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Three MythTV Linux Distros Compared
An anonymous reader writes "Linux.com has a comparison article up looking at three MythTV-focused Linux distributions. The piece looks at Mythdora, Mythbuntu, and KnoppMyth, with an eye towards ease of installation and the actual utility of the install. From the article: 'For regular system maintenance, KnoppMyth simply isn't in the same ballpark as MythBuntu and MythDora. The live CD heritage of Knoppix means you cannot update individual packages, which is fine if you like that, but for an always-on system like a MythTV back end, I'd prefer flexibility and configurability of a mainline distro. When all is said and done, if I were building my TiVo replacement today, I would do it with MythDora. MythBuntu shows a lot of promise, and I will give the final 7.10 release another look (in part because I run Ubuntu on my desktop machines), but it isn't ready yet.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.
I've been using my MythTV box as my primary media center for over a year and a half now. While I love to make the occasional configuration changes to meet the ever-changing needs of my family, I NEVER update unless I have a very, very good reason. Why? Because at this point I don't want a weekend troubleshooting session because I triggered incompatibilities. I guess that is just me being paranoid, though. I've never had drastic problems with Myth, but I can also attribute that to the fact that I wrote up my requirements, built the machine to them, and left it that way. No surprises! So there are some tradeoffs when using a media distribution like KnoppMyth to build out your MythTV, but sometimes they are really blessings in disguise.
df -h
> I think I'm just going to use CentOS or Ubuntu (the LTS edition - long-term support) and pull MythTV from one of the popular repositories.
Because many of us already tried that and couldn't get it to work. MythTV is one of the worst software I had to set up. It is just wrong to expect an end user for a PVR to even know what a database is, let alone having to set it up and deal with the error messages, even if it something popular such as MySQL. MythTV just needs to be as easy as the commercial packages to setup.
because it's potentially illegal, absolutely unrelaible, and there may not even exist a script to scape the information and transform it into a usable format
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
I'm currently trying to do what the distro should be doing for me; installing layer and application at a time.
Of course, I'm also trying to do this on a system put together from more recent hardware, the m-atx Gigabyte platform GA-MA69GM-S2H Socket which uses AM2 and the AMD 690G Northbridge. And a USB connected ATSC HDTV card.
I'm finding it's a snap to install Ubuntu, LAMP, and MythTV but almost impossible to get any further than configuration. And that is the problem. I can install WinXP and SageTV and have all these components work right now. So it still is the main problem for Linux and any distro - hardware support.
Yes, the larger question still is open versus restricted driver support. But at the end of the day, especially the present day like tonight, I'd rather have my hardware recognize a restricted driver and install it seamlessly than having the "freedom" of an open source driver. If move to open from a restricted, then shouldn't that be the incentive for hardware manufactures to provide these drivers?
KnoppMyth has been around for four years http://www.mysettopbox.tv/CHANGELOG.txt/. A glance at the CentOS site shows it was first copywritten in 2004. When Ubuntu was launch in October of 2004, KnoppMyth was already a year old. The community is large and very active. I'll stop producing releases when my keyboard is pulled from my cold dead hands.
Once I can actually read the article, I'll comment in full. But to state that one cannot upgrade software in KnoppMyth is dead wrong.
Regards,
Cecil
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
I was a MythTV proponent for YEARS. I built my own box, and I've run with both Gentoo and Ubuntu based backends. When my video card blew out last month after 3+ years of constant running (including through some very bad power outages which were hard on the entire houses electrical system) I couldn't afford to replace the video card and motherboard which was also fried.
I pulled the drive and stuck it in the computer in the other room, and decided to try XBox Media Center an my old xbox I had sitting around. To my surprise, XBMC completely blows MythTV out of the water. For about $30 in hardware (the equipment necessary to do the mod, which is entirely software based and done through a memory card and ftp) and 2 hours labor, I was up and running with a user interface that is one of the easiest to use I've ever seen.
It outputs in 720p or 1080i (doesn't have the power to decode actual 720p content without some heavy hardware modding.) It streams all the content over my network, so all the storage is in the office right where I download it in the first place. It uses mplayer, so it can play anything mplayer can. It can do 5.1 sound, plus I can put a ton of emulators on there to play my old super-nes games with actual controllers, including multiplayer.
For about $100 and a bit of searching online, a person could pick up a used XBox and be off and running, as long as they're just looking for a MEDIA CENTER and don't care about PVR capabilities that is.
-Hmm...I got a G+ invite, better remember to remove the request from my sig...-