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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?"
Hold on, guys, we can watch this show right after I reboot. Aw, crap, the nfs mount from the file server hung. Be right back, this will only take a minute. Wait, no, it's working now. Okay, there. I dunno why it's skipping, that should fix itself in a minute. Yeah, I know, it's still going on. Maybe another reboot would fix it. Aw shucks, it oopsed. Maybe this weekend I'll stop overclocking this AMD K6 I found in a dumpster over the holidays. I know, I know, but it didn't cost me a dime! Where are you guys going? Don't leave, this will only be a few more seconds. Trust me, this show is so awesome it's totally worth it. I'll just copy it over to the entertainment center box instead of the file server. Hm. I thought my network was faster than that, this should totally be taking less time. Fuck. Out of disk. Just lemme delete a couple things... there, now I'll redo the transfer. Oh, hey, you're back. What's in the bag from Fry's? No, what the hell, dude! I don't want a TiVo in my place, that thing is a tool of corporate oppression! Trust me, the myth box works 100% of the time, this is the only hiccup it's ever have, and it'll be fixed in a second. I don't care if that thing can download from Amazon! I can torrent any show ever. Okay, well, not that one. Or that one. But everything else is on torrent. Or usenet. There, see, it's booted now! Okay, it's playing. Hey, where'd everybody go?
The moral of the story is that your friends only wanted you for your PVR capabilities?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Installing larger HDDs and playing with Volume manager so I can 'easily expand my storage space'
Installing a second tuner card so we can record two shows at a time
Making WOL work properly so I can start the backend from sleep with my laptop
Get The MythWeb plugin running so I can schedule shows from work
Install the SNES emulator so I can play supermario
Fix a quiter CPU fan to improve the noise footprint
If I owned a TiVO it would have installed with no trouble!
With myth I have weeks of fun ahead
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"
But maybe there should be a rule about not allowing links to Articles full of Advertisement that span over 7 pages with about 100 words/page...
Oh, Theres a mythtv for windows?
Ive used mythtv on my linux box sitting next to the big screen for years now. Never much of a problem at all. Love mythtv and will never give it up.
"I WANT MY MYTH TV!!"
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?
You know that part about not being as hard as you make it out to be? You should have paid attention to that. Get knoppmyth burn to CD, boot from it and you are off and running. That pretty much works out of the box for ~80% of the people who try it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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
Invariably when KnoppMyth is mentioned, several sombodies will complain it is out of date. Valid enough but pointing my newly installed machine at Debian Testing and apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade took care of that.
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.
I've wanted a HTPC for quite a while now, and have A LITTLE time coming this spring to do it. How does knoppmyth compare to mythdora? What other acceptable solutions are out there besides those two (ignoring Media center)? I'm willing to pay some dollars for it (so it doesn't HAVE to be free, although that's certainly nice), but I want control over the media
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
...I can run the frontend on my laptop and watch live and recorded TV anywhere in my house. I don't yet use Myth for anything but TV using an 8 year old Hauppauge card but for me, the flexibility of the software is what wins me over. My only gripe is the default keyboard bindings don't make the most sense at first.
To be fair, I've never used a Tivo. I have used a number of other DVRs provided by cable companies, and I'll take MythTV any day. The others I've used won't allow you to short your shows by TV show. When you have over 350 shows recorded, this is a must. I also have a 400 GB RAID for storage. Other DVRs will allow an eSATA drive, so they can get up to 500 GB, but lets hope you don't have a drive failure. MythTV also has a nice web interface, so I can set shows to record whether I'm in my room or across the country. My MythTV box has been up for a solid month without any problems, and I only rebooted then to try out a new Live CD and see if it would auto-detect my RAID. While I have had some more serious issues with MythTV, it's been 6 months, and I've upgraded both MythTV and my distro since then and it's been completely reliable. Tivo may be a cut above the other DVRs offered by my cable company, but MythTV puts the DVRs I've used to shame.
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.
of going on 2 years, I'd have to say it's not even close - Tivo wins for the masses. Sure, my MythTV box does what my friends' Tivos do and more. But even though they are tech guys, too, I don't see many of them going through the pain in the ass experience that is setting up and maintaining the MythTV box.
