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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).
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;
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
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?
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!