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MythTV Allows Multiple Front-Ends On Wide Range of Platforms
As the DVR becomes a much more pervasive performer in home theater setups, the level of excellence demanded by the general consumer seems to continue to rise. The open source project MythTV has been in this arena for quite a while, and now offers the ability to have multiple front-ends on your MythTV install on a wide range of different platforms. Able to run on Windows XP, Vista, Xbox, and even an Apple iPod, the new flexibility is sure to interest many consumers (and many competitors).
Anyone familiar with MythTV knows that it can use multiple front ends. A port to Windows or Mac sounds good because the monopoly makes some hardware difficult to use. It's not such a great idea if you want control of your media.
As a proud MythTV user, this has been pretty common knowledge. Nothing in the article is new.
What make me really excited is if I could use my XBox360 as a generic frontend with it. If it could function as MythTV frontend + netflix player, it'd be perfect. It's doubtful since Microsoft has already spent so much time just getting it to play well(read not requiring WMV encoding) with an PC or SMBFS network share, which is still doable but no recorded programs or other goodies MythTV does so well.
If any MythTV Dev's are reading this, thank you so much for the hard work!
import system.cool.Sig;
Basically, with no capability to use a cablecard (much less switched digital video), MythTV is growing increasingly irrelevant in the DVR world. Sure, you could set up a complicated system using additional cable boxes from you cable company with some sort of IR channel switching, but the expense and hassle of that will keep MythTV on the far, far fringe. And if HDMI becomes the standard, MythTV is really screwed (it's able to record off of component outputs, but not HDMI).
I truly wish MythTV were practical (I hate DRM and the hassles of moving video from one form to another as much as anyone). But with an increasingly hostile cable companies (that want to lock you into THEIR DVR's), I don't think it is or will be again. It's hard enough to even get a Tivo to work on most cable systems today (with cablecards being wonky and Tivo still not able to do SDV), much less a DIY DVR.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
To the MythTV dev team. Thanks for the sweet product. It wasn't a 1 click install-setup, but it was well worth the time. MythTV makes watching tv bearable, sometimes useful. (especially now that Science channel is on basic cable)
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
You can get a used XBox for $100. Put in a cheap hard drive. Purchase a mod chip on the cheap, or do a soft mod. Install XBMC and MythTV, and then suddenly you've got a pretty sweet setup on the cheap. I love it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
except your an idiot...
cable company is REQUIRED by fcc to give customers cable boxes with firewire out.
myth tv can control almost all firewire boxes just fine.
MythTV doesn't enforce any DRM of any kind like the broadcast flag. Anybody familiar with MythTV knows that....
This space is not for rent.
MythTV is growing increasingly irrelevant
You would be wrong about that. The same jail the media conglomerates would like to keep you in confounds all DVR dev's. That's why an IR Blaster is important. It takes care of all that for you. Yeah, there's some compromises to piping in the video from the back of the cable box, but I just want to watch it at a convenient time so a little down-scaling doesn't bother me one bit.
And if HDMI becomes the standard
Most of you have only yourselves to blame for this because the vast majority are gladly buying into HDMI. VGA works good, digital-out works best. And guess what? No drm!!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
s/your/you're/
Calling MythTV impractical and irrelevant is overly pessimistic. In the digital cable, MythTV isn't very useful; however for those of us who use analog cable (which will be the majority of Americans for a while), MythTV does have some life left. Just like VHS isn't dead as it is being slowly phased out over the next decade. Maybe there will be some progress made in the next few years.
As for me, I don't plan on getting digital cable anytime soon because I don't plan on getting an HD TV soon. Yeah HD is great but I'm waiting until they settle on a few things. First it was 720p, then 1080i, then 1080p for the sets. The resolutions that are recorded vary between the three and some broadcasts are just upconverted and not recorded in HD at all. For port connections, there was component, then DVI, then HDMI. I'm pretty sure that some people like my parents and grandparents have not plans on getting with the HD revolution either.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
My recommendation? Tivo. Hands down! It doesn't have all the features and flexibility as the other units, but it's fast and responsive - from a usability perspective. And I can even download my shows to my PC.
Windows MCE was pretty nice - but after about a month, my filesystem got corruped, and I lost everything - including the 300 CDs I had ripped (manually) to the unit! The UI was a little slow.
