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MythDora — MythTV 0.2 In a Box
peterdaly writes "MythDora 3 is the first MythTV 'in-a-box' style distribution to include MythTV 0.20. Based on Fedora Core 5, MythDora 3 is designed to format your hard drive then install everything needed for a fully functional MythTV System. Here is a walkthrough of the entire MythDora installation process, including screenshots and a screencast."
How, other than being based on Fedora, is this any different from KnoppMyth? It runs as a LiveCD and will then (if you want it to) install itself onto your hard drive, doing all the requisite steps.
I'm not panning MythDora, but it just doesn't seem totally unique, unless I'm missing some critical thing about it.
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Why not just install Fedora and then "yum install mythtv"? Why has installation of Myth always been non-trivial? Now it's to the point where someone would rather format and install the entire OS...
If you're willing to install a linux distribution in your living room you should give Pluto a try. It incorporates myth and many more from media to home automation and is a free as in beer Debian based Linux.
Typo: Myth is at .20 not 2.0
That's the same number, right?
Isn't the general mythtv installation - it's the driver installation for all your hardware (most specifically, Lirc). The only way I really see a tool like this being groundbreaking is if they manage to stick a great GUI on top of Lirc setup (which is quite a bit more difficult than a graduate quantum chemistry course). Lirc aside, mythtv setup is fairly trivial these days. And excuse me for wanting Knoppix (a distribution time-tested at dynamically picking up new hardware) as the foundation rather than Fedora for a system that is very dependent on picking up all the necessary hardware.
/etc and my kernel/.config the second I finally got all the driver crap working ;)
That being said, I put it on top of a gentoo system, and backed up my
The first image that came to mind on reading the title was a MythTV box dedicated to recording episodes of "Dora the Explorer." And then my brain let out a primal scream, because if there is one thing I don't need in my house, it's more Dora.
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Nothing against MythDora, but after getting burned by Fedora far too many times I don't want to go near anything Fedora-based. Basing off of Ubuntu would rock.
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It's easy to set up. "yum install mythtv-suite" installs -all- the myth packages including mythweb and such. Pretty minimal configuration involved. I'd say that starting with a blank box I'd just built, it took me about 4 hours to install Fedora and myth both from scratch.
Excuse me if I'm missing something, but what kind of IR remote doesn't require line of sight?
The problem is that my desktop has no legacy interfaces. In particular, the DVD drive is SATA, and the keyboard is USB. Knoppmyth and Mythdora cannot currently handle installing from a SATA optical drive. Knoppmyth kindly popped me out to a shell when it couldn't find the installation source directory, but the drivers for the USB keyboard apparently hadn't been loaded, so I couldn't type anything anyhow.
I'm currently installing Myth 0.20 over Fedora Core 6 with the help of the MythTV on Fedora HOWTO by Jarod Wilson. It's been very helpful, but I still find myself spending a lot of time tweaking things to get everything working correctly. MythTV installation is just plain hard.
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. . . and considering that Fedora 5 comes with 2.6.16 (at best) it's not likely to fare any better on current-generation hardware. I'd still have to download the vanilla kernel, track down any vendor-specific optimizations, merge those in if the process isn't too time-consuming, then figure out which combination of kernel modules/firmware/tuner settings work with each rev of each card. Combine that with the suck that is Hauppauge -- I bought a PVR-150, chose it over the PVR-500 because I was skeptical and now I'm glad I saved my money on the dual tuner card. With a 500ms or so delay on the display it renders the cable guide totally worthless -- and you have a recipe for a craptacular HTPC. I then ordered an uber-cheap-but-easy-to-configure MSI TV@nywhere, and I had that card up and running in literally five minutes, compared to 3-4 hours of trying various firmware and tuner setting combinations with the Hauppage. Not only that, the MSI does hardware MPEG2 encoding, hardware-assisted MPEG4, plus NO appreciable delay in the display. Not only that, the MSI works with standard TV apps like xawtv and kdetv, whereas the Hauppauge works ONLY with Myth.
Or, install Windows Media Center and have it all work out of the box. MythTV may be GORGEOUS and offer tons and tons of functionality Windows Media Center will never provide, but Windows Media Center can be installed and fully configured out of the box in a half hour to 45 minutes.
I like Myth, really, and plan to put time into getting it to work perfectly, but it's hard to put aside an entire day to devote to setting up a TV/PVR application.
