Mythbuntu Linux Has Been Discontinued (softpedia.com)

"Mythbuntu as a separate distribution will cease to exist. We will take the necessary steps to pull Mythbuntu specific packages from the repositories unless someone steps up to take these packages over," read Friday's announcement. prisoninmate writes: Mythbuntu was an operating system based on the widely-used Ubuntu Linux distro and built around the MythTV free and open source digital video recorder (DVR) project... The Mythbuntu team recommends users who want to use Mythbuntu to install the latest release of the Xubuntu Linux operating system and then add the Mythbuntu PPA (Personal Package Archive), which will continue to provide the latest MythTV releases and other related packages...

The first release of the OS was back when Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was announced, and the last one was Mythbuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus). From this point...there will be no new ISO images anymore. Also, the mythbuntu-desktop and Mythbuntu-Control-Centre packages are now discontinued and won't be available from the Ubuntu repositories anymore. However, users will still be able to install the MythTV software and configure it as they see fit.

Comments

Or just use MythTV

[Lumpy]

Honestly, I still dont know why Mythbuntu existed the past few years. MythTV now is brain dead install on a standard Ubuntu install, and the only cards that actually work worth a damn are the HDHomerun network devices that are trivial to set up and require no drivers at all.

Last MythTV setup I built I used Ubuntu server as a GUI is 100% useless for a backend server,

Re:Or just use MythTV

[JBMcB]

I ran Mythbuntu for a few years. It was pretty friggin' sweet:

1. Automatic commercial skipping - worked *amazingly* well
2. Web access for scheduling and watching shows - it would transcode on the fly to mp4 and you could watch on your phone/tablet/whatever
3. A nice 10 foot interface for emulators, music, etc...
4. Plugins for all kinds of cool stuff - integrated Skype calling (a popup would appear on TV showing you caller ID, hit a button and TV pauses so you can answer) ZoneMinder, burning DVD's of TV shows with a few keypresses (used this for my friends pretty regularly)

Never had too many problems with installation/maintenance. Had some difficulty getting an old ATI RF remote set up, but it was mostly configuration, once set up it worked flawlessly.

Some guy on the forums had a crazy setup with something like 8 CableCard tuners and a few TB of disk space in a monster server in his basement, with thin clients acting as front-ends to the TVs in his house. Had it wired into a multizone sound system, controlled the whole thing through a web page on his tablet, or phone, or whatever. Pretty slick.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[HockeyPuck]

It existed for those that wanted something approaching an appliance, and/or were afraid of this "linux" thing and did not know where to start.

If you were afraid of this "linux thing", then Mythbuntu would be the last place you'd end up. Just like people bye Rokus or Plex enabled TVs or an of the vendor provided media streaming solutions that you directly connect to your TV. Also see "buying a home router".

Re:Or just use MythTV

[thegarbz]

Let me help you with this. You're not sure because you haven't used it recently. If most of these distros aren't as plug and play or even more so than your expensive over priced box from China, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

You expect credit card numbers to be on IOT devices? Who on earth would place them there? I suppose if you held one up in front of the camera . . .

Re:Or just use MythTV

[kalpol]

Basic Myth installs really easily on most distributions now, not just Ubuntu. I've run it on Opensuse for ages, just installs via Yast and setup is pretty simple. There are other cards for OTA that install without fuss too, the pcHDTV cards still do as far as I know (I have one).

Re:Or just use MythTV

[kalpol]

It does take a little setup to get Apache etc. running, but you can still do all that with MythWeb etc. (and all that functionality i hear is getting added into Myth base soon). Plex has a plugin too. The one thing I haven't figured out yet is getting the Plex plugin to play back with 5.1 sound - it's there in the recording but doesn't make it through Plex for some reason.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[BenFranske]

What hardware systems are as capable as MythTV and as cost effective (ongoing subscription costs)? Even just for TV DVR capability, which is all I use Myth for, I haven't found one yet.

Requirements:
A) Cable card support
B) Ability to save and edit recordings (exportable, DRM free recordings)
C) Automatic commercial skip (this works incredibly well on MythTV)
D) Ability to schedule recordings over a web interface
E) All of the standard DVR features

Re:Or just use MythTV

[BenFranske]

This. I switched my backend off Mythbuntu some time ago (once it became feasible to install reasonably recent copies of MythTV in other ways). But on frontends I really just want something that takes little time to configure and connects to the backend, very much appliance like so I've stuck with Mythbuntu. My suspician is that there is a pretty small minority of people running separate backends and frontends though so that's a pretty small audience. It really is ideal though, my frontends do seem to crash, stop responding to IR, etc. occasionally and need reboots. It's definitely nice to have the recording work being done in a rock solid VM so it is not interrupted by reboots.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[fahrbot-bot]

What hardware systems are as capable as MythTV and as cost effective (ongoing subscription costs)? Even just for TV DVR capability, which is all I use Myth for, I haven't found one yet.

I built a MythTV system, with two analog tuners, in Jan 2007 and used it until April of 2016 when I switched to a Tivo BOLT. My local cable provider Cox was going "all digital" and I wasn't confident about being able to use a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun PRIME reliably. Cox apparently varies its enforcement of the CCI bit -- different settings in different markets -- and is fickle about even maintaining those settings in each market, and I didn't want to have to screw around with it and them.

As for a Tivo BOLT vs. MythTV WRT your requirements:

Requirements:

A) Cable card support

The Tivo BOLT supports one card, 4 streams. Another Tivo device supports 2 cards, 6 streams.

B) Ability to save and edit recordings (exportable, DRM free recordings)

The Tivo supports saving through a web interface.

C) Automatic commercial skip (this works incredibly well on MythTV)

The Tivo has commercial skip available for a lot of channels and shows (generated by their staff on their servers), but usually only during prime time, and it works pretty well.

