And how can you make sure you are really "you".

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[EnronHaliburton2004]

And yet that is what most Debian Stable and Ubuntu users do for new third-party products.

If you want PHP5 for Debian, you need to download it from some unofficial Debian site. Some people know the site and trust the packages. To me, it's a "Random site".

This is a very common practice.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Bronster]

I know that I'm really me, and I don't give a rats arse what some Anonymous Coward thinks.

Something like that anyway.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[zippthorne]

You should always build your first compiler by hand. and build everything else from that.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Anonymous Coward]

If you didn't care, you wouldn't have replied. And who's to say that I am not you?

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Bronster]

My god, that's a bit deep for slashdot. I didn't reply because I cared, I replied because I could. To be less glib, I replied because I was procrastinating (I mean, I was waiting for my PearPC emulator to download security updates at the glacial pace it does so. Yes, that's it. Waiting).

Er, whatever. Now I need to become you and go on rampage. Woot. Go me, er... us.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[erikdalen]

php5 is in the official debian archives.

I've been downloading the mythtv packages from:
http://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[manno]

A huge thanks to you for sharing it. I'm going to try to run myth for the 3000, time. Probably with the same success as the first 2999 times though.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Plug]

You're welcome, but they are not my packages - I just found and published the link.

Re:Ubuntu Breezy packages

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Arg, I meant to say it isn't in "Debian Stable", and it wasn't in Debian Testing the last time I checked.

Although, it's hard to research this when the http://packages.debian.org/ is sick.

How long untill KnoppMyth has it ready?

[boy_afraid]

This is wonderful news, but how long until KnoppMyth is ready for the rest of us to play with?

I've got my R5A30.2 working with 95% success and will be replacing all of my Tivos in my house very very soon. I already have the backend working, and frontend working in the living room.

Re:How long untill KnoppMyth has it ready?

[mad.frog]

I thought KnoppMyth sounded like a great idea, so I downloaded it a few weeks ago to try out.

Problem #1: the setup menus don't work with USB keyboards. (Or so I learned after going to their site -- at first I just thought the computer had frozen.) There is a workaround ("unplug and replug the keyboard after you get to that menu"), which was deemed simple enough to postpone fixing this one indefinitely. (I don't think I've owned a non-USB keyboard for... oh, 8 or 10 years. I certainly don't have one in the house these days.) Annoying, but how many times will I encounter this -- it's a setup menu right? So, I slog on.

Problem #2: after I got to that elegant workaround, it got as far as the network setup menu... but when it tried to find a DHCP server, it apparently was unable to deal with the fact that eth0 wasn't actually connected to anything on this computer (it's running a wireless card). It dealt with this unexpected problem by... dropping to the shell command prompt.

So, that download went into the recycling bin.

Look, I realize that this is a hard problem, but promoting something as a LiveCD implies (to me, anyway) that it Will Just Work. (And if it can't Just Work on your hardware, it should be able to detect this and fail gracefully.)

Could I have fixed all this myself? Yeah,I guess. But I have better things to do. (Like reading Slashdot and bitching when free software doesn't work perfectly the first time.)

wow... It never ceases to amaze me

[enrico_suave]

MythTV just keeps getting better and better. I can't wait until .19 (presumably) gets folded into knoppmyth (yeah I know, just build it from scratch using one of the excellent guides like Jarrod's Fedora Core howto... but knoppmyth does make it so easy...)

e.

Re:wow... It never ceases to amaze me

[Blob Pet]

I'm with you on this. It's simply easier with knoppmyth.

Re:wow... It never ceases to amaze me

[XchristX]

I basically agree. But one main wierdness in knoppmyth is that you can't "apt-get dist-upgrade" w/out rendering your box useless (zillions of broken dependencies). The only way to upgrade is to use the auto-upgrade script in knoppmyth installer which backs up your sql stuff, your home dir and etc dir thru mythbackup, then wipes out your root partition and installs the current release. Problem is that I spend weeks installing & configging stuff there (firewall, apache .htaccess for mythweb, samba tweaks for good network performance, most difficult was compiling the ivtv 0.4 drivers and getting them to work on the new Hauppauge PVR-150 together with the tv-out on the older 350) that I don't wanna repeat (not all the config files are in "/etc" & older config files may not work in newer versions unless apt fixes them automatically), so it would be nice if some dedicated knoppmyth apt repos were kept from where we could update/upgrade stuff using apt.

Re:wow... It never ceases to amaze me

[Cat_Byte]

It has gotten significantly easier with the newer versions of lirc and ivtv. Ivtv used to take forever to configure to work with your tuner card(s). Now, you just install and modprobe it....done. On Fedora you can install the entire app with 'yum install mythtv-suite'. I set mine up from scratch after reinstalling on a bigger HD and it took about 15 mins total. The first time I set up myth it was more like 15 days...

Windows?

[hunterkll]

I've looked, but they seem to miss this important feature annoucement, or does it just lack? Does it run on windows?

Re:Windows?

[WTBF]

There is a .Net client that has very limited functionality that runs on windows, but the proper mythtv stuff itself doesn't.

However, if you want a Mythtv box I would really reccomend dedicating it to mythtv and so the operating system is fairly unimportant as long as it will run mythtv.

Re:Windows?

[hunterkll]

the post was meant as a joke :)

Re:Windows?

[BoldAndBusted]

Of course, you can share the recordings with Winblows boxes via Samba. There's even a script included to make human-friendly filenames for the shows.

Re:Windows?

[zCyl]

There is a .Net client that has very limited functionality that runs on windows, but the proper mythtv stuff itself doesn't.

The WinMyth frontend you refer to also seems to fail or crash for a lot of people who try it. It's still fairly solidly in the developmental stage.

Re:Windows?

[ThreeE]

Are you referring to nuvexport, or is there something that does this during the transcoding job?

Re:Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> The WinMyth frontend you refer to also seems to fail or crash for a lot of people who try it.

That's to make Windoze people feel right at home.

Re:Windows?

[WTBF]

If your card supports hardware encoding, like a Nova-T (dvb) or a Win-Tv 150, 250 etc (analogue) then it automatically encodes into mpeg2 that can be played back on windows.

You can also set the recording profile to automatically encode mjpeg/nuv recordings into mpeg2 or 4 somewhere in the setup.

Re:Windows?

[ThreeE]

All true, but this where do the filenames get changed to something human readable? Right now, all my files are like this: 1008_20060212110000_20060212113000.nuv -- which basically is [channel # + 1000]_[startdatetime]_[enddatetime].nuv.

Re:Windows?

[Jetson]

Right now, all my files are like this: 1008_20060212110000_20060212113000.nuv -- which basically is [channel # + 1000]_[startdatetime]_[enddatetime].nuv.

Actually, it's not "channel + 1000", but "video source 1, channel 008". Myth can support multiple input cards that have lineups from different sources or record in different formats.

Re:Windows?

[ThreeE]

Good info -- I didn't knw that. I would be interested in knowing how to get the filenames into human readable format and out of the .nuv container into a standard .avi or .mpeg file. I can do it now via nuvexport, but I do that manually on a file by file basis. I suspect there is a way to include this in the transcoding or other post-processing job within MythTV -- but I haven't figured it out yet.

MythTV is great. I would never suggest it to someone new to linux, but with a bit of knowledge and some persistance, this software is a gem.

Re:Windows?

[calethix]

MythstreamTV allows you to stream recorded shows to Windows PCs.

It's not quite as good as watching it directly on your MythTV box but it's decent.

Re:Windows?

[rtos]

I've looked, but they seem to miss this important feature annoucement, or does it just lack? Does it run on windows?

I know the post was meant as a joke. :) But I really do think there would be some value in having a Windows mythfrontend available, if not a backend. Unfortunately, all that is available now is WinMyth. And that doesn't work in most cases.

Part of the problem IMHO, is the absolute lack of documentation for the MythTV protocol.

Re:Windows?

[geckofiend]

If you have a hardware encoder it's already in MPEG format just with a nuv extension. .19 uses the proper extension...

Re:Windows?

[Redbaran]

Techincally, I don't think that would be a feature, but more of a bug.

Re:Windows?

[ncc74656]

Of course, you can share the recordings with Winblows boxes via Samba. There's even a script included to make human-friendly filenames for the shows.

There's also a shell extension that looks up filenames in the MythTV database and makes show metadata available to Explorer in the details view. It's part of DSMyth (which also includes DirectShow filters for the MPEG-4 recordings MythTV can create, but I don't use that part of it since all of my captures are MPEG-2).

Re:Windows?

[ImaLamer]

A good alternative for Windows systems is GB-PVR:

http://www.gbpvr.com/

It is free, as in beer, and runs great on XP, 2000 and even Media Center (2004 & 2005). I've been using it on a Windows 2000 system with great success (the mainboard sucks and most features aren't supported in Linux, damn HP!). The PC has a 900 Mhz Celeron, 192 MB of RAM and the WinTV-PVR 500 (dual tuner) - works great, I watch a show while it records two with no problems.

Re:Windows?

[oncebitten]

Have you tried Knoppmyth with front end only option? Or, if you want to repartition your drives, Knoppmyth will do that too.

As for the lack of documentation, use the (doxygen'd) source, luke (ok, even this site admits to the lack of documentation of the protocol, but, a good programmer should be able to figure it out).

Re:Windows?

[John Hurliman]

The backend most likely will never run on Windows, but last I recall the frontend was capable of compiling on Windows given the right environment setup (the UI is QT based, so you need to compile against QT for Windows). Not sure if there are binaries or if this is even the case anymore, I haven't been on the mailing list for over a year.

Re:Windows?

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Thanks for the info, I'm installing it now. It looks pretty interesting.

Re:Windows?

[Cat_Byte]

If you add the line to the DB to allow connections from anywhere on your network (or specific IPs), you can install the codecs and click on the 'recorded shows' in mythweb. I do that all the time and it works great. Cole2K has the Mythtv codecs included. I wasn't a big fan of mythstream of the windows front-end.

Re:Windows?

[calethix]

I agree, that beats the mythstreamtv interface. Thanks for the tip :)

Did you set up your browser somehow to handle myth://... links or just change them to a samba share?

Re:Windows?

[lagerbottom]

HTF does that translate to having a windows frontend

Some comments

[slummy]

I just installed this new version, it took about 2 hours to compile on my 800mhz Slackware box. The most significant change that I saw was the speed at which the backend handles channel changes. I think they re-worked the live-tv buffer a bit.

The new default theme also caught my eye, they based it off Microsoft Windows Media Center but of course added the MythTV/Linux flavor :)

Re:Some comments

[whmac33]

Is the channel change speed significantly faster or slower? What capture card do you use?

Thanks

Re:Some comments

[slummy]

I use a Hauppage PVR-150, the channel change speed has increased by at least 50%.

Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[TechyImmigrant]

MythTV is a bitch to configure.

I have to lspci, then spend weeks messing around with mythtv-config and mythfrontend to try and get it to receive TV. I've done this with three different cards, all of which are supposed to work with MythTV and still the dumb program fails to be able to do the most basic things, such as let me change channel, or use more than one card at a time, or be able to use an NTSC/ATSC card in anything other than NTSC mode.

It's not like I'm uneducated in these things. I was a principle engineer on a DVB set top box in the past. I do have a clue. However MythTV takes all that is obvious about television and renders it obscure and crash prone.

The thing they need to fix is autoconfigure code that scans for TV cards, asks you some basic questions (OTA/Cable/SAT? What country are you in?) and works out the rest, scanning for available NTSC/ATSC/DVB-T/DVB-S/DVB-C/DVB-H, logging them, mapping them against known channels (all available from the feds in the US and public sources in other countries).

My TV gets by without knowing what channels are being sent. It just finds them. MythTV should be able to work out of the box in the same way.

It would be nice if it could actually watch or import DVDs, like it claims it can. WatchDVD drops out after the first intro section, playing only 1 section. Import DVD does nothing. Yes I did install the CSS library. It did not help.

MythTV needs a configuration and functionality fix before they address minor UI issues.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[slummy]

I had absolutely no trouble configuring my box the first time. I used a Hauppage PVR-150 which is nicely supported by the IVTV drivers.
In fact, I found it quite easy once the proper modules were installed. I even have my remote working seamlessly. It just takes a bit of dedication the first time around, but after that it'll be a breeze.
Don't give up, there is always a brighter future in store!

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problem getting it configured to run with my WinTV PVR USB2 device which is not supposed to run with it at all. I can watch and decode DVD without a problem. I am not *uber* geek like most people claim to be on this site. However, with Jarrod's howto and Fedora 4 I was able to get this up and running in less then a half day. I used to be a die hard TIVO fanatic but now I don't know how I got by without MythTV plus now I have a reason to have a Fedora server at home that I can add stuff to it.

I just trialed BeyondTV and SageTV on a Windows box and all I had was problems getting that to work on the most supported OS on the planet! BTV and STV just kept crashing out on me, but right now my Fedora MythTV box has been running for 48+ hours without a need for me to reboot.

Installing MythTV is a breeze just follow Jarod's howto. Heck, I even build 0.19 from source but I want to wait for ATRPMs to update just in case I'm missing something.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

So go buy a TiVo like the rest of the lusers and leave us alone.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[swillden]

I can't comment about your other complaints, since I don't use Myth as a PVR (we don't watch TV). But these two make no sense:

It would be nice if it could actually watch or import DVDs, like it claims it can. WatchDVD drops out after the first intro section, playing only 1 section.

