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MythTV 0.20 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The latest version of MythTV, the open source PVR application for Linux, has been released. New features (as documented in the release notes) include a new menu system, an improved internal DVD player, support for DVB radio channels, and mouse support. There is also a new plugin – MythArchive – which allows recordings be written to DVD. You can download MythTV from MythTV.org."
It (and better TV Tuner drivers) are probably the only things that really make me want Linux over FreeBSD. Still, it's a nice release, even if I can't use it.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
For you Myth users out there, I have a few questions:
Thanks. Congrats to the MythTV team
Since the poor mythtv site appears to be slashdotted already:
Major changes
* Menus are now drawn by MythUI using OpenGL. This option can be enabled/disabled in the Appearance settings.
* Improved internal DVD player - now supporting menus and other missing features
* Added MHEG content implementation (Interactive TV in UK)
* Added Hotplug support for removable media in Media Monitor and MythGallery
* Added support for the HDHomeRun encoding device
* Added support for basic FreeBox recorders
* Added support for H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC) TS decoding
* Added an MPEG1/MPEG2/MPEG4-AVC IP network recorder
* Added internal UPnP support for TV and Music
* Added experimental second commercial detector
* New socket class for backend communications
* OSD image cache which improves channel changing speed
* Fixed program transition while Watching LiveTV
* Added beginnings of firewire capture support for MacOS
* Support for DVB radio channels and guide data collected via EIT for them
* Added mouse support in menus, including gestures
* Menus are now drawn by MythUI using OpenGL. This option can be enabled/disabled in the Appearance settings.
* Improved internal DVD player - now supporting menus and other missing features
* Added MHEG content implementation (Interactive TV in UK)
* Added Hotplug support for removable media in Media Monitor and MythGallery
* Added support for the HDHomeRun encoding device
* Added support for basic FreeBox recorders
* Added support for H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC) TS decoding
* Added an MPEG1/MPEG2/MPEG4-AVC IP network recorder
* Added internal UPnP support for TV and Music
* Added experimental second commercial detector
* New socket class for backend communications
* OSD image cache which improves channel changing speed
* Fixed program transition while Watching LiveTV
* Added beginnings of firewire capture support for MacOS
* Support for DVB radio channels and guide data collected via EIT for them
* Added mouse support in menus, including gestures
"You killed my yogurt!" --Fred Fredburger
All I want to know is, is where is the win32 version? this would be SWEET running on WinME!
(yes, obviously my karma is too good)
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
I've been running MythTV for about a year now and let me tell you -- TV can't get any better.
;)
I have the shows I want whenever I want them. Sure, sure, you can do this with Tivo. But can you also watch those recorded shows over your home network on other PCs? Burn to DVD? My MythTV box also is my torrent box, fileserver, IRC proxy, IMAP server....
Let's put it this way -- more features than Tivo, and they can't control what you do with it. Go ahead, skip all the commercials you want. Keep your recordings as long as you want. The Man can't keep you down when you're running this system.
Also, when that commercial flag becomes law (I think it's still up in the air), MythTV plans to use it to identify commercials and intentionally skip them. Eat that, capitalist pigs
Any word on when this build will be on a Knoppmyth ISO?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
http://mythtv.son.org/tiki-index.php should help. I don't think you'll find it under ports.
Seconded! MythTV is friggin' awesome. It eats the commercials, shares the shows over the network (NFS and SMB), lets me dump my MP3s onto it for playing, supports multiple heads (and backends), and more. I don't even use half the features of the software, and it still blows me away.
I'm using KnoppMyth, and was totally amazed how easily everything installed. Yes I did have to tweak LiRC, and a few other things.
I'm getting ready do build another unit into my house, and look forward to the extra features in the new version.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I have to pipe-up again, and say that MythTV is awesome. If you've got a tuner card, and a spare box, totally check it out. IT EATS COMMERCIALS, plays DVDs, MP3s, does a photo album, and other things that other units don't do, or don't do well.
It even has support for MAME.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Yeah, seriously, I just set up my myth 0.19 box YESTERDAY.
