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Best PC DVR Software, For Any Platform?
jshamacher writes "I've used MythTV for several years (first on Slackware, now via Mythbuntu) and it's good. But not great — I have a list of annoyances as long as my arm. For example, even 0.22 still has problems playing many DVDs and I frequently have to fall back on Xine. Since upgrading to new hardware, I've had issues with sound dropping out; these problems only occur for Myth, not for anything else. So now I'm trying out alternatives. Freevo seemed promising when I tried it a few months ago but it had its own issues. I'm also increasingly getting pressure from my family to get things like NetFlix streaming working on this machine. This seems to imply migrating to a Windows-based solution. I threw XP on it and tried MediaPortal but could never get that to control my Motorola cable box via the IR blaster. So my questions to you: What DVR software do you use? Are you happy with it? What don't you like? Are there any packages out there that 'just work' as media hubs and for time-shifting cable TV?"
Linux MCE is an integrated bundle of software.
The PVR part is MythTV, so may be be what the OP is looking for
I personally love Myth, and wouldn't change it for anything
but saying that, I use it as a media front-end only (no broadcast TV)
This doesn't solve the Netflix issue. Netflix is in bed with Microsoft and delivers using Silverlight 2.
It doesn't make any kind of sense that a business would deploy any solution using Silverlight, but whatever. I've whined about this before and obviously Netflix doesn't care.
I've got Windows 7 Media center running with a Linksys Media Center Extender.
On the positive side, It Just Works. Having a paperback sized MCE (cheap on Ebay, BTW) next to the big-screen rather than a PC is very nice.
On the negative side, Microsoft keeps trying so hard to prevent users from doing what they'd like. .wtv file format late in the Vista cycle, which broke things like dvrmstoolbox that was used for commercial skipping, and had no desire to help fix it. That's fixed by the community now, of course.
For example, they changed to the
They also broke ripped DVD playback on the extender. For the Vista media center, it was found that by creating a hard link to the DVD files (and giving the hard link a ".mp4" (IIRC) extension), DVD's would play fine on the extender. With Windows 7, sorry, but that workaround has been disabled.
And the worms ate into his brain.
The poster needs to forget using a PC for Netflix. The video quality streamed to the PC is VASTLY inferior to what gets streamed to the Roku. Being able to steam to your computer is great on a 17"-22" monitor, but once you start getting up to living room TV sizes, you can really see the lower quality.
Last time I tried pyTiVo with my TiVO HD, the results were far from stellar. I do store many of my DVD's as 1Mb/s 264 + AC3 AVI files and it just didn't seem to like it. It down-res'ed them horribly and the resulting video was poor. Plus, I believe it trashes the AC3, resulting in just stereo (yuck) sound.
Now, it has been at least a year since I messed with it (and gave up on it). If you think it has improved, I will give it another shot.
Not having decent local streaming of video files has been my #2 complaint with TiVo (#1 being that we can't easily backup the damn settings to a USB key or something so if the unit dies we can recover many hours of work done with preferences, season passes, stations, etc). Otherwise, the TiVo HD is *extremely* impressive and I highly recommend it... it runs circles around any cable provider's DVR or "software" solution I have seen.
Under the main television that we watch is a PS3, which sees the backend as a UPnP media server without any fuss. All recorded programs show up under the "video" menu. Any machine in the house can also be used as a frontend, if Mythfrontend is installed. Mythweb can be used to configure it remotely (even off-site if I'm feeling brave enough to let incoming conections to it from the outside world) so you can log in and set something to record if you are out and about.
I'm really happy with the system and not got any particular moans, other than the fact that tuners don't just work out of the box and forums have to be read ...