Huh? You do realize that "Watch DVD" just runs mplayer, right? And mplayer works just fine. There is something seriously wrong with your setup.

Import DVD does nothing. Yes I did install the CSS library.

Did you also install the mythdvd package? If you can elaborate on what "does nothing" means, there are probably plenty of people here who can tell you how to fix it.

MythTV needs a configuration and functionality fix before they address minor UI issues.

Perhaps the TV-watching part is hard to set up; the parts of MythTV that I use were trivial to set up. In any case, if you don't like Myth and don't want to invest the time into making it work, there are plenty of commercial options out there. It sounds like they would serve your needs better.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[ThreeE]

DVDs with menus are difficult (impossible) to get to work using mplayer. However, xine does a great job with them. You can change the player in MythTV to xine -- combine that with CSS libs and it will work fine.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[croddy]

Are you serious? That doesn't even remotely describe my experience with MythTV. Everything worked smoothly right out of the box -- spending a 5-10 minutes reading the install documentation *can* be very helpful.

There's a good reason your TV gets by without any metadata about the channels it's receiving -- it doesn't have any functionality which makes use of that metadata. It doesn't have to schedule recordings or resolve conflicts. It just has to tune what you tell it to tune, and light up your CRT with the signal.

All that aside, it's very rude for you to criticize something that people are writing and giving away freely on their own time and their own dime. Lots of people have used it successfully. If it doesn't work for you, track down the bugs and either report them or patch them. Vague, general complaints about the developers' priorities are completely out of line.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[grungebox]

You might consider GB-PVR. Windows-based, easy to set up, and free (though not open-source). The software's skins are lacking, so if the wife-acceptance factor is critical, that might hurt. All in all, I've been happy with it. There are some significant problems (priority lists are hard to set up, automatically interrupts live recording to start a scheduled recording without prompting you...something that always seems to happen during important live events like the Super Bowl, etc...) but it's certainly good for what it is. It also has media functions built in, and I've had no problems playing/ripping DVDs. I'm sure Myth is more customizable, but GB-PVR is certainly not too bad for the lack of effort involved.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[BoldAndBusted]

I'm sorry for your troubles. I've had MythTV running solid since August of 2004. No crashes outside of the few days needed to configure it. What you are asking for is for a nicely boxed product that has an army of QA testers and UI analysts to make a very polished product geared for non-technical users. MythTV is, as stated on mythtv.org, geared towards developers.

Of course, anyone is free to try to create what you are asking for out of MythTV and sell it. You are welcome to join the project and submit solid code to implement the features you suggest are important to MythTV.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[rtos]

MythTV is a bitch to configure.

Actually, I found that MythTV itself was rather easy to configure. What was hard was all of the subsystems required by MythTV.

For example, on a fresh Gentoo install, I have to get audio working (ALSA or OSS), and then video (Xorg, nvidia drivers, tv-out, etc.) and then get the capture/tuner card working (bttv, ivtv, etc.). And get them all working nicely together...

Once I had all that done, MythTV was a snap to configure and have up and running.

From experience I've found that when building a new MythTV, it's best to test/debug each subsystem as you go along.... most times the problem you are having has nothing to do with "MythTV" per se.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[calethix]

Did you set yours up recently? I had some difficulties getting my PVR-150 to work with the IVTV drivers. Once I got the right IVTV drivers, MythTV itself wasn't too bad. Anyway, I was just curious if there had been more improvements in the IVTV drivers since I installed it (around last summer I think).

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[SynapseLapse]

It would be nice if it could actually watch or import DVDs, like it claims it can. WatchDVD drops out after the first intro section, playing only 1 section. Import DVD does nothing. Yes I did install the CSS library. It did not help


I had the same problem on my box since Mplayer doesn't support menus on dvds at all. Install Xine and then change your Watch DVD to call
xine -pfhq --no-splash dvd://
instead.
It works great AND Xine let's you fastforward/skip those obnoxious FBI messages at the start of DVDs.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[ajs]

If it were rude to critisize open source, then Slashdot would be Miss Manners' nemesis. Fortunately, such criticism is part of the process, and has been since at least when I got involved, back in '88.

If you work on something like MythTV, you expect a ton of BWCing, but not all of it is bad. Often, the complaints of users demonstrate those areas that your software is truly lacking. Of course, detailed bug reports are ALWAYS more helpful, but if all the brain power you can spare is that requried for a rant... well, don't think you're the first.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[geckofiend]

So... Which closed source competitor do you work for now? That's about the only reason I can see for spouting nonsense like you have.

I have to lspci, then spend weeks messing around with mythtv-config and mythfrontend to try and get it to receive TV
If you have a properly configured VFL, ivtv or DVB card it's as simple as selecting the card type from a drop down list.

It's not like I'm uneducated in these things. I was a principle engineer on a DVB set top box in the past.I do have a clue.
So to break it to you but no... you don't

However MythTV takes all that is obvious about television and renders it obscure and crash prone.Wow, I guess I better do something about the Myth backend and frontends I've been running since 18.1 without a reboot or crash.

The thing they need to fix is autoconfigure code that scans for TV cards, asks you some basic questions
You mean like the channel scanner that's been in there for ages?

My TV gets by without knowing what channels are being sent. It just finds them. MythTV should be able to work out of the box in the same way.
Take your TV to China, the UK and Germany and see how many channels it finds. Then see check out it's handy on-creen guide...

It would be nice if it could actually watch or import DVDs, like it claims it can. WatchDVD drops out after the first intro section, playing only 1 section. Import DVD does nothing. Yes I did install the CSS library. It did not help.
Watch DVD launches the DVD player software YOU configured it to use. How is it Myth's fault if your own damn software doesn't work? As for Import DVD doing nothing sounds like you didn't bother to compile with it enabled.

Of course all of the above is readily avialable in the documentation but since you're such an expert and all I guess you can't bother to read that eh?

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[sulli]

I found that MythTV itself was rather easy to configure. What was hard was all of the subsystems required by MythTV.

And this, dear reader, is why hardly anyone uses MythTV. Who has time to figure out that subsystems are involved, let alone configure them?!

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[kernelpanicked]

You might want to check out the book Linux Power Toys II. I work with one of the authors, and sat in on a demonstration of setting up MythTV. The demo covered the same setup described, in detail, in that book. It's well laid out and will get you going with a complete setup, within a couple hours.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[geckofiend]

You're kidding right? Tens of thousands of people in the USA alone use MythTV. Myth is used in several commercial products as well.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[nmos]

You really should consider reading the setup guide. If you were running incompatable hardware then I could see how it would be difficult but otherwise it's really pretty easy. In short, if it's taking you weeks with supported hardware then you really need to stop thinking you already know it all and try just following the instructions.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy to set up? Maybe if you're in the US and are using an analog recording card with scheduling information included with the program. Just try getting the damned thing to work with a DVB card in Europe - it's next to impossible, despite the program claiming to support it. Even when it does work, it works very poorly, and the scheduling information is even more difficult to set up than MythTV, despite using the same sources.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Grey Ninja]

And this, dear reader, is why hardly anyone uses MythTV. Who has time to figure out that subsystems are involved, let alone configure them?!

And this, dear reader, is why hardly anyone plays Windows games. Who has time to figure out that subsystems are involved, let alone configure them?!

See how equally ridiculous it sounds the other way around? Video, sound, etc. are all BASIC parts of the OS.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Ryan Amos]

If you don't enjoy spending hours setting up a distro and installing MythTV, use a prerolled PVR distro like KnoppMyth. KnoppMyth is integrated with the MythTV development process and includes current drivers for many tuner cards that aren't supported in the default kernel. It will also download and install NVidia drivers, basically everything except libdvdcss (for obvious reasons; but you can download and compile it yourself easily.)

The KnoppMyth installer assumes you're installing to an IDE hard drive though. You may have to get in and tweak the fstab after installation on SATA. I've been using KnoppMyth for about 6 months though, and it is very nice, easy to install, and comes with all the bells and whistles already configured.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

Mplayer doesn't support menus on dvds at all.

Uhhh... is it just me, or is that like a major flaw? Maybe I should wait for myth 0.20.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

What DVDs don't come with menus? Any of them? Why isn't this flaw proximately documented? Why isn't this post moderated above all the DUHWORKS4ME people?

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

Equally ridiculous? Are you freaking serious? Playing games on Windows actually works. MythTv doesnt for 99% of the people out there. Instead they spend weeks tweaking a buggy system when instead they could go buy a brand new Tivo for less that $100 and be up and running in 5 minutes.

MythTV fanboys are some of the most retarded fanboys out there. There are other people that irrationally love a product, but at least their product works.

Moron.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[turpie]

I have to lspci, then spend weeks messing around with mythtv-config and mythfrontend to try and get it to receive TV
If you have a properly configured VFL, ivtv or DVB card it's as simple as selecting the card type from a drop down list.

That's the real problem, it's not MythTV that's difficult it's Linux.
Configuring v4l & co. is a pain in the ass.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[urbaer]

All that aside, it's very rude for you to criticize something that people are writing and giving away freely on their own time and their own dime. Lots of people have used it successfully. If it doesn't work for you, track down the bugs and either report them or patch them. Vague, general complaints about the developers' priorities are completely out of line.

But it's not a bug, it's a feature request. I can hardly see a bugrep looking like:

Bug: MythTV is a pain in the ass to set up
When installing MythTV on FC4 version blah, running on my machine with specs of foo, I found that the setup sucked. I traced this to line 620 of such and such, where the code rather strangely skips over the call to function display_user_friendly_setup. The function itself seems to have accidently had all of it's code removed... oh no wait... it was never there was it?

getting much love :).

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[ThreeE]

DVD playback is not performed by MythTV -- it is performed by the player you select. MythTV with mplayer will still play the DVD, it just won't play the menus. It's not a flaw with MythTV, it's a flaw (well, kind of) with mplayer.

We don't get upset that you aren't wearing a DUHIMCLUELESS tatoo on your forehead, so we won't push for mplayer to "proximately" document this "flaw." Plus, this stuff is all free in case you haven't noticed, so I'm not sure bitching at the coders is a winning strategy here anyway...

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Richard Jones]

AMEN to this. The last time I tried to install mythtv I had to get another user to dump some of his mysql table rows so I could get my channels configured!!! This despite the presence of fully-functioning channels configuration that other apps (like Xine) are happy to use...

I had to reinstall the OS recently, and now I'm just using Xine to watch TV. I haven't figured how to make it record, but then I never did get mythtv to record either (mythtv 0.19 will enable recording of LiveTV, which is a great feature!) I started down the track of reinstalling mythtv, but when it got to configuring the channels, I hit that ugly brick wall again.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[amigabill]

> MythTV is a bitch to configure.

MythTV itself hasn't been that bad. I've had a terrible time with Gentoo and the pcHDTV3000 cards I've got though. I'd like to get both these cards pulling in Cable from Comcast, which is supposed to be possible, but I haven't got any channels to check out yet. There's apparently no cable equivalent of the channel scanner utils for OTA antennas, or at least I haven't found such a thing. mythsetup's channel scan doesn't work either, but it should be possible to get things working without myth. Maybe that'll be better in 0.19, but Linux is really the hard thing to get configured for me.

I had it all pretty darn close to working ho wI wanted it once before I got the HD cards, the remote worked, TV worked with a PVR-250 card, DVD ripping worked, but TV output didn't work. Before I got that up a gentoo update royally screwed the whole system and I had to reinstall from scratch to get it booting again, and have yet to get MythTV working that well again, but I've removed the PVR-250 as I wasn't happy with the picture quality coming out of it. I'm sure drivers for this card have improved a lot since then, but I no longer care.

I've been fighting with my rig for a few years now, and often take months at a time off because I get sick of it. And that's usually being sick of trying to get things working in Linux in general. My last accomplishment was to get the pcHDTV firmware loading. Now I'm on an on-again-off-again quest to learn how to tune QAM channels, for which I've found rediculously little information out there.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[whmac33]

I have Myth and enjoy it. My family enjoys it too.

I really like Myth for the network and multiple tuner features. I also like the ability to upgrade. I'm thinking of getting an OTA HD card soon, which won't render the rest of my system worthless. Can't do that with a Tivo. You'd end up with two Tivo's.

That being said I haven't recommended it to anyone I work with, and I work in the IT dept, but I'm the only Linux guy of the group. I tell them I really like it though, but there is a time investment.

I tell them to get a Tivo or something that "just works". It's cheaper if it has everything you want, and you don't have to mess with it.

The worse thing about MythTv is if it fails to record (very very rarely) then my wife and family blame me. With Tivo they have a company to blame :)

*** Usually the failure to record is disk full, which is our fault cause we set it not to autoexpire anything..

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[3dZaphod]

Interesting. I had almost the exact opposite experience with 0.18 and a Twinhan digital (DVB-T) card.

The main issue I had with MythTV was the (non-intuitive to me anyway) procedure to get the DVB-T card to scan for the channels. One has to manually add a transport for each frequency, then tell it to scan that transport for channels (PID's). This wasn't mentioned in the setup notes or the excellent Fedora Setup guide. Once I got over that hurdle, things went much smoother.

