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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...
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.
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.
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.
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,
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!"
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.
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.