I built my MythTV box a couple of years ago so I could record two shows at the same time (dual tuner PVR500 card) and then watch a third on our main cable. I planned on reusing olds parts as I had a fairly decent PC sitting around unused; all I needed to invest in was the tuner card and a remote. I got the MCE remote and a PVR500 for the job. All was fine and dandy until I found out that some obscure library for MythTV didn't work on my Athlon VIA motherboard chipset. A new motherboard meant new memory, and a new CPU. I also got a "HTPC" case so the thing didn't look ugly in the living room. So right off the bat my quest to do a homemade Tivo on the cheap without monthly fees set me back about $600 after throwing in a large hard drive, too. This didn't really bother me, though, as I figured it was part of doing business.
I used Knoppmyth to set things up, and granted, it did go fairly smooth. The basic install goes along fine, it's the customization and other tweaks that take time and effort. I currently have it recording up to two shows at once, use it as a multimedia center so I can copy videos and MP3s to it and use it as a jukebox, and have used it to play emulated NES, SNES, and MAME games. But here are some things that I've noticed while using MythTV, in no particular order:
I started off with a Ti4600 video card. It's fan started to die, so I spent money on an FX5200 card which I've read is recommended for MythTV. This went fine, and configured fine. But for some reason if I need to reset my MythTV box, the video settings revert back to a "generic" video card, and I have to recopy over the FX5200 settings from the Knoppmyth wiki. I have no idea why this is.
Related to the above, when the generic video settings are on, recorded audio and video is out of sync. The video quality is noticeably bad, too. When it's configured correct, things are a lot better.
I've played NES and MAME games on it. I've tried SNES, but can't get my Gravis controllers to work for some reason. Supposedly there's Genesis emulators out there, but I can't figure out how to use those within MythTV. I had issues setting up two controllers for the NES games, and they worked for awhile, but then I had some friends over and we were going to play and the 2nd controller didn't work anymore. I don't know why. Also, with the games, integrating the remote is supposed to be possible, but I don't know how to do it for my remote. It would be nice to be able to map certain keys to the remote to do emulator actions or to hit escape. Otherwise, I have to have a keyboard and mouse available when I'm using the emulators (currently via VNC). I don't have a wireless mouse/keyboard for the HTPC yet.
After about a year, things started locking up, recordings were out of sync. Turns out MySQL defaults to logging every database action, and the database logs filled up my hard drive, killing MythTV. There was a fix in the forums, but it was a pain.
I can only record basic cable. It can do digital, but it would have to hook up to my digital box and use IR forwarding to control the box. That would sort of defeat the purpose of being able to record a show and watch something else at the same time. Not to mention the whole reason I got it was so I could record *two* shows at the same time. I'd either need another digital box dedicated to the MythTV box, or some sort of CableCARD thing.
Perhaps the coolest thing about MythTV is the commercial skip. After it records a show, it marks commercials, and pressing a certain button while watching them jumps to the next segment of the show. I've found this to be accurate about 50% of the time. Usually, it works for the first commercial break,
Anyone ever check out GB-PVR?
I run it home on top of XP Pro SP2, I only have the software installed thats needed for the PVR function, no Office or anything like that. Makes the machine very stable! Multiple tuner support, web based programming.. its got all the bells and whistles of Myth. The nice part is, EVERYTHING that needs to be done on the PVR side of things can be done from the remote! There is a very active forum/developer community and sub, the owner/programmer is on there posting and helping people daily.
http://www.gbpvr.com/
http://www.gbpvr.com/pmwiki/
http://forums.gbpvr.com/
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.
Lemme help, then.
Tivo does. Sort by show or date/time recorded. Also groups related shows together into a folder (e.g., "Doctor Who - 5 episodes"). Series 3 also puts all HD shows in another folder.
Tivo doesn't offer RAID. It's pretty easy to stick a second (or replace your original with a larger) drive. Series 2 (non-HD) does allow transfers back and forth from your computer, so you can store 'em on your own RAID, tape backup, DVD-ROM, or what have you. Series 3 doesn't have this; it appears to be a legal issue getting worked out with Cable Labs. You'll probably see the same thing on any new device with a CableCard in it.