Then came Myth. A royal pain to get running. The features and flexibility were very nice. The worst thing about it however was the music portion of it. (MythMusic). That was horible beyond believe - especialy in-contrast to the Windows MCE, which was very very nice. MythTV's UI was kind of slow and klunky as well. I do not miss it.
Then came the Comcast HD PVR. That was too great - limited functionality and channel guides were a pain. No music, no download capability. We only went through 2 or 3 of these boxes (due to dying) during our month we owned them - when we found out Tivo firmware was available.
The Comcast HD-DVR with Tivo firmware was the worst. We went through about 3 trips to the Comcast office, dead units, 3 or 4 technician house-calls. Lost show, etc. They eventually came out with a version of firmware which at least stablized the box. It's not too bad now - but a bit clunky - not as fast and responsive. The firmware is still kind of screwed-up - gives you the wrong sounds when clicking through things - shows disappear sometimes - a few unit freezes, etc. No music - at least not our - just the crappy Comcast music channels. Oh yea, and whatever you do - don't hit the "on-demand" button - 'cause that'll just ruin your whole evening.
So for the few things we watch in HD, we use the Comcast HD-PVR with Tivo - reluctantly.
For everything else - all the reruns, and bulk of stuff we record - and music - It's all still the Tivo Series-2. It works. It's fast. It's reliable. It's responsive. It does what I want it to when I hit a button. We've never lost a show. We're on our original unit after many many years. It's simple and streightforward. I don't want to do "development" at night - I just want to press a button and watch TV. Tivo does that, and well.
The only realy upside to MythTV was that it was free...but not anymore!
Why pay for TV? With the switch to digital, over-the-air TV is now probably higher quality than cable. Combine MythTV with one or two of these and you're all set.
Sure for the states it might be becoming irrelevant, but over here in the UK, DRM is not a problem. Freeview/freesat has everything I'd ever want to watch, and by definition, it's free to use on whatever platform you wish!
I have a few TV cards in our home server, streaming to a silent little Apple TV running mythfrontend. It works a treat!
This is true. I just set up a Mac running the 0.21 backend/frontend via FireWire on a Comcast 6200 box.
It works very well, except that I have to use the PPC backend for the time being (on Intel).
I can't tune the 5c channels, but there are only a few that matter that are encumbered.
I am testing out Plex (osxbmc) with the Myth Frontend extension currently.
The stability of this setup leaves some things to be desired (especially, coming from a TiVo background), but it is great fun to play with.
I'd like to put together a small format PC for this sort of thing. Alas, I can't use a cheap tower, it needs to be one of those small form factors that can fit in an entertainment center. I'd like to spend as little as possible but it seems like I could easily price myself into the $500 range putting one of these together. Any good guides out there?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
MythTV also works fine in the non-US parts of the world where DVB-T is pretty much standard for digital terrestrial broadcasts.
MythTV supports firewire access to cable boxes. MythTV can do both capture and channel changing via firewire. I currently have a MythTV box hooked up to a Motorola DCT-6200, and this allows me to record HD (as well as SD) channels. Having said that, some Cable companies will encrypt "premium" channels making this solution useless for those channels. However, for my needs at least, MythTV+firewire+DCT-6200 works fine. Throw in OTA HD channels (which in my location look significantly better than their cable versions due to compression in the latter) and life is good for my simple needs.
a guide that fills the screen unlike the comcrap guild that looks stuck in SD with ads on each page.
Free HDMI cable
OPTICAL and COAXIAL audio
E-sata
RF and IR remote
E-net
DIRECTV on Demand
usb for the OTA tuner add on.
on line Recording with out having to run a sever.
and the GUI looks a lot like the TIVO comcast gui that comcast shows off on there web page.
I have the box in a cabinet under the TV and the remote works fine.
Let's stop the namecalling.
The firewire boxes are a special order item in my market with a significant lead time (I guess to comply with the FCC). They don't even stock them at the local office, so 99.99999% of customers don't have them. --AND-- from what i've read, the firewire output only works for unencrypted channels in my market (so you can't record any of the premium digital cable channels).
Fail.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Does anyone watch the output of their MythTV on anything other than their computer screen? Every time I look at MythTV, a solution for getting the video onto a TV set-- in either SD or HD is a completely unsolved, undocumented and glossed over issue. When someone solves that problem, MythTV may finally not really be a myth.