This 'manual add of transports' was not necessary using another application such as Kaffeine which just scanned for all frequencies/channels.

The other main issue for us non-US folks was getting XML-TV to play nice with the online guide data (lots of fiddling with timezone settings and removing duplicate channels. Works like a charm now! I dare not touch it in case something breaks again :)

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[swillden]

Who has time to figure out that subsystems are involved, let alone configure them?!

Who needs to? That sort of work is what computers are for. To install MythTV, just use Debian (or a derivative), add the Marillat repository to your sources.list and then apt-get install the Myth components you want. Apt will work out the dependencies and dpkg will configure it for you.

Or, even easier, just download a knoppmyth ISO and install that.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

What is "BWC?"

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[ratatask]

>See how equally ridiculous it sounds the other way around? Video, sound, etc. are
>all BASIC parts of the OS.

And any decent OS should auto configure these atleast to a normal working state.
(which most non-windows OS really suck at, except for the handful of lucky guys that is now going to reply)

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[ajs]

BWC = "Bitch Whine Complain"

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Cat_Byte]

I was just curious if there had been more improvements in the IVTV drivers since I installed it (around last summer I think).

You wouldn't believe how much easier it is now... Use 0.4+ and it'll auto detect the card. No more messing with modprobe.conf.

yum install ivtv
yum install ivtv-kmdl
modprobe ivtv
lspci -vv

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, sounds nice but it took 'some days' to get my HD-3000 high def OTA cards working properly. Those drivers were a bitch to get configured properly, and there was (hope it's fixed) a bug in the Myth display code that led to slowdown and faulty decoding in the front-end (Details on my blog). The first time is the hardest.

I have two myth systems running, and on the bright side, they are extremely solid once setup properly.

OTOH, it was a lot of pain to setup and would have been easier to earn a couple thousand bucks and buy a mac and an El Gato tuner.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[slummy]

I just recently used the latest IVTV 0.4.2 drivers on an Intel system with a PVR-150, I did notice some improvements. The hardware dectection is a lot better, it seems they've really narrowed down the chipsets. They just keep getting better and better.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[pestie]

Thank you! I even went to Urban Dictionary looking for a definition for that and didn't find one.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[PFI_Optix]

I just tried installing KnoppMyth on Saturday. It didn't work. The problem is (I assume) that the hard drive I was going to use to test it won't work when set as master, and KnoppMyth wants to be installed on hda. Even when I went through a manual installation, it didn't work.

It's probably due to the documentation. KnoppMyth, like 95% of the Linux projects I've encountered, is very poorly documented. It's as if the authors don't want to bother writing a simple "here's how you get a basic installation working step-by-step" and instead just go with their disorganized and jargon-filled technical documents.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

If you watched Live TV with Myth, you got it recording.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[bedel]

I am fairly sure that scanning with DVB is broken at the present time, It works for some people but not others. The scan feature will miss channels and the only way to get them is to continue to scan again and again till you get them. Its mentioned in the mythtv-dev mailing list. The import channels.conf seems to be the best solution.

I am stuck using a version from just before the livetv changes went in, circa november. Though this version has a lot of faults compared to the new one its quite reliable, and it can best of all it can scan.

Really the issue here isnt mythtv its I saved $20 on my tuner cards and ended up getting one where the driver was not going to be activly supported. $40 more would have saved me tens (if not hundreds) of hours tinkering over the last 2 years. All the time I saved by not having to watch tv when it was scheduled.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Grey Ninja]

I would personally argue that any decent operating system should support most (if not all) of your hardware out of the box.

I have a Toshiba M50 laptop that I bought recently. (You can look up the specs yourself... it's a nice enough laptop without a whole lot of strange hardware. AC97 sound, Intel graphics, 100GB SATA HDD, and a lot of other niceties). It came pre-installed with Windows. First thing I did with it was reformat it to dual boot Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP Pro.

Windows installed on the SATA hard drive to my great amazement... (Ordinarily it requires a floppy disk... and my laptop lacks a floppy drive). But when Windows was finally installed, there was a list of about 15 items that didn't have drivers installed. This included my built in ethernet card, my wireless card, my sound card, my video card, and a few other things. The OS did NOT handle any of this automatically. I was forced to download drivers for things on my desktop and transfer them over by way of a flash drive, as I didn't have internet access without drivers.

On Ubuntu, pretty much EVERYTHING worked out of the box. 3D Acceleration was working... sound was working... wireless was working... wired internet was working... and it even detected my laptop's widescreen monitor correctly. I later on configured sound so that it worked a little better, and took more advantage of software mixing, and I set up the laptop to display on an external monitor as well. But it all worked out of the box, with a lot less fiddling around than Windows. The only thing that didn't work was the laptop's flash card reader, as no Linux driver is available.

Same goes for my Desktop. (AMD64 3500+, 9800 Pro, Audigy 2, SATA, 2 wireless cards, and built-in ethernet, etc.). Windows installs without video (aside from basic functionality of course) or sound drivers, and required me to install a lot of drivers. Ubuntu installed flawlessly, requiring me to only install better video drivers to enable 3D acceleration. Everything else on the computer just worked.

Ubuntu also just worked on every other machine I've ever tried it on. An iMac G3, my friend's Sony laptop, my friend's Acer laptop, my girlfriend's desktop, both mine and my girlfriend's servers (old computers. P-233 and P3-500). Absolutely everything important worked out of the box.

Now I'm sure that you are going to tell me that it doesn't matter as Windows just worked with the Dell that you got from the store. But does that really matter? What if you bought a Mac and wanted to put Windows on it? What if your computer was affected with a really bad virus and you wanted to reinstall Windows? What if you wanted to reinstall for another reason? What if you built your own computer? What if you have to install Windows for whatever reason? You are going to be facing these problems, and if you haven't done it a million times before, this is going to be very difficult for you. Linux might be a lot easier to get working properly, and set up the basic subsystems, such as video and sound.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[ajs]

Sorry, a friend of mine says / types that all the time, and I forget that it's his neologism, not a general purpose initialism.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

It is fun to metamod morons down who mark things like this 'Troll'.

MythTV legal?

[ZachPruckowski]

I'm not trolling or spreading FUD, but what is MythTV's legal status in regards to HD? I mean, if I was to consider such a solution (when I get a new Mac) over something like EyeTV, will it do broadcast flags if and when they come around?

Re:MythTV legal?

[chris234]

Last time the broadcast flag was floated around, hardware sold before the date was grandfathered.

Re:MythTV legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares if it is legal? as long as it works

I dont care if i break a stupid law like that. it doesnt make me feel guilty of anything and i wont ever be caught so the law is useless.

Re:MythTV legal?

[nmos]

It's really up to your capture hardware to worry about the broadcast flag. I don't think Myth knows or cares.

Re:MythTV legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the MPEG codecs etc included are being distributed illegally.

Re:MythTV legal?

[/dev/trash]

Hardware doesn't last forever

Re:MythTV legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

and that matters how?

ie who gives a shit.... "oh no, im breaking the law.. please cops lock me up cause i committed a sin....." oh wait

hahaha

Re:MythTV legal?

[boy_afraid]

I think you're breaking the law just POSTING on /.

Re:MythTV legal?

[wendy]

MythTV and any existing HD-capture cards will remain legal.

As proposed (and earlier implemented and struck down), the broadcast flag rule regulates only hardware manufactured after it takes effect. The flag rule would require the hardware that demodulates broadcast TV to implement DRM in response to "flagged" broadcasts. Existing hardware can lawfully ignore the flag, but new hardware would have to be "robust against user modification" -- incompatible with open-source PVR software.

Get your HD-capable cards now, and tell your representatives to reject broadcast flags.

Lazy Question

[hattig]

1) What hardware can and can't run MythTV?
a) In particular, could a VIA EPIA-800 system run it (recording, playback, live tv, etc)?

2) Does it work with DVB-T (digital terrestrial) in the UK? What hardware for PCs can receive DVD-T, or can it use cheap USB receivers?

3) TV Guide - does it recognise DVB-T 7-day guide and now & next? Digital text?

This would go nicely in my planned shed PC, which wil have the above hardware (from an old system of mine) for internet and music. If I can add a cheap DVB-T card and add this functionality that would be even better.

Re:Lazy Question

[WTBF]

1. Anything you can get linux to run on with full driver support should run fairly well with MythTV. An Epia should not be a problem, several people run a frontend on one and there is also a distribution to set one up as a diskless frontend easily (google MiniMyth).
a. The only problem you might run into is performance issues, although you might want some advice from people who have ran mythtv on old hardware about hat.

2. DVB-T works very well for me, in the UK with a Hauppage Nova-T pci card, which costs about £40. I believe the USB version costs more and is also not as well supported.

3. I don't know much about the guide, but it can pick up the EIT over the air data (what most stand-alone set top boxes use) for getting information, but I get it to grab info from Radio Times. Mine is set up to have 8 days worth of listings, and it works out automatically when to grab more to satisfy this. I plan all my TV in advance using the EPG (electronic program guide) and so have never tried looking for now and next, so I have no idea if that is there. Digital text is not supported out of the box, although there is a patch that someone is working on to make at least teletext work and it looks as if it will be included in the 0.20 release.

I hope this helps.

Re:Lazy Question

[A Life in Hell]

a) In particular, could a VIA EPIA-800 system run it (recording, playback, live tv, etc)?

If you've got the hardware mpeg acceleration working (XvMC), then yes. Otherwise, _maybe_.

2) Does it work with DVB-T (digital terrestrial) in the UK? What hardware for PCs can receive DVD-T, or can it use cheap USB receivers?

I'm told it works there too (I'm in australia, who are also dvb-t, using a twinhan card).

3) TV Guide - does it recognise DVB-T 7-day guide and now & next? Digital text?

Yes, but I found I got better results from the internet based guides still - the OTA tv guide seems to be lacking certain information (such as genre in some cases). ymmv depending on your broadcaster.

Re:Lazy Question

[A Life in Hell]

as a side note on the power requirements without XvMC, my mythfrontend is a athlon 650mhz, and it works great. That said, there is a real advantage to putting the backend in something fast when it comes to commercial detection and transcoding for size (I originally had the backend on the athlon too, but I later moved it into the background on my desktop machine - where it works great)

Re:Lazy Question

[hattig]

Thanks for the reply, it's very handy and appreciated.

Certainly I expect that a DVB-T receiver would just write the raw bitstream to disk, thus not require much CPU for encoding as it's bypassed. I'd only need CPU for decoding, and an EPIA-800 can do DVDs (just) so it should do that.

I just read that there are multiple versions of the Nova-T and one isn't supported (yet). My EPIA-800 has a spare PCI slot so that's all good.

Re:Lazy Question

[hattig]

Thanks for the information, it's muchly appreciated. :)

Re:Lazy Question

[misterTreellama]

Yeah, I'm running a full-on fanless system with a Via Epia MS-1000 (1 Ghz) motherboard, PVR-250 tv card, and silverstone powersupply (I forget which one). Like the other guy said, you need to have the hardware mpeg acceleration stuff enabled - I ended up using the openchrome project patch for Fedora Core 4. I also had many problems getting a distribution with working ALSA support for my spdif sound, and let me be the first to tell you that there is no tech support from Via. Zip. Nada. The link on the webpage sends you to a forum of other people that are struggling with the lack of tech support. Oh yeah, and the MS series boards lack many of the connectors that you would normally expect on the back of your PC, so the TV out, spdif, keyboard, usb - it's all provided as header pins. Yippy!

But it's a pretty cool setup. The only noise is from the harddrive right now, and that's an improvement.

Re:Lazy Question

[hattig]

Cheers. Unfortunately the EPIA-800 doesn't have the MPEG2 hardware accelleration as it is a pretty old board.

I could get a new board, but then I could be better off simply getting something with more support anyway, even if the board wasn't as small - e.g., a micro-atx nForce board with integrated graphics (with the hardware accelleration) and an underclocked Sempron with passive cooling.

Re:Lazy Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The OTA guide data where I am (Queensland) it utterly useless. If you're lucky, it might have now and next, but quite frequently that's incorrect, out of date, or just not present. There's absolutely no OTA guide beyond now and next.

Does anyone know?

[cosmotron]

Does anyone know of a good PCMCIA TV Tuner card that is Linux compatible? I have been looking for one for a while and can't seem to find any.

Re:Does anyone know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not PCMCIA, but can you use USB capture? On the Wiki there were some listed that worked.

Re:Does anyone know?

[ncc74656]

Does anyone know of a good PCMCIA TV Tuner card that is Linux compatible? I have been looking for one for a while and can't seem to find any.

By "PCMCIA," you meant "CardBus," right? PCMCIA (more properly known as PC Card) is too slow for frame grabbers; it's basically ISA in a smaller form.

Finding a CardBus video-capture card that works right under Windows is a big enough problem, let alone under Linux. The one I tried (a Kworld something-or-other that Fry's sells) had major problems doing clean captures at anything near maximum resolution. ADS sells a similar (identical?) card, and it behaved the same way. About the only non-PCI capture device I've run across that works reasonably well (under both Windows and Linux, BTW) is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2. It has the same hardware inside as their PCI capture devices, but instead of a PCI interface to the computer, it has a USB 2.0 interface.

