New Review Compares MythTV to Vista MCE

Parkus writes "There's a nice review on AVS forum of MythTV (Ubuntu) and Windows Vista MCE. The author tried both back to back and explains the pluses and minuses of each system after using them for a month. Helpful if you're thinking about setting up your own home theater rig."

Comments

Digital HDTV

[tivojafa]

I use both a MythTV DVR (64-bit Ubuntu) and a MCE DVR (64-bit Vista) at home. The MythTV machine is primary and the Vista machine is secondary.

The automatic commercial skip in MythTV is fantastic!
You watch TV shows and there are no adverts. Simple as that.

The biggest problem is resisting to urge to pick up the remote when the show is leading into an ad break :-)

Both machines can record ATSC HDTV and Digital Cable (QAM) - running a total of 4 digital tuners (2 x HDHomeRun network digital tuners with two tuner each - http://www.silicondust.com/)

Re:No Credibility

[russotto]

Who else is going to do it? Microsoft isn't going to make a truly good PVR, because their corporate philosophy interferes; they'd want to control it, not let you do so. The open source community may come up with 80-90% of it (and I'd argue already has), but there are some things which it can't do. Produce a _device_, for one thing, a piece of hardware that is quiet, boots (or wakes from standby; standby with Linux and the V4L/DVB drivers is still not reliable IME) in seconds, can be turned on via remote, etc. Compatibility with premium content is another. Apple is in a position to provide both; we know they can build nice, small, quiet hardware. We know they can negotiate with content producers and not compromise EVERYTHING. So it's not going to be Microsoft, it's not going to be the open source community. That leaves no one, Apple, or some unknown third party. Apple seems like the best bet.

I suppose there's the electronics manufacturers -- e.g. Sony (too tied to locking everything down), Phillips, Toshiba, LG, Samsung, a boatload of Chinese companies... aside from Sony (which has no chance) I think they're long shots.

Re:not mythtv -- Wait, yes it is!

[Stocktonian]

Huh?
When I read the article is was very clearly talking about MythTV compared to Vista MCE. I don't think he tried Linux MCE at all.

Linux MCE is a very different animal and MythTV only forms a small part of it. http://linuxmce.com/ It's an amazing piece of software.

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http://www.linuxlaptops.eu/

day jobs and switchers.

[twitter]

a lot of GNU/Linux people either are stuck dealing with Windows in their day jobs

If the author of the article was really familiar with Windoze, he would have known to use XP and third party applications for his media center. If not, he would never have made Vista work. There's a lot about this article that does not add up and I smell a switcher attack.