Getting DVI output from an nVidia card to work with an HD TV isn't too difficult at all. Mine is hooked up to my 52" RP CRT (a Hitachi 51F500). About the only caveat is that, with a native 1080i display like mine, you still have to enable de-interlacing as the nVidia Linux drivers simply don't handle output of 1080i content to a native 1080i display without tearing and motion blur (unless you de-interlace the content). It appears that, rather than fix this or even admit there's a bug, nVidia has chosen to wait for the day when there are no interlcaed displays left.
Aside from that one annoyance, mythtv is quite east to get working with HD TVs.
my via board has a s-video out, which worked ootb with muthbuntu, it plays movies and tv on my normal old massive CRT television!
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Now you're just being ridiculous and making up numbers. My cable bill is well under $215... not even $205. Idiot.
But by the same token - I don't decide when my grass gets cut - or how low - my landscapers do.
I don't decide what cleanser my toilet gets cleaned with, my cleaning people do
When any of these become unsatisfactory, I'll get rid of them for something else.
MythTV may be good for some people - but I was tired of sitting down on the couch in front of the TV after a long day of work, to debug why something wasn't working right.
Love it or hate it, TiVo is always there. Always on. Always working. Anything I need a a second or two away from happening. And I've never had to put an ounce of thought into it.
Don't get me wrong, I wanted to love MythTV - I still do! I envisioned spending time tying it into my house lights, alarm and sprinkler, etc. etc. etc. and having all sorts of fun. It just turned out to be so much work that I never got around to the "fun" - I never got it all working correctly - (OpenGL issues, driver issues, remote control issues).
When I had it my (then) 2-3 year old son loved penguins. The KnoppMyth windows desktop (which would display in the background when the Myth front end would crash/close/disappear) show Tux sitting on a couch watching TV. My son loved seeing this! But it kind of became a joke - whenever we'd go to watch something, it would be "Oh, oh - Penguin watching T.V. again!"
(Funnyness aside) - so then what - I get a call about if from my Wife, and have to SSH in from work to re-launch the Myth front-end? It was really cool that I could do this - but quite unfortunate that I had to.
How well does myth now deal with HD on cable providers, like comcast?
Rather than fight the system, and spend the money on tuners, backend hardware, etc, I just got comcast's HDDVR. It works well enough (the only way I can even attempt to watch the few shows I'm interested in viewing on my schedule .. otherwise the cost of cable isn't worth it).
I have my house wired with audio/video/cat5 jacks in each room. So, I really don't need to spend the money on front end systems in each of those rooms. IR receiver to IR transmitter over cat 5 to control the DVR. S-video out on the DVR downsamples to a regular TV (I'm not about to buy a bunch of flat panels while my old sets work just fine in the basement, bedroom, etc), so I can watch DVR stuff anywhere in the house, even stuff recorded on high-def channels.
The disadvantage with my setup is every room in the house can only watch one thing at a time (from the dvr...cable is fine, of course). Which is fine for me. But...if I wanted to I could connect video or cat5 to any number of sources in the future via the patch panels in the basement.
Cost was wiring (which I wanted to do for whole house audio for my soundbridge anyway), and a $50 distribution amp from radio shack. And I got to use all of my old equipment and not have to buy or build anything for a media server or multiple front ends (which have the requirement of being *silent*).
It'd be nice to have a system where I could save and organize things indefinitely, but really, I have other ways of doing some of that and it just doesn't seem like the effort to me, when the scientific atlanta box is "good enough" IOW, the consumer appliances have somewhat caught up, with the advantage of supporting HDTV and Digital channels with no effort and no tricks with IR and stuff.
What MythTV, or rather MythDVD does really well is function as a DVD Jukebox. There is nothing else out there right now for backing up your DVDs that is as painless as Myth, unless you want to spend thousands on the Kalidescope system. You pop your DVD in, import it as either a 1:1 iso, a perfect copy of the main title, or a compressed (xvid) copy. It will even pull the cover art and metadata from IMDB for you. I'd highly recommend Mythbunutu for those heading down this road.