Re:Does anyone know?

[MBCook]

No experience in this area, but here is what I would do. Get a FireWire card. There must be some lost cost ones that work with Linux. Then buy a FireWire video capture box. This won't be too cheap ($100 to $200?), but it will work with Linux, OS X, Windows, and anything else that correctly supports FireWire. It will also have the encoder built in, so it won't tax your CPU to encode/save stuff. If you already have FireWire on your laptop (many in the last few years do) then you don't even need the card.

I'm with my parent poster. I think you'd have a terrible time trying to find what you are looking for.

BTW: The FireWire solution also allows you to hook up a hard drive to store things on to, because as we all know digital video can be BIG.

HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

I've ben putting together a mythfrontend on a Via nano-ITX board in a Silverstone LC08 case.

What attracted me to this platform was the CN400 H/W MPEG2 decoder chip it includes that is capable of deciding HD MPEG2 resolutions (up to 1080i) -- xine plays 1080i on this platform with the 1.0 GHz CPU about 30% idle.

Of course, this is fairly bleeding edge, and there are the occasional dropped frames. Support for the CN400 comes from the openchrome project, which also supports dri/drm, and xine hooks for the resulting xxmc accelleration that takes advantage of the CN400.

It isn't quite fanless -- there is a processor fansink that puts out around 14 dbA. I'm told the 800 Mhz version of the same mobo is fanless, and once I get this stable, will likely spend the $$$ to try one.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[mybecq]

xine plays 1080i on this platform with the 1.0 GHz CPU about 30% idle

If you use the VIA supplied driver (comes in binary and re-compilable versions), you'll get about ~25-30% usage on the (800MHz) SP8000E.

I have mythweb setup to run VeMP (VIA's enhanced mplayer) for playback, and never see dropped frames on any HD content.

It would be GREAT if VIA supported MythTV like they do the VeMP and ViaeXP players. I think this would really help them get those little motherboards to sell. (A native HDTV output would help as well.)

I think the main factor in getting a fanless system is the available convection airflow -- without that the system won't stay cool.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

I generally avoid binary-only drivers.

Also, I've read (but not verified) that the via drivers are only supported on older kernels. So, I've been following openchrome with interest.

Finally, I haven't ruled out other issues related to the dropped frames -- remember I'm running a full FC3 right now, with all the servers that are installed by default. Clearly, that needs to change. Until it does, I'm not to harsh on the video drivers for the odd dropped frame (usb traffic, in particular, appears to muck things up).

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[evilviper]

What attracted me to this platform was the CN400 H/W MPEG2 decoder chip it includes that is capable of deciding HD MPEG2 resolutions (up to 1080i) -- xine plays 1080i on this platform with the 1.0 GHz CPU about 30% idle.

Many ATI/NVidia/Intel videocards can do hardware MPEG-1/2 decoding. I have such a card, and I NEVER use it. You can't do any postprocessing, deinterlacing, inverse telecine, noise removal, etc. Plus, it's completely useless for MPEG-4, WMV3 (aka VC-1, aka WMV9), H.264, etc., which is the format you'll find a large portion of HDTV content available in (T2 DVD, IMAX DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray DVDs, P2P downloads, etc.)

Meanwhile, even on a 1GHz CPU (not a 1GHz VIA CPU, a REAL 1GHz CPU!) decoding in software, outputting to XV, GL, VIDIX, etc., will be FASTER than hardware decoding.

I would STRONGLY recomend staying the hell away from VIA. I made that mistake once, myself. You can expect better performance from an AMD/Intel chip clocked at about half what a VIA chip is, and the AMD/Intel chips will be lower power as well.

Find yourself a LV PIII-1.0GHz (12.1W max), an ULV Pentium M-753 1.2GHz (5.5W TDP), an Athlon 4-1.2G (25W max), an Opteron-840EE 1.4GHz (30W TDP), or a mTurion MT-34 1.8GHz (25W TDP) if you're dedicated to ultra-low power, fanless CPUs. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with a cheaper system, and a few quiet, variable 80mm fans.

lavc/h264, however, needs a much faster CPU right now. I believe that's simply due to a lack of optimization, and the situation should improve.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

Sour grapes, perhaps?

Many ATI/NVidia/Intel videocards can do hardware MPEG-1/2 decoding. I have such a card, and I NEVER use it. You can't do any postprocessing, deinterlacing, inverse telecine, noise removal, etc.

Hmm. xine -xvmc and deinterlacing works just fine. The openchrome drivers apparently route the decoded video back for further processing, rather than just feed the chip's display engine, though it wouldn't surprise me if this were possible.

I would STRONGLY recomend staying the hell away from VIA. I made that mistake once, myself. You can expect better performance from an AMD/Intel chip clocked at about half what a VIA chip is, and the AMD/Intel chips will be lower power as well.

I have not seen serious problems (like the infamous DMA problem) with the nano-ITX. It isn't cheap, at around $400 for the 1.0 GHz version mobo, but I was looking for a fanless (or close to it) small form-factor. mini-ITX and ATX boards would not fit the bill.

Find yourself a LV PIII-1.0GHz (12.1W max), an ULV Pentium M-753 1.2GHz (5.5W TDP), an Athlon 4-1.2G (25W max), an Opteron-840EE 1.4GHz (30W TDP), or a mTurion MT-34 1.8GHz (25W TDP) if you're dedicated to ultra-low power, fanless CPUs.

And for H/W MPEG2 decoding to HD resolutions...?

Personally, I'm perfectly happy with a cheaper system, and a few quiet, variable 80mm fans.

Smaller, and fanless, is the goal for me. The 1.0 GHz system doesn't quite get there (it has one fan around 14 dBa which really is whisper quiet), but an 800 Mhz system probably would.

To each his or her own, I suppose.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[evilviper]

And for H/W MPEG2 decoding to HD resolutions...?

I think you lost me. With a reasonbly fast CPU, decoding in software (MPlayer, Xine, VLC, ffplay, etc) is FASTER than XVMC, including higher resolutions like 1080.

MPEG-2 decoding takes practically no time, it's displaying it that uses up CPU cycles, and display with eg. OpenGL or even XV will be quite a bit faster.

And, as I said, you aren't just stuck with MPEG-2. You can playback any video codec. Otherwise, you'll be waiting for a week to watch your movie, as the video is re-encoded to MPEG-2 in the background... MPEG-2 is nearly dead.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

I think you lost me. With a reasonbly fast CPU, decoding in software (MPlayer, Xine, VLC, ffplay, etc) is FASTER than XVMC, including higher resolutions like 1080.

Hmm.

Last time I checked, one needed around a 2.5 GHz P4 to decode 1080i MPEG2 in software.

On my nanoITX mobo, xine -V xvmc runs rings around stock xine.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

Have the dma issues under linux been settled (crashes during heavy data tranfer hd/eth, as noted for ex: http://epialinux.org/drivers.html albeit a bit old)?

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[orv]

If you use the VIA supplied driver (comes in binary and re-compilable versions)

No it doesn't, the VIA mpeg driver is binary only.

supported MythTV like they do the VeMP and ViaeXP players

They are hardly "supporting" Mplayer and Xine, they have created their own versions that they now need to try and keep in step with the upstream packages.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

The opnly thing I seen on the nanoITX are occasional recoverable DMA timeouts on disk transfers. But, I have not ruled out the drive.

While I have not been intentionally stressing hd and eth at the same time, I have been doing builds across the 'net to NFS-mounted directories while playing video.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[mybecq]

I've never had any problems with the SP series; the problem seems to be with EPIA M, MII and CL.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[mybecq]

I also try to avoid binary-only, however in this case the benefits outweigh the missing functionality.

Also, I've read (but not verified) that the via drivers are only supported on older kernels.

Actually, they support the standard kernels for RedHat and Fedora, but not the updates (FC4 is at 2.6.15). I spent an hour or two getting the driver working under the FC4 2.6.15 update, and haven't had an problems so far. Mostly just handling obsoleted functions.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

I spent an hour or two getting the driver working under the FC4 2.6.15 update, and haven't had an problems so far. Mostly just handling obsoleted functions.

How, if it is binary only?

I can only imagine that perhaps it relies on deprecated or changed kernel or ioctl calls which you've forward ported to 2.6.15.

I might be interested. I guess they bypass xvmc completely then, which would mean there is no dependency on X either. Of course, I haven't looked at the Via versions so I might be guessing just plain wrong.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[evilviper]

Last time I checked, one needed around a 2.5 GHz P4 to decode 1080i MPEG2 in software.

Not even close. My 1.66GHz Athlon stays under 50% load when playing back 1080i MPEG-2.

With XVMC, it stays at about 40% load playing the same video, so my system is almost at the crossover point, where hardware acceleration becomes counter-productive.

(using mplayer-cvs -vo gl, Geforce4 440 MX AGP, Slackware 10, etc)

On my nanoITX mobo, xine -V xvmc runs rings around stock xine.

Yes, that was pretty much the point of my post. VIA's CPUs are painfully slow.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

My 1.66GHz Athlon stays under 50% load when playing back 1080i MPEG-2

Good lord, that must be loud as heck, with the CPU and PS fan it requres! At least, if it is anything like a similar Athlon tower I have. What silent (and by silent I mean fanless) system do you have that can do 1080i? I *think* an 800 Mhz Via Luke with a CN400 using openchrome should be able to manage, convenction cooled. The 1.0GHz nanoITX board I have is spec'd to use a fansink (albeit putting out 14 dbA noise), so it doesn't quite cut it either.

Still, I'm impressed that your Athlon can do 1080i60 (or 1080i59.97) in real time at all.

Yes, that was pretty much the point of my post. VIA's CPUs are painfully slow

Compared to a power-hungry monster, yes, certainly for the same clock speed. That's exactly why one turns to specialized hardware for MPEG-2 decoding, when using low-power (heat and computational) processors.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[evilviper]

What silent (and by silent I mean fanless) system do you have that can do 1080i?

This thread feels distinctly like I'm slamming my head against a brick wall...

I already provided a good list of 5 or 6 very low power Intel/AMD CPUs, which run cool enough that they could easily be operated in a fanless case. They are all more than fast enough to do realtime 1080i@60fps MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding in software, and the faster ones should even handle 1080 WMV9.

lavc's H.264 codec isn't very far along right now. When it gets some performance optimizations (in the near future), I expect H.264 playback in realtime will be possible on the same hardware.

I'd recomend the mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz 25W TDP), or perhaps an Intel Duo LV-L2400 (1.66GHz 15W TDP).

Source: http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

Source: http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm [erols.com]

Well, if you had provided that information in the first place, I wouldn't continue to question the existance of a low power processor and video H/W from other than Via.

In particular, your mention of (AMD) Athlon processors as low-power left me scratching my head -- I was not aware that AMD had low power processors to support fanless designs until you provided that reference. Also, mention of Intel CPUs (likely mobile ones) that you think would be adequate means nothing to me without some convincing that they are capable of rendering 1080i in real time with or without spcialised MEPG2 accelleration hardware (other formats would be nice to support, but not essential for my purposes, not even MPEG4).

But even that processor list (which I could have googled myself) is not what I was looking for when designing a system. I was not interested in having to design and build a mobo around a processor. I wanted to purchase a fairly well integrated mobo, convincingly capable of rendering HD MPEG2 video in real time, convection cooled, in as small a form factor as possible with a strong preference for open source software.

The nanoITX fit the bill, even as it took forever to become available (heck, mine doesn't even have an integrated coldLuke processor/northbridge -- it has separate Eden CPU and CN400 northbridge) and dissapointingly requires (very modest) active cooling for the 1.0 GHz version.

There was a Commell mini-ITX board that employed the CN400, and X CLE266 driver extention development for it to support HD resolutions, which led me down this path (waiting for the supposedly fanless Eden processor in a nanoITX form factor). The only trouble was that the Commell board required noisy active cooling (I was not about to engineer a heatpipe/enclosure solution from scratch, either).

The alternative was a HushPC or Serener enclosure, using heatpipe technology with a conventional processor, but those would have been even more expensive than what I eneded up building (Eden C3 with CN400, 512 MB RAM in a Silverstone Lascala LC08 with slimline DVD/RW drive and 500 GB hard drive) at a cost of around $1000.

Perhaps I erred in thinking that S/W decoding of HD MPEG2 video required a 2.4 GHx P4 (and the associated cooling and noise), but there was nothing I found that convinced me otherwise. H/W MPEG2 accellerators on common graphics cards (which already started to break the requirement of a small form factor) generally didn't have open source drivers.

The only item that showed promise, after a process of elimination, was the Via Eden C3 with CN400 northbridge in a nice nanoITX form factor.

Frankly, I really like the small form factor, and the existing problems strike me as possible to overcome, particularly since Via has their own xine and mplayer for this platform that leverage the CN400 (albeit without completely open software).

And the $1000 drops way down to around $600 if I eliminate the DVD/RW drive and hard disk, and simply use it as a MythTV frontend (which would fit in an even smaller Silverstone Lascala LC07 case). It's just that I like to occasionally pop in a DVD into the playback device in the media room and not have to go to the server rack, and having local content (not to mention support native development if I care to hack) is nice as well.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[evilviper]

Well, if you had provided that information in the first place, I wouldn't continue to question the existance of a low power processor and video H/W from other than Via.

