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MythTV Vs. TiVo, Round 2
Egadfly writes with a comparison of the open source MythTV and the highly commercial TiVo Series 3. "How different are the two systems' available remote control devices and their graphic interfaces when it comes to ease of use? Which product should you choose if your HD signal comes OTA or if you plan to use CableCARDs? And what software features (present and future) can you expect with each product? Will loopholes in FCC regulations and cable company encryption ultimately squeeze out MythTV and other open source players?"
Nice try! The live TV side of Myth might be flaky - probably due to hardware constraints as much as the program - but for playing downloaded video It Works, I've never had a problem like that which you mention. And I use an nfs diskless solution too, never has it not booted. And thanks to power cuts it has gracelessly shut down several times, but so far so good.
Broadcast TV is dead, by the way.
TIVO owner: Hold on guys, while I play this show I recorded on my tivo.
TIVO: Sorry, I've deleted that show because a local company 'accidentally' set the macrovision copy protection flag on the broadcast.
There are some pragmatic benefits to using free software to store/watch/stream/listen to/etc your media.
(and its not as hard as you make out)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
From the article, about the User Interface: I want screenshots! Not some excuse why it's hard to judge. "This is my seven page article. however, it's a hard subject. therefore I'm going to write how hard it is to write about this subject"
Until I can get CableCARD support in a home-built Linux box (and I know I never will) Myth is completely irrelevant. A set-top DVR is the only choice for a more-than-minimally-functional system.
Granting someone else control over your box may* make it easier for you to use, but it sure as hell isn't your box anymore.
Back on the topic of media specifically, I'm afraid that most people have no idea how much the BigCo's are pushing for control. If people knew, would they care? I doubt most people will even see a problem with broadcast flags and devices that refuse to play content...
People are complacent, and have learned to accept a (imho) fairly high level of suck in exchange for not having to think.
(*But no guarantee ... while I have no 1st hand experience with it, Vista reads like a nightmare compared to any reasonable modern distro)
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
People are complacent, and have learned to accept a (imho) fairly high level of suck in exchange for not having to think.
... and we accepted it! However, at a certain point you have to improve matters because too much suck causes lost sales, and gives the competition an edge. The problem with the entertainment people is that they don't want any competition, thereby allowing them a free hand to shove as much as suck at us as they want. People would probably scream bloody murder if they were told that, by Federal law, only Windows boxes could be used or sold in the United States. They don't, however, seem to have as much of a problem with having that level of control applied to their software or their entertainment (which is, after all, just more software.)
To a significant degree, I think you're correct. Look at what Microsoft foisted upon the world, in the form of Win9X. Talk about your high level of suck
That bothers me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is a device for watching television. You are building/buying this device so that you can sit in front of the idiot box like a slack-jawed yokel for thousands of hours. You're complaining that the 5 hours learning how to set-up MythTV is the waste?
What rate do you want to bill the universe for your TV-watching hours? Go for $450/hr; it sounds even more impressive. Your TV watching hobby might be costing you $200,000 per year, OMFG!
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
unfortunately, as much as I love the idea of my mythtv... I've had the opposite experience.
I've got nfs share over wireless (802.11g) that randomly disconnects itself when idle. and mythtv & the nfs & the wireless require a reboot to function. unfortunately, due to sequencing and timing of boot, the nfs share doesn't always reconnect at boot, and I'm not always able to remember to check the the wireless connection is up, before I check the nfs share to mount the share, before I boot mythtv. If I get in a hurry, or forget to check something- I have to reboot. not that I can blame these issues 100% on mythtv, but unfortunately, it does rely on some inconsistent technologies as I've implemented it. maybe if I had a cat6 run between machines and maybe if i had a better file server it wouldn't choke... but that's not an option for me.
Now when it works, it works wonderfully for watching downloaded video.
when it works.
As a happy customer of Tivo for several years now I am quite disappointed to find that it will not work for me if I move to Australia.
I have been doing a little research on MythTV (again) and still am off put by the complexity of it. The Tivo box really is my OS X to MythTVs Windows, in my opinion. But an even bigger issue to me is if I had to start paying a monthly fee to Tivo since they dropped their lifetime support fee option.
ps. The article was so lean on details I wonder if the writer even touched either a Tivo or MythTV box.