Can MythTV control my existing cablebox (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250)? It's got a USB port, what looks like a smartcard slot, and analog+digital audio/video outs.
If I could use the cablebox's tuner, maybe I would need only a video digitizer, or even just transcoder. It would be great to use the cablebox to covert digital video signals to TV. I've already got the cablebox and TV, I'd like to spend that money on better quality for the parts I actually require.
--
make install -not war
Nowadays, thanks to Netcscape and Google, beta is the final state of software. And after years of Linux, an escalation to 0.20 is a perfectly reasonable user upgrade.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I been loving it since.19. I have a DVB pci card a dishnetwork smartcard, and I can record digitaly with all and AC3 sound. I wish I could do that with directv, but linux does not have DSS support. There are DSS tuners, but they just work with windows. Other than that mythtv is awesome.
I've been happily running a set of Myth boxen for more than a year now, and while I love the system, the one feature I had been sorely waiting for was an easy way to export to DVD. While a more involved method was possible, I look forward to being able to just create an ISO directly from Myth itself. Keep up the good work!
No, but it costs time. I've used Linux as a server OS since Slackware 1.0, and have no problems configuring most things, but to date I've spent three solid days over the last 18 months on various attempts to get Myth working. Hell, I went out and bought components based on recommendations for them being good video card and capture card to use with Myth, and I still couldn't get anything that worked.
The most recent time, after blowing an entire weekend screwing around, I finally restored my Win2K backup that I'd made before I started, installed GBPVR and in about 5 minutes was up and running, and have been happy with that ever since.
...is that MythTV could use a bit of exposure to the great masses of people out there who are completely unaware of this software, yet who could use it to their benefit. The parent understands the purpose of the release notes while observing that something else could help the program more.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
I just finished setting up my home MythTV system. It rocks! I've got my digital cable connected directly to my backend using a PCI DVB-C card, and my projector is connected to my frontend using a DVI cable, so the backend can record the MPEG-2 streams directly to disk with no quality loss whatsoever (and including all the audio and subtitle tracks), and then the frontend can display them on my wall with not a single bit of quality loss in between! Plus it plays my videos and my music, it lets me skip commercial breaks (which it has automatically tagged for me), watch DVD's, play legacy games with MAME, etc., etc.
It really is a fantastic piece of kit. It can be pretty finicky to set up and you need to be prepared to invest some serious amount of time, but it's worth it!
I love MythTV. I'm very excited to try 0.20 (UPnP especially). It's a great piece of software and IMO handily beats MCE (though I hear BeyondTV puts up a fight). The level of control is great, I absolutely like to OWN my media. I have a looming fear though that poor MythTV is about to get 'shafted' so to speak.
MythTV has HDTV support for broadcast and Cable HD, but lacks a means of decrypting these streams. In fact, PCs in general do at this point, but I suspect that will change. Vista MCE will undoubtedly have encrypted HDTV playback support, Tivo as well (if it doesn't already). How is a free OSS solution like this to compete against imposed proprietary restrictions? I smell a DeCSS debacle all over again. Perhaps it will get cracked. Maybe I can still watch my streams if I subjugate myself to a DMCA violation or two.
Lets face it, another case of a superior product getting kicked to the curb by an industry that likes to wear tinfoil hats at the detriment of its consumers. I guess I have a decision in the future. Use the software I love and watch the shows it can view, or relinquish control impair my viewing experience and broaden my media options. I think I'll stay with Myth, the studios just lost a viewer (though I doubt they'll notice).