*Sigh*

You never said that you did not believe my figures, you just acted like I hadn't provided them at all. Much like the H/W decoding question you asked.

Even if you had completely doubted me, it's not like I just said "there is an AMD chip that's low power". I provided exact model names/numbers as well as the MHz rating, and watt ratings. A quick google would probably have turned up AMD's own spec sheets.

Also, mention of Intel CPUs (likely mobile ones) that you think would be adequate means nothing to me without some convincing that they are capable of rendering 1080i in real time

I'm not an Intel salesman. I just replied to mention what, IMHO, is a much better option. If you want benchmarks for these processors, google for benchmarks. You can surely find a few that will involve HDTV playback, or at least compare them to some processor you have first-hand experience with. Or you can visit the ffmpeg/xine/mplayer project, and read the mailing lists to see what hardware others are using for HDTV playback.

I was not interested in having to design and build a mobo around a processor. I wanted to purchase a fairly well integrated mobo, convincingly capable of rendering HD MPEG2 video in real time, convection cooled, in as small a form factor as possible with a strong preference for open source software.

I don't know what you're talking about, as far as "build a mobo".

It is a rather simple task to find mini-ITX bare-bones systems. Practically all of them have sound, net, video, etc. integrated. In fact, VIA's CPUs are the right architecture to be swapped with any P-III CPU, such as the very low-power P-III CPU I had listed. You can just swap the CPU in your nanoITX if you like.

You could also just go out and buy a notebook (with one of the low power processors) for the purpose. Very low-power, everything integrated, as cheap as $400, etc.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

Or you can visit the ffmpeg/xine/mplayer project, and read the mailing lists to see what hardware others are using for HDTV playback.

I did.

That's where I got the notion that only a noisy 2.x GHz Intel or AMD proc, with all the associated cooling problems was the only S/W only solution for HD MPEG2 decoding. And H/W-assisted solutions were not supported by open source drivers, for which I had a preference.

I don't know what you're talking about, as far as "build a mobo".

I thought that would be obvious from context. If you throw a bunch of CPU part numbers and specs at me, it sure looks like you think I will build a system around a particular processor, that is, design and build the motherboard from scratch. I suppose I could google for motherboards with particularly interesting processors, but that strikes me as an ass-backwards way of finding an integrated, quiet, system capable of rendering HD MPEG2 video.

Instead, I googled for "slient H/W MPEG2" or some such, and found Via's offerings. I then found the hdmythtv.us site (which no longer exsts) which extolled a Via-based mini-ITX Commell board, employing a CN400.

You can just swap the CPU in your nanoITX if you like.

Are you sure? I know of no Intel or AMD chips in that form factor. Of course, that doesn't meean they don't exist. As you can tell, I don't follow every little CPU variant from the major manufacturers.

The bottom line is that the Via Eden processor with CN400 northbridge looked as the most likely capable of meeting my requirements, and it comes damn close. Even ignoring the nanoITX form-factor, and accepting a bigger mini-ITX or even micro-ATX form factor, all the other options that were easy to assemble involved systems requiring fans, some arguably quite noisy (by people who had done so); or expensive heatpipe solutions (I had actually considered a HushPC system at one point, until I read that even a speedy P4 could not decode HD MPEG2 in real time). Actual success reported with the CN400 on hdmythtv.us was the clincher for me to like the CN400 northbridge.

The system isn't quite as stable as I'd like -- I do see the occasional dropped frame. I'm told Via's binary drivers are better than Ivor Hewett's openchrome effort, but I prefer to support the open source effort. Then again, I haven't optimized the O/S: I slapped a full FC3 install on it, with all the default services, as a first try, to avoid dependency hell.

The bottom line was that reported real-time HD success on a CN400 in a mini-ITX board weighed far more heavily in my decision than anecdotes of what "should be" fast enough. As always, YMMV.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[evilviper]

I suppose I could google for motherboards with particularly interesting processors, but that strikes me as an ass-backwards way of finding an integrated, quiet, system capable of rendering HD MPEG2 video.

Well, since the hottest and most important part, BY FAR, in any system is the CPU, that's exactly how you need to search for the most appropriate system, no matter what goal you have in-mind.

Are you sure? I know of no Intel or AMD chips in that form factor.

I still wonder why you keep asking me to repeat myself, instead of googling what I've just told you...

VIA C3/Eden/etc. == Socket 370
Pentium III == Socket 370

I've personally upgraded a system from a C3/800MHz (slow as hell) to a Celeron 1.2GHz. Of course I have no way to be 100% sure. Your system could be some weird prototype VIA isn't talking about, with a different socket, or with the chip soldered to the motherboard (like some cheap VIA C3 systems were infamous for).

As you can tell, I don't follow every little CPU variant from the major manufacturers.

They don't vary often. AMD used socket A for all their processors (mobile and desktop) for years, until the Opteron. Intel stuck with socket 370 throughout the life of the PIII (except for mobile CPUs). It's only recently that the issue has gotten... complex.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

The nanoITX motherboard takes a Eden processor in a soldered-in nanoBGA form factor. While the C3 might be available in a Socket 370 form factor, I know of no motherboards taking a Socket 370 CPU and offering a CN400 northbridge.

Later versions of the nanoITX motherboard have an integrated "coldLuke" package that combines the Eden processor with the CN400 northbridge.

I doubt one could make a nanoITX mobo with a Socket 370 socket -- it would take up far too much real estate, given that the nanoITX form factor is 12 cm. by 12 cm.

I take issue with this comment: Well, since the hottest and most important part, BY FAR, in any system is the CPU, that's exactly how you need to search for the most appropriate system, no matter what goal you have in-mind.

The most important bit is application performance per unit heat, in a fanless system. A wimpy CPU, with dedicated application-specific hardware, can be a better fit, than a powerful CPU without such hardware.

An earlier comment of yours complained that dedicated MPEG2 (and MPEG4) hardware does little for other codecs, and this is certainly true. There is an argument for using the most powerful procesor one can find, and engineering a fanless cooling system for it. However, (a) I remain unconvinced that one can decode even just HD MPEG2 in S/W without an extremely power hungry CPU, (b) other formats can be transcoded in backend machines, if necessary, (c) fanless cooling for power hungry CPUs gets very expensive, (d) there will always be some exotic codec for which the CPU will be inadequate in real time.

Given the push for cheap, quiet, set top boxes, I see compute-expensive codecs that gain popularity implemented in hardware at about the rate that consumers or cable TV providers are willing to swap said hardware. So, I'm not worried all that much about locking my mythfrontend to MPEG2 and MPEG4, and not being able to render HD WMV 9 or whatever. Frankly, the fact that it can hold 20 of my favorite DVDs and some 240 CDs and replace a big and heavy cabinet of same, is good enough for the next five years for me. HD isn't even a big requirement for me, but rather insurance for what I might wish it could render in the near future.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[evilviper]

The nanoITX motherboard takes a Eden processor in a soldered-in nanoBGA form factor.

Well that completely eliminates the possibility of exchanging CPUs right there. So my previous post was just a waste of time...

I know of no motherboards taking a Socket 370 CPU and offering a CN400 northbridge.

Yes, well, at this point we've established that there is a lot you don't know. Let's see. How about these:
http://www.ascent.co.nz/ProductSpecification.aspx? ItemID=339612
http://www.atiosys.com/us/html/products/product.as p?pid=94&cid=3
http://www.atiosys.com/us/html/products/product.as p?pid=97&cid=3
http://www.atiosys.com/us/html/products/product.as p?pid=98&cid=3

I doubt one could make a nanoITX mobo with a Socket 370 socket -- it would take up far too much real estate, given that the nanoITX form factor is 12 cm. by 12 cm.

A CPU socket is only a couple mm larger than the CPU itself. They omit a socket to save on cost, not size.

A wimpy CPU, with dedicated application-specific hardware, can be a better fit, than a powerful CPU without such hardware.

Yes, in very specific applications that is often true. It's not when it comes to video playback, though. I've been doing this stuff for several years.

(a) I remain unconvinced that one can decode even just HD MPEG2 in S/W without an extremely power hungry CPU,

Yes, well... If you're not prepared to believe me, and won't bother to do the slightest bit of research on your own, I can't possibly help you.

(b) other formats can be transcoded in backend machines, if necessary,

Adding only a couple days of delay to watching a DVD. How convenient.

(c) fanless cooling for power hungry CPUs gets very expensive,

We've covered that. Even some very, very fast CPUs are as low as 25W.

(d) there will always be some exotic codec for which the CPU will be inadequate in real time.

H.264 and WMV9 are not exotic, but standard codecs which WILL be used on HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, and ARE being used on current HD IMAX DVDs, as well as HD movies being shared on the internet. These are not exotic, these are standard codecs. The world doesn't move fast enough that more CPU-intensive codecs get introduced often. If you can handle these codecs at 1080, you're set, for at least the next decade.

I see compute-expensive codecs that gain popularity implemented in hardware at about the rate that consumers or cable TV providers are willing to swap said hardware.

HD-DVD players utilizing H.264 and WMV9 are already being sold at $500, and Blu-ray players using the same codecs are only a few short months away. DirecTV has already been selling their "HD Recievers" which decode H.264, which will become their primary codec shortly. Quicktime now uses H.264, and so the HD trailers on apple.com/trailers are all encoded in H.264 now.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

A CPU socket is only a couple mm larger than the CPU itself. They omit a socket to save on cost, not size.

True, but the nanoBGA package is 15mm on a side. Socket 370 is HUGE, by comparison.

Yes, well, at this point we've established that there is a lot you don't know. Let's see. How about these:

Since (a) building this is a hobby, and (b) I did most of my net search last summer, it is quite possible that more boards became available, yes. The Commell LV-667 (if I remember the product number correctly) was available then, with a CN400, in a mini-ITX form factor, but a VT-1623 instead of a VT-1625, so I didn't pay attention if it was Socket-370.

The Socket 370 mini-ITX mobos are nice and flexible, but all the one's I've seen require a chassis with a fan, or those that have a CN400 are incompatible with fanless mini-ITX chassis that use a heatpipe.

In many cases, it (a) wasn't clear if fanless was an option, (b) manufacturers rarely return calls of people interested in building "one of-s" (understandably), and (c) I didn't have a research lab or the time to evaluate every possible candidate.

"I remain unconvinced that one can decode even just HD MPEG2 in S/W without an extremely power hungry CPU,"

Yes, well... If you're not prepared to believe me, and won't bother to do the slightest bit of research on your own, I can't possibly help you.

Research how? All the research I've read on Linux HTPCs included dire warnings about not being able to do HD MPEG2 decoding in software on anything resembling a fanless system. It is possible that that is incorrect, but untill I see someone describe the system they built, with evidence that it can do that, I will remain skeptical. It was a David George who first pointed out success on a Commell LV-667 using a CN400. But, his solution (a) was noisy, and (b) was limited to a VT-1623 instead of a VT-1625 TV encoder. That turned me on to a nano-ITX with a CN400, and VT-1625, particularly when the 1.0 GHz system was advertised as fanless. It isn't, sadly, but the 800 Mhz system is, and would likely be adequate.

Frankly, I'll probably build another machine if WMV 9 or H.264 content becomes all that prevelent. I figure it will take at leasrt a couple of years, and probably more before I can't get "ordinary" DVDs anymore.

I suppose it isn't quite fair of me to throw in the VT-1625 requirement at the last minute, but it was a tipping point. I just plain forgot about it. Whether the processor is socketed or not, on a cheap $400 mobo for an embedded system also wasn't an issue, yet you harp on it with regard to flexibility.

If you know so much about rendering video in fanless, or almost fanless systems, without relying on specialized hardware, or proprietary software, there's a world of Linux HTPC builders who are all ears.

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[nicholas1716]

I have an SP8000E mobo, using myth 0.18 and 0.19, and the latest xorg 6.9 openchrome drivers for fedora 4, and have corrupted color when watching TV and recordings. After starting X & myth, the first playback is fine, but if you then select another playback to watch, the colors are corrupt - eg, faces appear bluish.
The only way to get normal color is to exit X, and restart it. Restarting just myth does not cure the bad color.
Any ideas ?

Re:HD Myth on a Via nano-ITX with CN400

[renehollan]

Check with Ivor. This looks familiar and a known problem.

Captions support!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Closed captioning support on PVR-250/350 (but not 150/500) cards, DVB subtitles, and other cards supporting VBI information."

Thank you!!!!!
(deaf)

Enjoy it while it lasts

[bogie]

5 years from now something like MythTV won't even be possible because A) hardware required to receive signals won't be available on linux B) patents C) it will be outright illegal and you will face jailtime for unauthorized recording of your cable feed.

I think Mythtv and the rest of these HTPC packages will eventually hit a brick wall due to greedy broadcasters. Oh free htpc software market, we hardly knew ye...