Yup, that's gotta be it. Those MythTV tycoons may be giving it away for free; but by god do they ever clean up on volume! If we ignore distribution costs, the extra adwords income from the traffic boost might keep the devs in hookers and blow for 30, maybe 40, seconds!
I get a call about if from my Wife, and have to SSH in from work to re-launch the Myth front-end? It was really cool that I could do this - but quite unfortunate that I had to.
I hooked into the ACPI power button routines to kill/restart the X server when mythtv hung up. The backend was it's own process outside of X, so it continued to run fine when this was done.
So, all non-technical wife-types had to do when mythTV hung was to press the power button and it would take care of itself. But to be fair, by the time I stopped using it (I went off-grid) it was pretty stable - perhaps once a month a frontend reset was needed.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The only problem is that the Cable Company is not required to let all of the channels go out unencrypted on the firewire out.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I suspect the issues and devices (cablecard etc.) you're describing are US-specific. It's not becoming irrelevant in the rest of the world (at least not for any of the reasons you mention).
I'm using MythTV with 2 DVB-C cards and decoding pay channels without trouble. I'm currently using a softcam setup with a pay card (Irdeto 2 encrypted signal), but have used official Irdeto 2 and Viaccess CAM modules with success.
I've been using MythTV for the past 4-5 years, and am generally very happy with the product and the service I get from it.
I have two Tivos, one with life time service, one with out. I don't want to pay Tivo the monthly fee to use the non life time service Tivo, it would be nice to be able to load something else on to it and put it to use.
In the digital cable, MythTV isn't very useful; however for those of us who use analog cable (which will be the majority of Americans for a while), MythTV does have some life left.
So basically you pay the cable company to get the channels you can get over the air? In my area, there's just over two dozen channels left on analog cable - the local networks, a few pbs channels, and a handful channels that nobody cares about (QVC, HSN, a couple of Spanish channels - not the big two of Univision and Telemundo, the local gov't channels, etc.). If I went OTA, I could actually get a few channels I couldn't get from cable (granted, most of those are networks from a different city, but still).
Just like VHS isn't dead as it is being slowly phased out over the next decade.
Have you been living in a cave for the last couple of years? New releases are not put out on VHS anymore. Most studios stopped completely in 2006 after a phase-out and almost all the rest have stopped since. The only thing left for VHS is home recording and films that are now completely out of print (no new VHS being produced and not released on DVD).
Personally, I'm not getting into the HD craze for the foreseeable future, either, but I'm also not stuck in the 90s.
End of line..
First it was 720p, then 1080i, then 1080p for the sets.
And given that the highest broadcast resolution is 1080i, and has been specified as such for at least a decade, do you expect this trend to continue?
For port connections, there was component, then DVI, then HDMI.
It's not as if they took away the older ones when they added the new ones.
Breakfast served all day!
Digital TV doesn't need encoding. It can just write the bits that fly in from the antenna to the hard drive. It can recompress into another format if you like, but that needn't be done in real time.
Well Jack Valenti's corpse, maybe. Unfortunately the senator from disney is still in office.
If I ran for congress, I would never win as my platform would be to roll back copyrights to 15 years and gut the patent system.
Let people innovate, for crying out loud.
The entertainment industry has been dragged kicking and screaming from one bucket of money to the next.
CDs will kill the Music industry! Billions of dollars later...
VCRS will kill us! Billions of dollars later...
DVDS will ruin the movie industry! Many, many more Billions of dollars later...
repeat ad nauseum
And to the cens0r below. I record them on the Charter DVR and then move them to the computer. HD and everything.
So, the only extra thing you need to be able to use your home-rolled HD DVR is an HD DVR from your cable company. Gotcha.
This guy's the limit!
The fix for your choppy high motion is likely de-interlacing.
You're right. It's not as if there was some kind of mystical "High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection" system added which would screw up the picture quality if it detected that you hadn't paid enough money for your HDTV. That would be ridiculous.
MythTV also works fine in the non-US parts of the world where DVB-T is pretty much standard for digital terrestrial broadcasts.
Mine worked fine with my sky box too -- RS232 cable to receive what channel the ox is on, and an IR-blaster like box to change it down the second RF input.
I then tried upgrading the hard drive, and accidentally short-circuited my PSU. Doesn't work now... Mythtv will never win until it's immune from dropping a screwdriver between 12V and 0 rails while the machine's on.