Tivo's got one, too.
My Tivo's uptime is measured in months/years. It reboots itself when new updates are available. It does this at 2:00 AM and hasn't missed a show yet. In the 7 years that I've had a Tivo (Series 1/2/3), I've forced a reboot *once*.
Tivo is an incredibly easy to use, rock solid (hey, it's running Linux) unit. Look, if you're happy tinkering with the thing, more power to ya. As for me, I turn the TV on when I'm done working, the kids are in bed, and I'm looking to unwind. I've got enough between work and my own side projects--I don't need to be messing with the TV, too.
One other point (and you may have had a solid Myth system for long enough to see this): When you get a device like a Tivo that is stable, simple to use, and works every time, things change. It becomes a new tool that transforms how you do things. I can't imagine watching TV without Tivo--it's that different (and that much better) than plain-old service. I skip commercials (but fast-forward through them so I can catch new show announcements or the occasional ad that is amusing the first time you see it). I watch shows on "Tivo time," skipping through the boring parts. I fast forward to the end of the remodeling show so I can see the results without all the witty banter. I check out old shows I haven't seen in years because Tivo had space and nothing better to do than record it. I don't worry about when seasonal shows are on (like the Peanuts ones)--Tivo catches them for me.
If you like watching TV, and you don't have this kind of experience, you should get a Tivo.
"200 Quatloos on the newcomer!" "300 Quatloos against!"
I'm quite surprised that they used mythtv or is vdr too german? Here in Finland the popularity is reversed to say the least and getting softcam to work with some cheap smartcard readers wasn't that big of a hassle. Recording porn err documentaries has never been this easy.
Rigt before going to spec out a nice bunch of PC components on NewEgg and build a good box, I always pass by the Myth TV Users Mailing List to make sure that I get the most relevant and updated hardware necessary, and instead end up reading a sampling of the horror stories they go through, taking a few minutes to savor the different tortures one can be subjected to (video out of sync with audio, artifacts on certain channels, MySQL database corruption, NuvExport screws up, X breaks dependencies, and all the rest) and decide to wait another few weeks, certainly the new upcoming release will be much more reliable and user-friendly? And by the way, what happened to all of the things that were done during last year's Google's 'Summer Of Code' for Myth TV ? All the great features and enhancements that were worked on?
So I keep waiting, hoping that the next time I check the mailing list, their version of Matt Groening's Life In Hell have died down a bit....
Even though I am definitely doing a fair amount of Sys Admin duties on various distros, this is different, the killer part is what will happen when something screws up while I'm not around, and my wife gets mad because something didn't work, (provided I can even teach her to deal with all of these menus, options and the whole 'watching Live TV through Myth' syndrome) or my kid decides that he knows better and starts trying to hack the box himself in frustration....?
Surely the TiVo is an attractive box for the wife and kids, but with technology changing as rapidly as it has been, it is questionable whether to invest in such a product today, unless we were hard-core TV addicts, and could justify the cost as it would immediately be recouped.
Funnily enough, the most expedient thing I've ended up doing has been to identify the things I want to watch, and as a previous poster pointed out, just BitTorrent the shows in HD without commercials the next day, no matter where in the world I may be. (...and yes, it is sweet to download things at 10 Megs speed while in certain countries like Japan or Norway!!...LOL!)
Net result: I hardly EVER watch any TV whatsoever, and the few shows I care about can be watched on my laptop.
Well, I wish I had more time to tinker.... and still, major kudos to Jarod Wilson for having created this amazing open-source wonder. But as others have pointed out, for either of these two options, it's really going to all be about being able to have Myth TV interact with the CableCard slot, at least in major urban centers where cable companies rule the roost, and antenna reception is unwatchable!! The killer is that companies like Time Warner Cable are offering their own PVR deals, so they will make sure to lock anyone else out of the convenience until forced to do so by the FCC... Or that someone learns to hack the Firewire outputs of some of those new set-top decoders. Then you potentially still have HDCP to contend with. Oh, brother!! Brave new world !!
