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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."
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?
Ubuntu Breezy packages for MythTV can be found at http://deb.thehunter.ws/. Huge thanks to those Drunken Caffeinated Monkeys.
I've looked, but they seem to miss this important feature annoucement, or does it just lack? Does it run on windows?
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.
Evil people are out to get you.
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?
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.
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
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 $$$ to try one.
You could've hired me.
I enjoy all of the above, but in Windows, using SageTV. (sagetv.com)
I also enjoy things like a real time-line progress bar w/ commercial markers.
Stability with ATI HDTV Wonder, and AverMedia A180 HDTV Tuners...
WebUI, Adskip, DVD rip, Weather, Full UI mods/skins, client/server, awsome HDTV support, and kick-ass driver support for every tuner card out there (No PVR250 needed).
All for the cost of some $$$.. Well worth it to me.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
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?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
Hoyty
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.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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)
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!!
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!
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.
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.
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.