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