I just dropped my myth box which I had struggled with for the last few months. Admittedly, I didn't know much about Linux beforehand, just the basics so I wanted to use myth as a learning tool. I didn't mind that struggle at all. Setting up in the end was easy and relatively painless once I understood some Perl basics etc. Myth's qualities are not overstated above. Authoring DVDs of recordings was a bit of a hassle, but it seems with those release notes it might have gotten better. I could even archive to DVD all my old VHS easily with the right tuner card! But there are two basic reasons I dropped Myth: 1) I was never happy with the media players available aside from watching archived videos, including DVDs (never got that to work). 2) the picture quality tended to be pretty poor (maybe that's the fault of ivtv? but still can't get myth without drivers). My friend tried two windows alternatives--gbpvr and media portal--and the picture quality for live and recorded TV is leaps and bounds better than anything I could find after hours and hours of tweaking my myth setup. I can't imagine how it would look on a nice TV. Blue lines on the top and bottom of the feed, terribly flat blacks, fuzziness on certain channels pervaded my myth experience and haven't occurred with media portal. I have other problems with media portal and wouldn't mind going back to myth, but it just seems the limitations of the drivers out there really kills the experience for me.
Any idea when the Google Summer of Code projects will be included in MythTV? I am guessing .21? These projects are going to be very usefull to MythTV, especially the AutoConfig, Make Myth Multi-user, and the Windows Port.
http://code.google.com/soc/mythtv/about.html
Ah, a casual user then :-) Took me at least a week (but then I was compiling Gentoo on a diddy 1.2GHz Epia box)
MythTV is complex to set up because it is doing complex stuff - plus its supporting lots of different modes of use (analogue TV, DVB, with/without hardware MPEG are all rather different kettles of fish).
Any free/open (and especially non-windows) media centre is liable to be driver hell - there is not much that developers can do when TV cards rely on firmware "blobs" and manufacturers play musical chairs with chipsets without changing model numbers or packaging - and a media centre relies on so many different drivers.
When MythTV is working it is jolly impressive - the new release sounds like it fills a lot of important gaps (DVD archiving was a glaring ommission).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I've had one of these for about five months and while it was a PITA to install, it definitely increased my e-penis with the local LUG. It looks great and is popular in the household.
/home in a separate XFS partition for faster disc access on large files than ext* can do, resetting Myth's own pointers to this location). It's frustrating to try to rip your own DVDs only to find that this requires opening a terminal and starting a service which isn't normally running. Users of bttv based tuner cards received a nasty shock when the L4TV kernel module maintainers inadvertently wrecked audio support with recent kernel updates.
Is it easy to install? No. Myth isn't an application, it's a platform inside Linux relying on MySQL, Apache, PHP, tuner drivers, lirc drivers, and the willingness to tweak the things which aren't guaranteed to work correctly out of the box (e.g. PHP5 not registering itself as a MIME type with Apache 2, streaming requiring not only hardcoding your box's IP in Myth's settings but having to run a SQL query to update all references to 'localhost').
Daniel Hyams' advice for installing Myth under Ubuntu makes it clear that there's some room for improvement in terms of startup and housecleaning -- creating a system that automatically logs in without passwords, that backs up its own databases, etc. -- and structure (putting
And yet, even with all the negatives mentioned above, the end result is hella impressive. Your rules for recording can be simple, complex or even regex based. With a Hauppauge card with MPEG2 encoding chips, you can run it on a 450MHz P3.
However, what it needs most is a wrapper installation program which installs the AMP stack, requests a master AM password and configures it into Apache, MySQL and Myth, manages dependencies, establishes services at startup, bypasses login, sets a database backup schedule, ties DVD ripping to the necessary background services, and runs checks to see that Apache and MySQL are behaving themselves.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
While it's true that not everyone has an easy time of setting up MythTV, the other side is that there are tons of people that have no problems at all getting it working.
My first installs of MythTV went decently well, but I had some hurdles due to the Linux flavor I used. However, there are _great_ guides that walk you through the install. There are also some "install a MythTV system" distrobutions (KnoppMyth, MythDora, etc) that do a basically complete system/Myth install with minimal configuration. And above all, the user community is fantastic. If you have problems, search the mailing list archives (lots of problems have been addressed before). If you can't find an answer, just show us your problem and say "can you help?".
I'd suggest that anyone not comfortable with Linux and mailinglists first attempt an install with Knoppmyth (http://mysettopbox.tv/)(or MythDora). The hardware is autodetected for you, and the forum-based support is very helpful.