Frankly, MediaPortal and the new Vista MCE are heads and shoulders about the rest and have the added benefit of being able to use Windows drivers which means everything on the planet is and will be supported.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I know you're wrong because I tried to do exactly this before I went and bought a Series 3 Tivo. The only way to have a DVR for encrypted HD is to get a Tivo or a POS cableco DVR. Your setup (unless you have some magical HD capture card that nobody makes) can only record encrypted HD content that has been downconverted to SD, and even if you did have HD capture, it would be re-encoded.
Oh, and put a watt-meter on your cable box+MythTV combo. I'll bet you spend more on additional electricity than you would on the monthly Tivo service fee.
Disclaimer: I don't use MythTV or a Tivo.
So I go into the store and start playing around with the Tivos on display while I'm shopping for a PVR solution. I'm looking at a few different options including building my own MythTV box, buying a Tivo, buying a Windows Media Center PC, buying some other appliance, and buying an add on for one of the boxes I have laying around the house.
I ask the sales guy, "so how do I skip a commercial?" After a long rant about how there is an easter egg that allows me to assign a 30 second skip ahead to a button that does not seem to labeled for that option if I push this particular sequence of controls, I'm thinking something is really wrong with this picture. (On the solution I ended up with I go to the preference section and insert the numbers I want in seconds for the skip ahead and skip back. I want to configure my device not learn how to shoot a fireball in Mortal Kombat XXII.)
Next I ask about saving video and making copies for on the road. I mean I can record a VCR tape, I should be able to record and burn a DVD, right? Well, yeah if you buy a model that cost another $500 dollars you can burn DVDs with it, but not all shows will burn. Huh? And it won't do VCDs at all for cheaper archives of stuff like news broadcasts and public access lectures from local professors. Hmm, that is annoying. And how easy is it for me to save it as a video file I can watch on my Mac laptop on the plane without wasting my battery on the DVD player? Really its that hard huh? At this point I have some real serious doubts. I mean, the interface is okay aside from the skip ahead, but why can't it do these simple tasks?
Then the sales guy starts talking about the subscription. Subscription? Why do I want to pay a monthly fee? For up to date program info, hmm, that is fair enough, but there are already like 20 free online Web services that offer that info supported by ads. Why should it cost you guys so much? Why not add a few ads? Oh you do have ads and it costs that much? Isn't that sort of gouging people? So what happens if that service is wrong or spotty or I just don't like it? Can I pay one of the other companies and pick the price/service that meets my needs best? No, I'm locked in huh? I was really not sold on this.
I ended up passing on Tivo because they seemed expensive and wanted to add in all sorts of artificial problems and limited behaviors for what seemed like no good reason but which, in retrospect looking at their big Cable TV partnerships, makes a lot of sense for them, just not for me as a customer. The solution I ended up using was the combination of an old, old mac tower I had sitting around, an Elgato EyeTV tuner+software, a new video card that would mirror to a monitor and TV, and a DVD burner for the tower. It cost me about 1/3 the upfront price of an equivalent Tivo (would be more for someone who needed to find an old mac) and the program info I use is free and ad supported and I can pick from among a variety of options. When I want to archive a few episodes of a TV show I can use the built in editor to delete the commercials and then click burn to DVD (or VCD) and it works, every time. I can skip ahead or back with the included remote with no problems. Playback of live TV or prerecorded , while burning a DVD and while recording something else causes no slowdown or stutter. Export to Mpegs for viewing on the plane is selecting the export menu item and then dragging it onto the auto-discovered shared laptop drive. It never crashes. It never fails to boot. If the power dies and the UPS dies it recovers just fine. I had a hard drive die once and swapped it out. Every now and again there will be a display problem for the video (every couple of weeks) and I have to quit and restart the application, which takes about 3 seconds. That's pretty much the only complaint I have.
I guess my point is, you can mock MythTV if you like, but it is just as easy to mock the artificial limits of Tivo. It makes tasks that should be easy, hard and task
FWIW, the only issues I usually see is when I change something. As with most Linux applications, once it is stable it will usually stay stable unless you change the configuration (hardware failures notwithstanding).
IIRC, it was Isaac Richards that originally developed MythTV. I think Jarod is the guy with the most popular install guide.
Enigma