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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.
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?
To my surprise, XBMC completely blows MythTV out of the water.
Weird, I had no idea you could plug a video capture card into an XBox, let alone set up XBMC to use it to record TV. Got any links?