I would recommend this excellent guide for installing it on Fedora. I use FC3/myth at home currently, and it works wonders.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Hmm... I've had server experience but it sounds like less than you, and I managed to get usable mythtv in under 2 hours. I've been tinkering with it for three weeks since then, but it was working acceptably almost straight away. The main thing you need to do is take a structured approach - if you were putting together a LAMP system you wouldn't mess around with PHP until you knew Apache could serve a static page. Same thing for myth - get known-supported cards and get them working with a standalone TV app, check your sound card is working well, maybe get DVD playback working because that's a known quantity and will test your display drivers, then look at installing myth. I was using DVB-T so followed one of the several howtos I found on google.
The only weird, non-obvious thing I found is that what the configuration GUI calls "video sources" really should be called "channel allocation/listings sources" - although this may be a quirk of DVB and make more sense in analogue (can anyone enlighten me?).
I think you are wrong about transfering the service. I believe the lifetime service option is for the life of the box, not transferable to other Tivos. Sorry.
Yes, absolutely. I've seen a number of shows get recorded at 1 am instead of their first showing in order to ensure that I get everything I have scheduled to record, even if it's not the earliest showing of each episode.
Illegitimi non carborundum
The frontend already runs on Mac, but the backend? Eeehhhhhh... no.
:)
;) ) we might see more effort to port it to OSX. At the moment, it's a moving target as much of the API is still "in flux" and will be for some time to come. As I mentioned above, to port to OSX interfaces would not be trivial, and to have to redo it every 3 months because a new version has changed a core piece of code would be a pain in the arse. That's the reason you don't see much activity on a BSD port either... or Windows... though I know some have tried it.
I think the primary reason is that the majority of Mac owners who are interested in this kind of setup are usually the kind who have a Mini for hacking. No encoding capability. Myself, I run a Macbook Pro; no supported encoders there either. To get PCI, you gotta get a Mac Pro; an expensive proposition. Most people who would build a Myth box are building it from commodity hardware or from their own "bits boxes". In other words, doing it on the cheap. Hell, I know I did.
Yes, I know there are firewire encoding boxes, but these don't tend to be well supported by Linux. Porting to OSX and using OSX native APIs would be a significant undertaking.
I think another thing is the average Mac consumer is not the kind to fiddle with this kind of thing. While there are some developers on MythTV that use Macs, I'm not sure there's a large enough community to pull together a port.
Of course, you could start up a Sourceforge project to port it and prove me wrong
My feeling is that when the project itself stabilizes a little (note the 0. in the version number... that means we're at least 80 versions from production
Has anyone else ever wondered why so many OSS projects are afraid to ever reach v1.0? Here's an example of a project that has been in development since 2002. It's undergone cycles of feature additions and bug fixes, and it's just now hitting version 0.20?
Overall, Myth is a very serious contender, not to say that it doesn't need some spit and polish here and there. Better cooperation from hardware companies would certainly help too, especially for TV-Out capabilities and Tuner-Chip-Du-Jour companies (I'm looking at you, ATI and Hauppage...) The web interface is fantastic! How many times have you been at work/school/the office and heard about a new show that you might want to see. You can find and schedule that show from your computer anywhere or even your phone (I use a Treo 650).
Being able to convert recorded shows into XviD, Divx, vcd, etc. is extremely handy too, and works with PSPs, iPods, GP2Xs, Treos, etc. I really don't care to pay $1.99 for a show I already recorded just to get it into the right format to watch on an airplane/train/boat.
Making compilation DVD's of the kids cartoons without commercials is great for those long car trips, as is being able to record the decaying laserdiscs and the occasional 8mm video or VHS tape into DVD's with full menus.
Just my $0.03 (inflation, you know.)
Erm... Excuse me parent, but is starting to support recording from Firewire in OSX, and it DOES support FreeBSD. RTFA, and look at the release notes (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Release_Note s_-_0.20). It's all in there:
Added beginnings of firewire capture support for MacOS
and
Fixed FreeBSD compilation