Z.
This comparison would be completely different in Europe! In europe nearly every digital TV channel broadcasted over Cable, OTA or Sattelite is encrypted with one of many encryption standards (Conax, Irdeto, SECA, etc.).
Instead of a "CableCARD", which is used for viewing encrypted content in the US, a "Conditional Access Module" (CAM) is used in Europe, Africa and most Asian countries for all digital broadcast methods (DVB-C, -S and -T). Most TV companies supply set-top boxes with a built-in decoder and a smart-card, but the smart-card can also be used in other receivers or in a PC when you have the right CAM.
There are a lot of TV cards that can use CAM's and are very well supported by MythTV, for instance: http://http//knc1.com/gb.htm/.
Receiving HDTV or Encrypted content with MythTV is no problem in Europe at least.
The TiVo doesn't seem to exist in Europe, so I wouldn't be able to compare it to TiVo myself, since I never saw one. A very popular digital TV receiver / DVR in Europe is the Dreambox: http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/.
The Dreambox is an open platform, is linux-powered and doesn't have any "problems" with DRM or whatsoever. The only limitation the Dreambox and other set-top boxes have is a lack of raw computing power and that's why I prefer to have all my home entertainment on a HTPC.
And that's where the Windows (MCE) vs. Linux discussion comes back!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
See this company, for example. Most are like that one, fairly low volume, willing to customize your system lightly, but not so much it messes with their support.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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MSI Axis 700 Lite Via 1GHz C7 CPU onboard VIA CN700 1 x 240Pin VIA UniChrome Pro 3D Graphic Barebone - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
512MB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
WinTV-PVR 500 MCE (dual tuner card since there is only 1 pci slot)
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SAMSUNG SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
http://www.imedialinux.com/imedia_mythtv $19
It lists a price but I was able to download an iso, but it is optimised for the hardware decoding found on the cn700.
Total $508.23 if shipped to my house, and I could go the local computer store and get a remote and optical drive for another 70
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
The uptime on my MythTV box is 133 days. I haven't touched the software for over a year, because it works fine and I don't want any of the new features. When I want to watch a show, I click TV->Watch Recordings and then select what I want to watch, and when commercials come up, a couple of presses of the "Fordward" button on my remote (configured to skip ahead 30 seconds) is all it takes to skip them. If I want to watch a DVD, no problem, play a game or two (kids love the old SNES games), no problem. Listen to my MP3/OGG collection, no problem. It all just works.
After And I set up the server, I then got an even older 450 MHZ PC with barely enough RAM, and made a front end out of it. Again, that didn't work well, but a cheap Nvidia card took care of that AND gave me Svideo out so I could run a monitor and a TV as a second monitor (dual screen) at the same time. I then forced MythTV to run on the TV and got TV plus internet. It was only jerky if I did too much internet or whatever on the PC while watching TV. You do have to watch what window has focus, if you want to do some control to MythTV, but you get used to alt-tab etc.
Because that worked so very well, at only the cost of 2 cards, I replaced the front end machine with a new 3200+ AMD socket 754 MB and chip at a little over $100. I had the case and everything else already. I also just took the 450 MHZ frontend and put it in another room, still on the MythTV network.
The new AMD system is a dream. I run TV, internet, Openofffice.org, VNC to other machines, XP in a VMWare session, and much more. And performance is never a problem.
MythTV is OTA, and there are plenty of stations, ABC NBC CBS PBS etc all have mutiple channels each. Fox goes HD next year, but I can record all of these SDTV using power search (record a show anytime it finds it by name, don't record dups and reruns, and skip commericals.
nice.
Still running on the 600 MHZ backend, but I am planning to upscale to a higher end AMD and plenty of RAM and 1.5 TB of Hard disk. This will be my main server for whatever purpose, including VMWare etc. Oh, and 4 or 5 HDTV cards, plus the SDTV cards while there is still SDTV.
Really, this is the coolest thing for OTA TV.
Distribution used: MythDora http://g-ding.tv/, which is Fedora Core 5 and MythTV plus add-ons and on one install DVD. Also nice. FC6 would have been better, but this will do fine.
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