Slashdot Mirror
MythTV Compared with Windows Media Center
legoburner writes "Tom's Hardware has a nice comparison of MythTV and Windows Media Center Edition, and it seems that they preferred MythTV by quite a margin: 'Enter MythTV, a grand unification of personal digital video recording and home theatre technology, and a magnum opus of modular design, freedom of expression and personal entertainment.'"
Good news Tom's Hardware picks MythTV over Windows MCE (Media Center Edition), but maybe not so much a surprise. Tom's Hardware's preference isn't going to mean a lick to the general consumers. I can't tell my neighbors MythTV is bitchin' because they're not going to have a clue how do it themselves, and I'm running out of support hours and don't have time to set up everyone with MythTV, let alone support it afterwards.
What would be really cool is if some company pulled a Red Hat, or Suse, etc., with MythTV whereby they offer their "version" of a MythTV distribution bundled with hardware and all. With minor standardization, it's a product that could spark consumer interest. This would offer an alternative to the always present MS MCE, and an interesting competition (potentially) with TiVo.
Let me speak on both sides. I have been running Linux since 1994, and am not a noob by any stretch of the imagination. I just built a mythtv box, and things are bother better and worse that you might expect. First I chose to buy a PVR-150 card, and to use ubuntu as a base. Both decisions made the process much easier than it would have been otherwise. Most of the set-up was just adding the correct repositories and typing apt-get install. EXCEPT for getting the ivtv drivers running. I have no idea why there is no pre-compiled driver for ivtv for ubuntu. The instructions on the howto pages are detailed about which version of the ivtv driver to use, and how to compile it, so why not just have it available as a pre-compiled module. (I know why don't I pre-compile them and make them available) If the compiled ivtv module was available it would have taken less than 30 minutes to have everything up and running.
Overall I think that the thing that will hold Linux back from becoming really widely deployed is the lack of automation for simple tasks. I wanted to burn a DVD from a show that I recorded in mythtv. I can find several good recipes, including in the mythtv documentation, about how to do it. If it is so easy to write a detailed list of how to do something, then why not automate it.