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."

Comments

new features

[samsonov]

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

Re:new features

[tji]

MythTV could really use a marketing guy to help with the new releases (actually, there are many open source projects that could benefit from this). The list of highly technical updates to MythTV don't really do justice to where MythTV is today.

As a MythTV user, here is what I see as important, and having improved in 0.20:

- MythTV is a free / open source PVR application, with support for analog, digital, and HDTV recording in most international standards (i.e. it's usable in the U.S., Europe, Asia, etc.). It includes many features not available in commercial PVR products.
    - Automatic commercial detection and removal, or manual skip forward/back.
    - Transcode of video to other formats/resolutions -- including DVD export in 0.20.
    - Network based structure, allowing 'backend' recording storage on different machine than the 'frontend' display. (i.e. stick the backend with all the cable connections, antennas, loud fans and tons of disk in the basement, put a small/quiet frontend near your TV for output.)
    - HDTV support: With supported HD capture card, terrestrial broadcast HD and Cable HD are supported (with the exception of encrypted cable HD channels - which cannot be decrypted on any PC PVR)
    - Improved MacOS X support. The 0.20 version has greatly improved the Mac support, especially for the Intel based Macs. Performance optimizations for HD video playback make the Core Duo Mac Minis a great choice for a small/quiet frontend box.

A Year of MythTV

[feld]

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 ;)

Re:Questions

[ParadoxDruid]

Is it possible to create "playlists" of TV Shows? Say I wanted to rip all my futurama DVDs to a Myth box and play them at random. Could I do that?

I don't know about MythTV, but I have all my Futurama DVDs ripped to my Linux box, and have a "Random episode" icon on my desktop that runs this bash script:

#!/bin/bash
count=`ls /home/paradox/media_drive/Media/Futurama |wc -l`
let "pick = $RANDOM % $count"
let "pick += 1"
kaffeine "/home/paradox/media_drive/Media/Futurama/`ls /home/paradox/media_drive/Media/Futurama |sed -n "$pick"p`"