Going "digital" and the promise of HDTV is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on US consumers in all History.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[ThreeE]

I will find your analog hole.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[hawkbug]

And that's the largest problem, you said analog. I want Digital. But I won't get it unless politics in this country are revamped in the next 5 years. Not going to happen.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[ThreeE]

I'm with you brother. Unfortunately, I don't see the cable companies streaming intellectual property in lossless format down my broadband connection anytime soon. Thankfully, the analog hole will not introduce much noise -- certainly not enough for me to care much. In fact, I suspect I will introduce more noise via compression than by DRM avoidance via the hole.

Most people just accept the current way (I've got to buy a Tivo and pay for listings and I can't move touch the files, etc.) and move on to other things in their lives. I guess they think as long as I'm not getting screwed a whole lot, I'm okay getting screwed a little bit.

Me, my last MS product was Win2K. I subscribe to basic cable. I have cable broadband. I give my cable connection away via wireless in return for an occasional dinner/beer and pet-sitting. It all comes out to nothing anyway.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[LordSnooty]

Actually what's the best thing in my view about MythTV is the video browser/gallery, for watching things off p2p. I run my mythbox without a TV card - I find TV in the UK generally rubbish and not worth justifying a card. I simply dump anything of interest from my cable box onto a consumer DVD recorder or grab it from p2p (or make sure I'm in front of the TV). And now I use my mythbox to watch the p2p stuff. No DVD, no CD means low noise. I find it the best way to work and I'm surprised that virtually no-one is using it in the same way. It's impossible to run without a backend so I have to put up with "cannot connect" messages, and none of the video browsers are truly great, not surprisingly most of the focus goes on the TV cap side. I tried Freevo but still found myth without a card easier to set up.

But with all this talk of broadcast flags, I feel that I am in fact a pioneer, if those who say myth will stop working are right.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[JWW]

If that comes to pass I (and many other myth users) will just ignore/bypass/break these laws. Ignoring bad laws like some of the ones they're trying to pass now (and the DMCA already, of course I use DeCSS to play DVDs on my Myth box) is a form of protest.

What the broadcast companies are trying to ram down our throats is pure evil. If they suceed in making my Myth box illegal, forcing me to use _their_ (limited) PVR or try to make me whatch shows only when they're on, they won't make more money off of me. I will just chuck my TV to the curb.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[westlake]

If that comes to pass I (and many other myth users) will just ignore/bypass/break these laws

not so easy to do when rights management is embedded in the hardware: no certified motherboard or HD decoder, no digital tv.

I will just chuck my TV to the curb

but you aren't the market. the family with the plasma tv is the market. replay of the superbowl can wait until tomorrow. pay per view is still cheaper than the megaplex.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[NitsujTPU]

Ignoring bad laws like some of the ones they're trying to pass now (and the DMCA already, of course I use DeCSS to play DVDs on my Myth box) is a form of protest.

A better form of protest might be voting people out of office, posting angry websites, and entering into public debate. Nobody is going to know what you do in your own home, so, it doesn't even read on their meter. If you're trying to send a message, you should send something more than noise.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[hawkbug]

Yeah, I actually have a Tivo, not an HD one, but a standard dual tuner directivo - and I've got it completely hacked. I can transfer anything from TV to my computer via ftp, or streaming, and save it as lossless mpeg2. When I say lossless, I ofcourse mean compared to the format they beamed it into my house from, not from the original source ofcourse. I'm pretty happy with that - but now that I have an HD TV, I'll be working on getting a new Tivo to hack that does HD.

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[evilviper]

5 years from now something like MythTV won't even be possible because A) hardware required to receive signals won't be available on linux

ATSC tuners are legal, and should be for the foreseeable future, since the broadcast flag was struck down.

The DMCA specifically allows (clean room) reverse engineering for compatibility, which means decrypting your cable/satellite signal should be legal, as well as breaking HDCP (or at least reasonably light shades of grey).

B) patents C) it will be outright illegal and you will face jailtime for unauthorized recording of your cable feed.

Don't let me interrupt your fear-mongering, but you're being extremely vague. Other than the DMCA, what laws, patents, etc., do you claim will stop people from legally building a DVR?

Re:Enjoy it while it lasts

[dwater]

I used to live in Ca, but moved to China. I had a ReplyTV (4040, I think) in the US and recorded many shows, which I brought with me. Recording Chinese TV isn't of much interest to me, but I use MythTV to play the shows I already have recorded.

A similar use to what you describe, I think.

MythTV Meme Still Strong

[broward]

MythTV was one of my pre-inflection graphs / choices last year. It's still going strong. It's not the best graph I've ever seen, but there's clearly strength behind it.

http://www.realmeme.com/roller/images/meme/mythTVD ejanews.png

Much anticipation?

[no-karma-no-worries]

Probably not. People who are dying for these new features already got them from the subversion repo...

Re:Much anticipation?

[Andy Dodd]

Some people prefer to have a semi-stable system for their TV-watching habits, even if it means sometimes waiting utterly forever for a new Myth release.

I fall into this category. Time to do an emerge sync and then emerge mythtv. :)

Same in Windows

[voxel]

I enjoy all of the above, but in Windows, using SageTV. (sagetv.com)

I also enjoy things like a real time-line progress bar w/ commercial markers.

Stability with ATI HDTV Wonder, and AverMedia A180 HDTV Tuners...

WebUI, Adskip, DVD rip, Weather, Full UI mods/skins, client/server, awsome HDTV support, and kick-ass driver support for every tuner card out there (No PVR250 needed).

All for the cost of some $$$.. Well worth it to me.

Re:Same in Windows

[sigloiv]

I casually use my 9600XT with it's VIVO support with an old satellite reciever I own. I looked at SageTV, but unfortunately it didn't support the AIW/VIVO...

Re:Same in Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

it supports software tuners now. so it may work now.

Re:Same in Windows

[neomajic]

You are missing the point completely. The is to not use Windows.

Re:Same in Windows

[lanswitch]

Come on, this windows talk is completely off-topic. We were talking about MythTv, remember?

Re:Same in Windows

[jargoone]

Speak for yourself. The point for you may be to not use Windows. Note that to accomplish that, you could buy any commercially-available PVR.

Some of us just want to use the best solution available, taking into account one's technical ability, and desire to screw around to get stuff to work. MythTV is neat, but it sure isn't simple to set up. I'm wrestling with it right now, and will probably get it to work, but I have above-average competence with Linux. Lots of people don't, and I'd bet that with Sage, stuff comes much closer to Just Working.

Re:Same in Windows

[manno]

I can attest to being incompitent, and prefering Sage to Myth... A LOT. I REALY, REALY want to get myth to work, but after spending over 24 hours trying to do so... I lost my patience.

Re:Same in Windows

[elrous0]

So, would it be off-topic for me to point out that MythTV is a total pain in the ass to set up and maintain?

-Eric

Re:Same in Windows

[jrockway]

Yes. Why? Because nobody cares. If it's too hard for you to do, pay someone to make it easier. Or learn to program and use your skills and time to make it better. Or buy a TiVo and put up with the mandatory ads and whatnot. It's your choice.... whining about how free software is "too hard" isn't going to get you anywhere on slashdot.

Re:Same in Windows

[elrous0]

whining about how free software is "too hard" isn't going to get you anywhere on slashdot

I'll tell you what, I'll stop whining about how hard free software is to set up and maintain if your ilk will stop whining about free software remaining a small niche market.

-Eric

Re:Same in Windows

[jrockway]

I'm not whining about it being a niche market. I frankly don't give a damn. If you want to use Free software, use it. If you want to be a slave to corporate America, then do.

DVB Subtitles

[labratuk]

Now that DVB subtitles are available, can you imagine OCRing the (image based) subtitles, saving them into the recorded stream and having full-text-searchable tv programmes?

Re:DVB Subtitles

[geckofiend]

The subtitles are not "imaged based". If you can decode DVB subtitles you have them as ASCII text.

Re:DVB Subtitles

[labratuk]

Hmm. I was inferring from the extended release notes that it was similar to DVD subtitles:

- Added support for DVB subtitles (image based)

Perhaps there is more than one type of DVB subtitle?

Re:DVB Subtitles

[coldcut]

You are correct. ETSI document EN 300 743 describes the subtitle stream specification, which includes both RLE subtitle image data, and actual character codes.

The specification can be found here: http://webapp.etsi.org/action%5COP/OP20021004/en_3 00743v010201o.pdf

Re:DVB Subtitles

[mnbjhguyt]

>Now that DVB subtitles are available, can you imagine OCRing the (image based) subtitles, >saving them into the recorded stream and having full-text-searchable tv programmes?

that what video.google.com was at first.
you could search full text from indexed close captions.
it looks like you can't do that anymore though.

Time stretch in other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why hasn't the time stretch feature of MythTV been ported to other apps? Gstreamer, MPlayer I'm looking at you. Time stretching is a great feature which allows you to speed up the audio (together with video) without changing the pitch (no chipmunk sounding people). Great for when you're short on time, catching up on a TV series or just more 'efficient' watching. You can get through a 30min show in something like 15 min when

The functionality is already built into a library (libsoundtouch? libsndtouch?), it just needs to be called for the audio processing.

Am I the only person that wants this?

(Please no derails about "do it yourself", etc).

Re:Time stretch in other apps?

[Aneurysm9]

I agree with you there. It pissed me off that I couldn't timestretch dvds played through mplayer on my mythbox.

Re:Time stretch in other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mplayer does timestretch. RTFM.

Changing end times

[Anonymous Coward]

Well,

I'm stuck with real player on linux to play some
radio programs. What do I do to change the end time?
Change the cron job to kill real player at a different
time.

Re:Changing end times

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the mplayer command line player instead.

p2p tv

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know of a software which would let one share the TV feed over the network? My friend has a TV card and we both have full-rate ADSL so would be cool to be able to watch his feed.

Re:p2p tv

[SynapseLapse]

MythTV offers transcoding options to automatically convert the video to xvid/divx after it's finished recording.
So, while it may not be "live" tv, it's pretty easy to setup the machine to record say, The Daily Show, each night, save the file to xvid format, then you just shared the folder on the network and stream away.

1 idea anyway.

Re:p2p tv

[Se7enLC]

not true, unless it just came out in this revision. It does have automatic transcode to RTJPEG and MPEG4, but not directly into xvid/divx wrappers. The nuvexport can do this expertly, but not automatically. It's a feature that has been lacking for some time now (combining the formats of nuvexport with the automation of mythtranscode)

Re:p2p tv

[SynapseLapse]

Ahhh, ok. I misunderstood what the transcode option was. Admittedly I haven't messed around with it yet. Thanks for the heads up.

Nope, you are the one who is wrong

[Andy Dodd]

Capture cards with onboard MPEG encoders (the kinds you *want* to be using with MythTV) have a 1-2 second delay inherent in their operation. They are completely unsuitable for most games out there, except for possibly puzzle games where reaction times mean nothing.

Yes, "dumb" capture cards are fine for games and I use an old BT848-based card with my Xbox, but such capture cards are not a wise choice for anyone serious about reliable TV recording, since they require large amounts of CPU on the encoder box.

Re:Nope, you are the one who is wrong

[ydrol]

Capture cards with onboard MPEG encoders (the kinds you *want* to be using with MythTV)

Bear in mind that Digital TV cards dump the broadcast MPEG2 stream directly. In this case, there's no advantage in having an MPEG encoder unless recording from external source.

Re:Nope, you are the one who is wrong

[whoop]

Actually, non-mpeg capture cards don't use all that much cpu time. Granted, I wouldn't suggest dropping two or three in one box and record several things at once.

I have had an old-old circa 1997 hauppage bt848 lying around and decided to give Myth (via Knoppmyth) a try to upgrade my first series Tivo. That was at least six months ago, and it's still working perfectly. I can play other recordings smoothely while it is recording and transcoding the raw stream into MPEG.

Re:Nope, you are the one who is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

False. Sorry but your information is outdated. Even the MPEG-out cards like the PVR-350 have a framebuffer that does not have any delay whatsoever.

Works fine. In fact I play non-mpeg movies via xine and use the very same framebuffer, if there was a delay then I couldn't do that.

Re:Nope, you are the one who is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Capture cards with onboard MPEG encoders (the kinds you *want* to be using with MythTV) have a 1-2 second delay inherent in their operation. They are completely unsuitable for most games out there, except for possibly puzzle games where reaction times mean nothing.

I've got a PVR 500 that I've got my PS2 connected through. DScaler takes a lot of CPU to do quality deinterlacing, but otherwise it works great.

Now if you try to run it though anything that supports pausing a live signal, THEN you will have a delay. Otherwise you'd have hiccoughs and delays when you hit pause.

What about this on the MythTV site?

[carlmenezes]

It is highly recommended if you are using the Nvidia binary VGA drivers that you use version 7676 or earlier as later revisions have serious problems with features like XvMC and OpenGL sync which can result in poor performance or lockups.

Will the breezy package automatically check for that?

Re:What about this on the MythTV site?

[Plug]

Breezy Badger packages version 7667 of the NVidia drivers. It is Dapper Drake that you might have to worry about.

MythTV *IN THEORY*

[Andy Dodd]

Define "full rate ADSL"

Most likely your upstream rate is still not nearly high enough to stream video at a decent quality reliably.

