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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.
MythSwiper, no MythSwiping!
Oh man...
The PS3 can run Linux but so far it's been regular Linux distributions. MythTV sounds like a natural fit for a device which has practically everything in place to be a kickass multimedia console. It would be cool to see a MythTV dist for the PS3 that boots straight into the UI and also works with any plugged in USB devices like TV tuners.
Recently the free listings provider for north america (TMS' Zap2it) annouced they will be going offline on Sept 1 - a replacement ($5/month for now, hopefully reducing to $20/year in the future - schedulesdirect.org) is available but only the latest release .20.2 of stable (And -fixes and trunk in snv naturally) support using it.
.20.2 (post mythfilldatabase scheduling fix) otherwise you will not be able to get north american listings.
If you download one of these distros make sure they have updated it with a
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
mythtv is just linux softwre - those distros are just rolls of their parent distros with mythtv bundled and tuned as it doesn't normally come bundled.
if you're going to watch HD it's best to compile it yourself so it can do the most cpu optimizations (make sure to enable them via the appropriate configure flag)
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
The good thing about being forced to get a TV is that a condition of me doing so was that I get to install a Myth TV setup. I'm thinking satellite + cable + OTA inputs to a small cluster in the basement, new fibre runs all over the house, speakers in every wall, projectors in hidden drop down ceiling mounts, touch screen controls in every room, integration of every form of entertainment known to man and a user interface that delights and astounds.
By the time I'm finished, of course, it'll be obsolete and I shall have to start over, just like the fourth bridge paint job. Perpetual geeking if you like.
Beep beep.
Your facts are kinda misleading. True, the latest 20.2 release incorporates direct support for the new schedulesdirect.org program listing. However, older versions can be 'retrofitted' by using/updating just the xmltv application. The latest xmltv 0.5.48 will work with the new schedulesdirect site. You can then feed that into your existing mythfilldatabase. This solution might work for those unable/unwilling to upgrade their mythtv version. Personally, I've gone to 20.2 and the upgrade was pretty seamless.
There's been some talk about getting a subscription service running for MythTV users; if I recall, the goal was to get it going for $5/month.
Here's an option that could be considered: buy a BeyondTV license from Snapstream, then use your username and password along with a little reverse engineering to login legally to their guide service. BeyondTV's guide data is included with your purchase -- no monthly fees. Currently it costs $70, so after a year it would have paid for itself at the proposed $5/month.
That said, I should say I'm pretty pleased with the actual BeyondTV software, even though it is Windows-based. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get Myth (MythDora) and Freevo to work at all on a pretty vanilla new Dell PC with new hardware reported to be compatible. I downloaded BTV just to see if the hardware was to blame, and after a grand total of 15 minutes, I had a working PVR with multiple tuners. The software is customizable as well, so I can do nightly batch processing like I was planning to do with the Linux box, although the included Xvid transcoding works automatically if you want to do that.
I don't see what's the point of building a dedicated distro for MythTV. Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use a well-known, established distribution, and just create a software repository with MythTV?
A dedicated distro may be here today, gone tomorrow, if it doesn't build a large enough community. That's not what I expect from the operating system that I'm gonna use on the MythTV server that I will build next month.
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.
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
With the Linux port of XBMC underway, and very usable at this stage, Myth will have serious competition soon for (currently) its non-PVR functionality. The linux port of XBMC is completely OpenGL 2.0 optimized. Currently, in terms of UI and user friendliness, there's very little that compares to XBMC.
If someone does this right I'd think they could have quite a hit on their hands.
New Slogans
Yes, I realize, a distro != fork, but now-a-days with the vast differences, it may almost amount to one.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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 know a book just came out on MythTV: Practical MythTV (http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=1 0245)
Is it any good? Anybody read it?
it matters massively. HD is MPEG2 at 1920x1080. I am using an Athlon 2500+ and offloading some of the MPEG2 decode work to a geforce 6200 via XvMC (unfortunately ATI's drivers don't have XvMC) and i still use 50% CPU when watching HD. With CPU opts turned off i bet you i couldn't watch HD (no i'm not doing a recompile of mythtv and 10 recordsing tonight to find out)
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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...-
I started KnoppMyth over 4 years ago, so I'm biased.
.deb or install from source. The problem comes in if you want to auto upgrade to the next release (BTW: Neither of the other options supports an auto upgrade functions. MythDora is working on it however.). Whatever additional packages you installed, you'll have to reinstall (R6 will address this). But what do you need to install (other than perhaps pineapple and some codecs ;)? And if you read tjc's guide to using the backup and restore, you'll only have to install those once.
The comparison seemed rather dull and uninformed. The installation, default theme and the "running" systems are compared. In the end, it comes to "convenience". This is where the author's lack of information really shines.
To stated that one cannot install additional software on KnoppMyth is wrong. You can install a
In addition to MythTV and it's official plugins KnoppMyth includes mplayer, xine, webmin (how is that for conveniences?), rrd (hit Apache and see how your system as been performing, seems pretty convenient to me), MythWebFlash, irblaster support and so much more.
In addition to the official themes, we also include most if not all of "Juski's" http://juski.co.uk/themes are included as well. So while the author didn't like Titivillus, there is nothing stopping him or any user from using any theme. Got an ipod? What to take that show with you? Myth2ipod http://www.myth2ipod.com/is include in KnoppMyth. Or stream it with MythStreamTV.
Both NFS and Samba are included and configured. All one has to do is start the daemons. Got an nvidia based video adapter? Guess what is automatically installed on first boot? Navigate with a keyboard? KnoppMyth includes out the box support for multiple remotes. Guess which distro was the first to officially support the popular Hauppauge PVR line of hardware MPEG tuners?
The ideal behind KnoppMyth is to make it easy to get a Linux/MythTV powered PVR is a quick and easy manner. Some of you already get this... Think appliance. KnoppMyth is into it's fifth year and we'll continue to improve and develop it. Much thanks to member of the community for the improvements, ideals and support. I do wish MythDora and MythBuntu well, however as I see it... They are threading on ground already paved.
Regards,
Cecil
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
Your honour, I cite the precidents set in RUBBER v GLUE and POT v KETTLE, and request that the poster be beaten about the head and shoulders with a large, freshwater fish.
How can you expect people to wear clothes, when there's so much choice?-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
How much does it really matter to use compiler optimizations for HD? Do you have any numbers, benchmarks, etc.?
The big ones, but also enabled in many pre-compiled packages:
* cmov, about 10% (supported by Pentium Pro and later, but not some VIA processors)
* enabling MMX & SSE, about 10-15%
Total you can add about 30-35% with full optimization on a P4, vs. compiling for a Pentium Pro, which is the default. These numbers are somewhat old, but there is no reason to think they have changed appreciably.
If you search the MythTV mailing lists you will find these and even better numbers. Video is one of those things that is much better supported on modern instruction sets than the classic i386 ISA; hence the dramatic improvement. Using a compiler like icc might yield some good improvements over gcc too.
How can you expect people to wear clothes, when there's so much choice?-)
It's not so bad. We're geeks... we only have to choose once every month or three.
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