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A new KnoppMyth is just around the corner! It is smaller, faster and offers more features. Just be a little more patience folks. The elves are finishing up the work and Santa is tuning the sledge.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
I have a Snapstream Firefly RF remote, and it's the bees knees. By which I mean, it's totally awesome. I find myself getting pissed off when I have to use other remotes and actually aim them. It works fine with LIRC and seems to have most of the buttons nicely labeled for MythTV operation.
Another benefit of RF remotes in general is that you don't have to worry about finding an HTPC case with a built in IR receiver, or where to put the external receiver so that it won't look tacky. Just stick the RF receiver on the back of the thing and be done. The range is excellent (at least 40 feet and through walls).
YOU CAN! Here's how I do it. Every Myth setup has a Video section. This is a file browser that will launch mplayer or your media player of choice. In the Video Setup secion, it will ask you to define the directory for video (this is separate from your Myth recorded TV shows). Specify a directory (mine is /video/movies). Then all you have to do is just place some media in that folder. If you're downloading a DVD rip of a tv show from BitTorrent, you will be downloading a folder containing mulitiple mpeg's or avi's. Simply tell bittorrent to save the files to your MythTV video directory and the files will automagically appear in the Video browser.
/video partition (where all of the mythv media sits) is shared out to the rest of my computers via NFS. Using the computer in my office, I can browse for torrents and download them directly to the shared folder and then enjoy them from the living room couch. This is also great for my mp3's and oggs. All downloaded or ripped music goes to the Myth box and then you can listen to music either at my desk with xmms, in the living room through the stereo system and MythMusic, or from the laptop in any room (or even outside while in range of my router). The great thing about Myth is that it is a server for ALL of your media.
In my apartment, the MythTV system acts as my file server. The
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Having started with Knoppmyth, and then moved briefly to Mythdora, I settled in on a manual compile of Myth 0.19 on Suse 10.1. It was this configuration that worked best for me - because I had invested in 2 PCHDTV HD-5500 tuners. I could not get them working in Myth 0.20 at all, and finally made them work in 0.19. The feature set between the two is minimal, with 0.20 being a lot of fixes and optimizations, so there's not a lot of love lost.
Myth is not an easy thing for even the experienced admin to make work. Because of the dependencies and the hardware involvement, this is more than just installing an application and having it work. For people new to the Myth infrastructure, it's actually rather nice to have a live CD install everything that's necessary. For 90% of the folks wanting to try it, they're going to have a dedicated PC for it anyway. Of course, if you want to just throw in a tuner card and try it that way, you can compile it too.
If you're a Suse person, you can check out a HOWTO I put together for 10.1 and PCHDTV cards here. It covers all the stuff one has to do to make a Myth box work with HD under Suse 10.1. While there are RPMs available for Myth 0.20 on Suse 10.1, the package doesn't support HD, which is what my project was specifically designed to be.
If you do plan on doing HD - be vigilant in your hardware selection! HD playback takes a considerable amount of computing horsepower. I really recommend getting an nVidia 5200 card for playback - not only are they super cheap, and sometimes fanless (read: noiseless), but they also support the nVidia XvMC playback driver, which accelerates MPEG2 streams, offloading decoding from your processor. It also does a fine job at Bob2X deinterlacing, required for watchable HD.
He probably means the buffering. The PVR-*50 and 500s don't just pop what they're capturing onto the screen in Myth in real time. They actually do about a 2 second buffer before showing something on the screen. Whether that's the drivers for linux or Myth I don't know.
That has nothing to do with the Hauppauge cards and everything to do with Myth and, in fact, ffmpeg (which apparently chokes if you give it a partial frame, and so Myth buffers conservatively in order to ensure this doesn't happen). The same would occur on any capture card, AFAIK.
And besides, how on earth does that make the guide unusable? If anything, it makes the guide *necessary* (as channel surfing is basically a no-go).
I do remember seeing something a while ago on Windows MCE where they were showing off how they had worked around the buffering and were able to just go to Live TV without any pausing. Hopefully it's a matter of time before Myth gets that functionality.
Not likely, at least not in the near future. This could be done if Myth sent the captured stream straight to the FE, while at the same time writing it to disk, but the issue is considered low-priority (and I happen to agree... the delay isn't long enough that I give a damn, and is really only an issue if you're one of those suckers that habitually channel surfs, rather than using the guide like a sane human being).
BTW, if anyone is thinking about it, please don't bring this issue up on the mailing list. It's a very long standing issue that tends to ignite expansive flamewars...