MPEG-2 from a hardware encoder card at good quality will be 5-8 Mbits/sec. Transcoding to MPEG4 at good quality will take it down to around 1 Mbit/sec, which is still faster than 90% of the DSL upstream connections I've seen. Even with 1.5 mbit DSL, overhead means you're going to be pushing the limits of your connection.

For streaming internally within a LAN, Myth does EXTREMELY well. I routinely stream MPEG2 recordings over an 802.11g connection. (11b will not work for MPEG2 stuff, it will work for transcoded MPEG4.)

Re:MythTV *IN THEORY*

[havardi]

Agreed-- I stream over 802.11g to my ibook, in bed. Since our bedroom is on the other side of the house from the access point, sometimes the show will drop due to the low signal. That only happens for live tv/ mpeg2 content. My stuff gets transcoded to mpeg4 every morning so I rarely have a problem.

Re:MythTV *IN THEORY*

[andykuan]

I tried exposing my MythTV box to the Internet last summer so I could reach it with a frontend-only box at my office and watch a Red Sox day game. My upstream bandwidth from Comcast is around 300kbps so I set my MPEG-4 settings down as low as I could (I think it was 240). If it weren't for the stuttering, the game would've been just passable. As it was, it kept on freezing and restarting so I gave up.

I have read that the Myth protocol relies on virtually unbuffered streams since the assumption is that all of the elements of your Myth system would reside on the same LAN.

CableCard Support

[hoyty]

I know the likelyhood of official drivers for Cable Card PC hardware on linux being released are about zero. Just curious if anyone has any thoughts on the possibility of reverse engineering drivers and hacking them in to MythTV? Hopefully once the hardware gets out there even in pre-built vista machines there will be some more interesting stuff to happen.

Re:CableCard Support

[ScrappyLaptop]

Funny, I would think that companies such as Video Without Boundaries or any of the others that sell Cable Card Linux powered set top boxes would have to make their source code available, just like every other Linux powered device out there...they tout using Linux, but no mention of the GPL nor source code anythere on their site that I can find. Get them to release their source and I bet you just might find the Cable Card support you are looking for.

MythTV 0.19 is better than the Release Notes

[zzxc]

This release includes a lot of enhancements, even though it doesn't look like it from first glance at the release notes. MythTV 0.19 can save cut commercials from MPEG2 video streams without transcoding. This saves you disk space. It also has many bugs fixed, resulting in better compatibility with video hardware. (some framegrabbers that wouldn't work before work now) Now, when you watch live TV, shows are automatically recorded. If you want to keep (rather than have them expire) them after you are done watching them, you can do so in the "watch recordings" menu.

MythWeb has been greatly improved, allowing you to better control MythTV from a web browser. The frontend can now even be controlled from a telnet socket. Overall, you won't be disappointed. (0.19 is so much better than 0.18.1 that I've been using the SVN snapshots of the development code)

Still Lacks DVD Changer Support

[Bruha]

M$ added DVD changer support in their MCE rollup update. Yet mythtv still lacks this.

I had a box built and wanted to use it to rip all my dvd's to some massive storage but $$$ became an issue after figuring how much space I actually needed on the hard drives. DVD Changers are much more economic just a little slower.

Re:Still Lacks DVD Changer Support

[Doug Lim]

Seems like you're comparing apples to oranges, no?

For what you'd expect to spend on a DVD changer, you should certainly be able to buy enough hard drive storage to fit at least that many DVDs and many more.

How many DVDs are you talking about fitting into that changer, and how much does that changer cost? You can't tell me that's going to cost less than the equivalent hard drive capacity.

For example:
http://pcworld.about.com/news/Jan192001id38742.htm

970GB storage for 200 DVD capacity - cost $1800 (I'm assuming list price to be generous). 500GB EIDE drives are a bit over $300. Call it 2 drives to fit 200 DVDs - $600-700.

And how much is MS MCE? (I just checked Tigerdirect, which lists it at a bit over $100. You could probably spend a bit more if you don't like/trust Tigerdirect and want to go for a more traditional retail outlet.)

So, I guess, yes, if money is no object (and discounting slower access), sure, MCE and the DVD changer that MCE has support for is definitely the better solution.

Re:Still Lacks DVD Changer Support

[waferhead]

Seems like you could do something with mythdvd and lirc...
Would still have to have removable media support etc.

I was curious about what a DVD changer cost, and Google found this...
"http://www.compuplus.com/i-Sony-400-Disc-DVD-Chan ger-Player-DVP-CX985V-1005242~refer-froogle.html"

For $279, seems almost too good to be true.

Or is that what you had in mind?

Re:Still Lacks DVD Changer Support

[Anonymous Coward]

I found an entire computer including a 200 disc changer for $100 more than the list price of what you found. And the computer is already set up with MCE, with TV Tuner and in the form factor of a home theater component.

Sony XL-1 $2,000

Re:Still Lacks DVD Changer Support

[TClevenger]

This is a biggie for me. There are some very reasonable 400-disc jukeboxes out there, but the cheapest consumer A/V jukebox controller I've been able to find is a VideoRequest ($1,900 and up.) Anybody have any cheaper options?

Hardware?

[geminidomino]

I've played around a few times with building a Mythbox for this sort of thing. The two things stopping me are mainly that I can't decide on a capture card and finding a usable remote that's not insanely overpriced (Preferably USB. I don't want to have to solder up a serial IR receiver or whatever LIRC needed the last time I looked). Any suggestions? I don't care about HD content or any of that crap, just basic cable input, which the HD-3000 I looked at for "futureproofing" doesn't seem able to handle (or at least, that's what the FAQ suggests.. I think.).

The other option I've been playing with is getting an Xbox and modding it with XMC.No TV capture, but that's really just gravy at this point (not much good on TV these days, and nothing worth watching on "broadcast"). Of course, then the question becomes which mod chip to get. :)

So this of course is why I'm still without either. ;)

Re:Hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't want the tv stuff just buy and xbox, softmod it, and run XBMC. I've got myth up and running for the tv bits, but I still use XBMC over it for general media playback.

Re:Hardware?

[geminidomino]

Softmod?

Re:Hardware?

[modemboy]

For a cable capture card I would suggest a hauppauge pvr-150 non mce. They can be had for around $70 (got mine from buy.com) in the non mce version (means no remote). It is a hardware capture card so no system load, good quality too.

For input I found the easiest way to go is to buy an infared keyboard mouse combo (liteon makes a nice one for around $30) and then also buy an ir learning remote of your choosing (as cheap as $20, Sony's are easy to setup). Then you use the IR keyboard to teach the remote whatever key presses you want to map to each button. Very easy to setup and infinetly customizeable without any pesky config files. Plus then you have a wireless keyboard handy for when you need to hack.

KnoppMyth is the best!!

Re:Hardware?

[geminidomino]

For input I found the easiest way to go is to buy an infared keyboard mouse combo (liteon makes a nice one for around $30) and then also buy an ir learning remote of your choosing (as cheap as $20, Sony's are easy to setup). Then you use the IR keyboard to teach the remote whatever key presses you want to map to each button. Very easy to setup and infinetly customizeable without any pesky config files. Plus then you have a wireless keyboard handy for when you need to hack

That is easily the most clever solution I've seen yet! I never even THOUGHT of using a learning remote like that. I suppose Myth is setup so that such an approach would work, with 1-key actions like that?

Re:Hardware?

[Josh Triplett]

Buy a Hauppauge PVR-350. It includes TV-in with MPEG2 encoding, TV-out with MPEG2 decoding or with full Xv support, and a nice remote control which works perfectly with LIRC and MythTV.

If you want additional tuners later, I recommend getting a PVR-500; two tuners with MPEG2 encoding in one PCI card.

Re:Hardware?

[modemboy]

Yup, all 1 key inputs for all functions afaik.
The only limitation is that key repeat doesn't work for me (as in I have to press the down key over and over to get through a list rather than holding it down) but I believe that has to do with the way I capture the ir codes/programmed the remote, I think I could get it working with some more fiddling but at this point I don't care, it works great for my purposes.

No kidding about the ease of use, I see people banging their heads agains lirc tring to get these cheesy hauppauge remotes working while I have a fully customizable remote that has way more buttons and also controls my tv and stereo functions.

Re:Hardware?

[acid_zebra]

I have a Hauppage PVR-350 which works great with myth AND comes with a perfectly supported remote.

Re:Hardware?

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

Is this with tv-out and non-mpeg2 sources (ie not dvd, nor from tv-in, but .divx etc)? If yes, you don't happend to know how this is done? Last time I checked people were trying to patch mplayer without much success.

Re:Hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to chip xboxes, you can copy stuff on to the harddrive that causes an exploit to be launched when you turn it on, the exploit then runs anything you want, as if the xbox has a chip. There are guides and things at xbox-scene.net, the forums, in particular the "XBE Exploits" forums, are a goldmine of information on it all.

Re:Hardware?

[acid_zebra]

Ah, I used to send everything out over the 350's TV-out card, but no 2d/3d hardware acceleration meant playing MAME sucked.

So I got a cheap Geforce FX5600 (I think) card with TV out and use that.

As for your 'how was it done' question; I set up the X server to use the PCR-350's tv out and that was pretty much it. But again, a cheap $30 PCI geforce card work much better.

Re:Hardware?

[geminidomino]

I'll check it out, thanks.

Re:Hardware?

[Darby]

I can't decide on a capture card and finding a usable remote that's not insanely overpriced

I highly recommend the Hauppaugue PVR-350. Hardware MPEG encode and decode, comes with a remote that's supported by mythtv out of the box.

It's around $170 for card, remote, cables etc.

Supported perfectly.

Anyhow, that's what I run and what my parents and inlaws all run (Birthday presents from yours truly ;-)

XBox and HDTV, I can't help you on ;-)

Re:Hardware?

[What me a Coward]

At that point then why bother with a $170 pvr 350 when you could buy a $139 PVR 500 dual tuner from newegg and get a cheap $20-30 USB remote?

    I assume the PVR 500 is supported in MYTH? Sorry haven't looked lately at the supported hardware for it.

Re:Hardware?

[geminidomino]

Well, I've got it softmodded (Thank goodness the local EB had a copy of Splinter cell) and got EvoX loaded.

Now the trick seems to be finding XBMC binaries.

Re:Hardware?

[acid_zebra]

well the PVR is SUPPOSED to be 2 350's in a single card. But from the myth mailing list I gather that the 500 support can be a bit hairy. I haven't checked in a month or two so maybe it's working OK now.

So at the time I opted for the 350, don't remember the price but it was cheaper than what you mention, while the 500 was brand-spanking new at the time and so more expensive.

Re:Hardware?

[What me a Coward]

The PVR 500 is two PVR 150's not 350's. It works great BTW easy setup only two entries in system hardware Tuner 1 and Tuner 2 no crossbar or audio drivers seperatly and it installed in like 2 secs.

    Yeah the PVR 500 was more pricy at launch but since then the prices have come down a bit except on Hauppauges online store it's still selling for $170 without remote $199 with remote but it can be gotten off of Newegg for $139 plus shipping.

    I wouldn't be surprised if it is supported better in myth now as that's a tuner that will be in big demand once it works with little or no flaws. 2 Tuners 1 slot only thing better would be a tripple tuner card or even a quad.

Re:Hardware?

[Josh Triplett]

Is this with tv-out and non-mpeg2 sources (ie not dvd, nor from tv-in, but .divx etc)? If yes, you don't happend to know how this is done?

Yes, the PVR-350's TV output works just fine with non-mpeg2 sources. What you want is the "ivtvdev" X Window System driver, which gives you an X server on the PVR-350's TV output, and that X server has Xv support which allows you to play back other video formats with acceleration.

There are several useful ways you could make the MythTV frontend and the X server start on boot and stay running; I just put it in /etc/inittab:

myth:2:respawn:/bin/su - mythtv -c '/usr/X11R6/bin/startx -- -layout TV'

"TV" is a layout in my X server configuration which uses ivtvdev.
This approach seemed far simpler and more lightweight than many people's suggested solution of running full-blown KDM and KDE, setting KDM to auto-login as mythtv, and creating an autostart .desktop file for MythTV. YMMV.

Re:Hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the reply, exactly what I needed to know!
(And as a debian user a big thank you for all your other work aswell).

mplayer != MythTV

[carlcub]

All you need to do is, as another poster mentioned, change the MythDVD settings to use another program that does support DVD menus. Xine works well, as does ogle. It's not a MythTV problem at all.

MythTV as a Separate Head

[Schlaegel]

I have MythTV running in the background of my primary system. Using the hardware accelerated encode/decode/tvout of the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 350 I can watch, pause, ff, and rw live and recorded television with little impact upon my system (doesn't even register in system monitor or top). I use a separate instance of the Xserver only displays on of the tvout of the 350 and only receives input from the remote of 350.

Before I took the plunge and set up MythTV the process confused me. There is so much talk of a MythTV frontend system and a backend system, that I was unsure if it was possible to run both parts of MythTV on the same system. I found that with a hardware accelerated card, both the frontend and the backend can be run in the background with little impact upon anything else. I do wish it didn't require MySql to save on ram usage.

Now I do write, email, program, and browse on my system on the primary head, while my wife skips commercials on the television using the remote! Don't be afraid to try it, my system isn't a speed daemon and isn't even in the same room as my television. I just connect the system and television with some long high quality coax.

Thank you MythTV developers!

Re:MythTV as a Separate Head

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a similar setup. Using a modulator I patch the TV-out with my central coax run. So any TV in the house just needs to switch to a given channel to see my second head.

Question: what can I use for a long distance (rf?) remote? Currently using my old Zaurus with wireless card, but battery is practically dead by the time a show is over. End up with a wired (for electricity that is) remote. Reminds me of the wired remote we had with our first VCR. So 80's!

Re:MythTV as a Separate Head

[ZERO1ZERO]

ATI do a RF remote control I beleive for about 10$

My MythTV experience: Great, but . . .

[Yeechang Lee]

I've been running MythTV for about two months, and have previously posted on my experience. I've been 100% Unix at home for ten years last month and my MythTV box is one of three Linux boxes plus one OS X box at home.

My experience with MythTV is can be summed up in the statement "It's great, but . . ."

Great:
* Support for recording and playing back HDTV broadcast feeds from FireWire (cable box) and MPEG-2 capture card (over-the-air) sources.

But . . .
* FireWire input is generally reliable, but nodes sometimes mysteriously and unpredictably move around based on when and how the cable box, mythbackend daemon, and the MythTV box get started and restarted. (I don't think this is a MythTV problem, but more to do with the current state of the Linux FireWire libraries plus some unreliability on the part of the very common Motorola DCT-6200.)
* MythTV's current state of over-the-air channel detection and setup is so, so horribly bad as to be nearly unusable. It's still not completely clear to me how the combination of Zap2It's program data and mythtv-setup's transport scanning are to work together. Anyone setting up over-the-air reception is going to run into the utterly baffling "missing PIDs" issue. Despite this I previously had, after enormous amounts of grief and multiple tries, three over-the-air HDTV channels working and working well; then all of a sudden one stopped working despite signal locks and an unchanged antenna orientation. Right now, with a rebuilt box, I only have one channel working right.

Great:
* Very, very nice user interface (I really like the Retro theme and Isthmus OSD) with tons of great features.

But . . .
* Holes in the most obvious places. For example, I have two HDTV cable boxes and the aforementioned over-the-air capture card. Let's say cable box #1 can't be used at the moment because fo the aforementioned wandering-node issue or because the preset channel is not broadcasting due to an outage. There's no way to, in Live TV mode, skip that tuner and go on to the others; instead, mythfrontend bounces me right back to the menu (if it doesn't crash completely). If the over-the-air card can't lock into the channel it's preset to, mythfrontend again bounces me right back to the menu or crashes instead of letting me instead try a channel that is working.

So on and so forth. (By the way, I really dislike the way its fans tend to push KnoppMyth as some kind of all-in-one, turnkey MythTV box-on-a-CD for dummies. It's not, unless you want to call lack of support for SATA drives in the install script and USB keyboards and mice a "feature" (unless things have improved since 5A26), and portraying it this way simply hurts the MythTV cause.)

Don't get me wrong; I still *really* like MythTV, am very happy with what I can do with it and how I've set up my little quasi-home theater setup, and it's quite possible 0.19 has taken care of some of the more glaring issues. But it's labeled 0.19 *for a reason*. Everything I wrote in my previous posting still holds, for better or for worse.

Looking for Distros

[Kernull]

On the subject of MythTV, I have been looking into setting up a PC Multimedia Center. Does anyone know a list of distros on this topic? Some distros I have found are:

http://www.geexbox.org/en/
http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html
http://www.davedina.org/content/ (this looks promising, but is still in infancy stages)

Ideally, I am looking for a distro that I can set up in my living room, and, giving non-linux-savvy-guests a mouse/keyboard they can navigate their way to video games (ROMS), videos or TV.
I have browsed the distros above, but would like to know what else is out there before commiting countless hours configuring it.

Performance issues

[Mikaelk]

I have a relatively low powerered system (Celeron 500 MHz). I recently tried freevo and was pleasantly suprised how much faster the images, video and music applications were. My guess is that it is alot of overhead going on around the db.

dts passthrough

[novus ordo]

Seems that dts passthrough needs libdts, but after looking around seems they changed their name to libca and it says there they are getting sued by DTS Inc. Anybody know of any way to get dts passthrough working in mythtv?

False, you're clueless

[Andy Dodd]

Framebuffer applies to playback of content within the machine to the TV output of the PVR-350 - In this case the 350 is performing as a playback device, not a capture device. Yes, the 350 supports raw framebuffer PLAYBACK. It does NOT support capturing raw YUV from the tuner inputs. (Supposedly the hardware does, but the drivers don't, no one has figured out how yet, and it is not a high priority for the ivtv people at all.)

Updated install?

[i8myh8]

The installation process for MythTV has always been atrocious. I consider myself somewhere between a novice and intermediate Linux user and I have been unsuccessful thus far in getting MythTV to work. Have they updated it so it's an easier install? Truthfully TVTime comes all setup working with my TV card without any effort, so I find it kind-of strange that MythTV is such a complex beast. There has to be a way to make it more user-friendly to setup.

MythDVD vs. everything else?

[Kadin2048]

Because you mentioned it, maybe you can answer this ... how does MythTV/MythDVD stack up for DVD transcoding to other programs (e.g., dvd::rip, etc.)? I'm 'shopping around' for software to do this, in order to reduce the load on my Mac, and I'm trying to figure out which one is worth spending the time to set up.

On MacOS, I use the (excellent) "HandBrake" utility, which does a direct 'one shot' DVD -> MP4 transcode, while also handling subtitles, cropping/scaling, etc. It comes as one binary, too. It has a claimed 'Linux version' but from what I've seen, it's not really ready for prime-time. (Although I'd be willing to change that assessment if anyone wanted to offer evidence that it's easy to get going.)

Is there anything which does something similar on x86 Linux? I'm hoping for something that's equally easy to use -- I'm really not interested in shooting an afternoon setting up a half-dozen utilities to do what ought to be a fire-and-forget operation, if I can avoid it.

Re:MythDVD vs. everything else?

[drig]

I haven't had a ton of luck with MythDVD. I've just been dropping to shell and running mencoder. MythDVD seems to go snarky when there's the little problem, and requires dropping to shell and restarting mtd. If I'm using the shell anyway, I might as well just run the damn command.

Even the MythDVD player, not the ripper, is sub-par. It just runs mplayer for you. I ended up changing it to xine, because xine supports menus where mplayer doesn't. Even that's simply not as easy or as foolproof as using the $40 dedicated DVD.

capture card for games

[xmodem_and_rommon]

i can confirm that, through a decent capture card, gaming systems are perfectly playable. I have a compro videomate TV, its about the bottom of the range, and the delay is not perceptible. (assuming i'm not using any timeshifting functions, etc).

What i can NOT get this card to do is stream properly. I decided it'd be a fun experiment to see if i could use a wireless controller and my laptop to stream video over the network and play games in another room of the house, but no matter what button i tweaked, i couldn't get the delay for windows media encoder below about 8 seconds. The drivers for my tuner card are buggy as fuck. As in, when i use VLC to open open it, my computer bluescreens.

I think that if i could get the lag down to about 400 ms it would be playable albeit a bit annoying, but even if its 1s its still a cool experiment. If any slashdotters have any suggestions i'd be happy to hear them.

Re:capture card for games

[maino82]

what software do you use to play games on your comp? i've tried virtualdub, vlc and ati multimedia center, but they all produce delays that are unnacceptable for game play (even when setting the caching down to 0ms). any advice on how to eliminate or reduce the delay? i have an ati all-in-wonder x800xt, just for reference.

Re:capture card for games

[xmodem_and_rommon]

i use the compropvr softare, which is included with the tuner card. Surely your ati card came with its own capture software?

wait, is this an agp card, with video capture capabilities? If so, then good luck. The agp slot is really only designed for one-way communication

Sounds like a project.

[Kadin2048]

No crashes outside of the few days needed to configure it.

That, to me, is probably the most unappealing thing that you could have said.

I've been thinking for a while of installing MythTV, but I'm afraid after using an Elgato EyeTV on my Mac, that it would probably just be an exercise that would leave me very frustrated. (The EyeTV is a commercial PVR, and it takes roughly 5-10 mins to set up and basically seems to do most of what people are trying to get MythTV to do, except the client/server stuff, for which there is a free addon.) It's basically a zero config install, does one-click to DVD and iPod (provided you have Toast), and does TiVo-like functions with the TitanTV site providing scheduling data.

Is it cheap? No. A software encoder is $149 (it relies on your processor for the heavy lifting), or an MPEG-2/MPEG-4 encoder is $329; Toast for DVD burning functions is $80. (Or you could get the older MPEG-1 model for about $70 on eBay.) There is also an HDTV version if you want that for $350. Plus you have the 'Mac tax' to factor in. But I can tell you from personal experience, it really does 'just work.'

I appreciate the effort that everyone involved in MythTV is putting in, but I think you have to be careful advocating something that's still at an early enough stage that it's a bit of a project to set up. If what you want is just a PVR, that is, the PRODUCT and not a PROJECT, there might be better alternatives out there.

Re:Sounds like a project.

[Cat_Byte]

If you have a working system, all you really need for myth is the PVR-150 (about $70) and it comes with the remote. Install ivtv and it'll autodetect it. One of the hardest parts to figure out is knowing which tuner port to use. /dev/video0 tuner 0. Also, when you set up the channel lineup to download from zap2it, make sure you choose the correct frequency from the dropdown. If you get static channels, just clear channels and choose the next one (there are only like 3). Most will work with default. Comcast in Dallas was cable-hrc so it took me a couple tries to find it.

Re:Sounds like a project.

[BoldAndBusted]

I appreciate the effort that everyone involved in MythTV is putting in, but I think you have to be careful advocating something that's still at an early enough stage that it's a bit of a project to set up. If what you want is just a PVR, that is, the PRODUCT and not a PROJECT, there might be better alternatives out there.

I was not advocating it, I was just sharing my experience. Maybe you're not ready or willing to put the time in, or you don't like what MythTV gives you. Life is about choices. I'll leave it up to those people involved in making PRODUCTS to make their case that their stuff is available and Better For You(tm), since they'll have Marketing, Research, Engineering, QA and a call center ready to make that happen.

Nowhere on Mythtv's official site or in its official docs does it say that MythTV is anything but a project.

How long until 1.0?

[Call Me Black Cloud]

It's taken 4 years to get to ver 0.19, so only 16 more years until version 1.0 is released.

That's perfect! It will be ready just when my kids are finishing high school and getting ready to go off to college! Hopefully the developers will keep working on it so "Myth" doesn't live up to its name.

Re:How long until 1.0?

[ThrobbingGristle]

After 0.99 comes 0.100 anyway

Windows Media Extender Support?

[Gyorg_Lavode]

Does mythTV support windows media extenders yet? THat is the biggest feature I am waiting on in a PVR piece of software before I build a high-end computer around it. (Note. WMC will not work because I can't live w/ the format it stores in.)

Re:Windows Media Extender Support?

[What me a Coward]

Try Sagetv http://www.freytechnologies.com/
  It supports and has for some time all the things myth just came out with in their new release plus it works with media extenders like Hauppauges media extender. And it stores recordings in Mpeg2 and 1 as well as supporting Mpeg4/divx.

Re:Windows Media Extender Support?

[Gyorg_Lavode]

Hauppauge's media extender does not have digital audio or HD video support though. Those are 2 of the big things I want out of my extender. Now should sage TV support something like the linksys media extender, (though I'd really prefer DVI but oh well), I'd certainly go for it.

Re:Windows Media Extender Support?

[What me a Coward]

Not sure about linksys extender support you could check through their forums to see if somebody has one setup in it or post a question about it.

    Sagetv does try to support the newer hardware that people want to use and does listen to the community on things they want to see show up in sage or be supported by sage so if it doesn't support it now i wouldn't be to surprised if it doesn't show up in a future beta version.

    Having come out with a whole slew of things in the last beta HDTV support for a number of different cards and studio which allows end users to change and modify sage interface and gui as well as create plugins for sage and a number of other features that the community was asking for, I wouldn't rule it out at any rate it never hurts to check or ask.

    You could also ask Linksys what HTPC they support or are planing on supporting if thats the media extender you are set on.

Re:Windows Media Extender Support?

[Gyorg_Lavode]

The linksys is a windows media extender built to extend windows media center. The thing is I've read all windows media extenders basically impliment the uPnP:A/V standard so support from other back ends should not be too complicated. Reguardless I"ll give the SageTV forums a try. Thank you for the suggestion.

Telnet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone support telnet for a new application?

I'm not anti-CLI, far from it, but I have this aversion to passing plaintext passwords on the 'Net. So why not SSH?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

XBOX

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, it's probably the simplest, cheapest route to go. You can get an XBOX for a hundred bucks. A modchip for another fifty. That's all you need. Download the latest version of XBOX Media Center (screen 1, screen 2, screen 3) and configure it for your network (a couple lines in an XML file).

It couldn't be easier.

This won't record video, which is the real reason for using MythTV, but if you just want to watch networked videos/listen to music/play old games (see also: MAMEox), this is the way to go. If you look carefull at those screenshots, you'll notice that XBMC integrates perfectly with IMDB (for reviews & details) and Amazon (album art, tracks, etc.)