D) Ability to schedule recordings over a web interface

Nope. But, Tivo has an Andriod and iOS app that works through over the LAN and/or cloud -- not sure of the breakdown.

Personally, I would *really* like to have this functionality back. I used the MythWeb plugin a LOT and even wrote a Perl script to generate a 6-hour static programming schedule grid (with clickable links) updated every hour via cron. Our local paper use to print a "green sheet" (called that 'cause it was green) with the week's programming laid out in a grid and it was pretty handy. My script generated something like this.

E) All of the standard DVR features

Yup.

The BOLT cost me $400 with a 1 TB HD and included the first year of service (as with all Tivos). There are system with more/less available and you can add an external, but there are caveats. Continuing service is $150/year. All in all, I think my MythTV system was more capable -- and could be used for other things! -- , but the Tivo system is less hassle. I would actually recommend it -- especially over what Cox and, presumably, other cable companies offer.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[Rich0]

How easy is it to get it running well with nothing but a remote control?

I thought that most of the value-add of something like MythBuntu was making sure all the right drivers are there for hardware acceleration (on a low-power board that can only hardware decode), that lirc and such works completely out of the box, mythtv starts on boot full screen, and so on.

Sure, you can run mythtv from a X11 session trivially from any linux desktop distro. The challenge is making it work in your living room without a lot of fussing around.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[BenFranske]

B) Where is any information on this web based export? All I can find is some references to using the old TiVO Desktop software which is horrendous and painful if you do this very often and is still subject to the same CCI restrictions as MythTV would be.

F) $150/yr for guide data is ridiculous. The TCO on this product is horrible. The upfront costs may be slightly less than my MythTV setup but I've had the same HDHR Prime MythTV setup for going on 6 years now, with no signs of it stopping so that would be $850 so far just in fees, plus the original hardware purchase.

There is no doubt that the TiVO is better than the cable company DVR systems, those are really terrible. What I asked for though was someone to show something better than MythTV since the GP was basically making the argument MythTV was useless anyway. I don't think that's been done yet.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[DeadBeef]

Tvheadend is pretty good these days. The only thing in your list that I haven't seen any evidence of is commercial skipping.

I've just migrated off mythtv onto tvheadend and kodi and because they didn't have a great legacy of old analog tuners and other crazy, the setup for a bunch of DVB-T and DVB-S tuners makes a ton more sense than the gymnastics you had to do to map different multiplexes to specific tuners.

Re:Or just use MythTV

[fahrbot-bot]

B) Where is any information on this web based export? All I can find is some references to using the old TiVO Desktop software which is horrendous and painful if you do this very often and is still subject to the same CCI restrictions as MythTV would be.

I think the Tivo Desktop software has been discontinued. You can get to your recorded shows by hitting the embedded web server at "https://xx.xx.xx.xx//" and using the username "tivo" and your Media Access Key (obtained from the console) as the password. Recorded programs can be downloaded as MPEG files. There may be other ways to stream to your phone/tablet using the app, but I haven't looked into it.

F) $150/yr for guide data is ridiculous. The TCO on this product is horrible. The upfront costs may be slightly less than my MythTV setup but I've had the same HDHR Prime MythTV setup for going on 6 years now, with no signs of it stopping so that would be $850 so far just in fees, plus the original hardware purchase.

The $150 also include software updates and a HW service plan (of sorts). I agree it's pricey for guide data, vs. the $25/year from Schedules Direct. You can buy the Tivo with a lifetime subscription that lasts the life of the hardware and this would be cheaper in the long run -- assuming your system doesn't die early :-) You don't have to make that decision up-front but can wait until your first renewal date.

There is no doubt that the TiVO is better than the cable company DVR systems, those are really terrible. What I asked for though was someone to show something better than MythTV since the GP was basically making the argument MythTV was useless anyway. I don't think that's been done yet.

The Tivo is an excellent turn-key system that works with little fuss. In some ways it is better than MythTV - the interface is even simpler than MythTV's, the box is super small and quiet (especially the BOLT), the remote is both RF (for the Tivo) and IR and can also control your A/V tuner, displayed TV show / movie box graphics are nice, etc... There's a really nice remote w/slide-out keyboard available. I too ran my MythTV system for many years w/o major issues, but I'm a Unix/Linux admin and system programmer :-) and was just using analog tuners w/o cable cards. I've read a LOT of reports from people that have tried to use CC's with MythTV and while they've been successful with the system, working with their cable co can be a huge pain in the ass. I just didn't want to fuck with it anymore. My understanding is that some cable co's, like Verizon/FiOS leave the CCI bit to Copy Freely on (almost) everything (others always use Copy None everywhere and Cox is in-between and inconsistent). I had Verizon I would have looked into upgrading my MythTV system for sure.

Re:Never heard of that one

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

How many users - or even downloads of their iso - did they have?
More importantly, how is Cluthu Linux doing? Drop that one at your peril.

Re:Never heard of that one

[stanbrown]

I ran this for years, till I lost access to nonencrypted TV content. Really that has been, IMHO, the end of an Open Source DVR. I now have Dish, and i desperately would like to have access to the codebase to add enhancements. Most of which they would actually e OJK with. I am certain the auto comercial skip WOULD NOT be OK with them.

Myth

[fluffernutter]

I never tried Myth, but I had a friend who used it. I've never been sure how to tell if a TV tuner card would work in my area and didn't want to be bothered with ordering one and having to return it. Kodi seemed to be the thing to use for people without tuner cards so that is what I have stuck with. If it wasn't for the vast uncertainty of media in this day and age I probably would have tried Myth and liked it, but as it turns out TV was just too much of a risk for me.

Re:Good

[itsdapead]

Making a entire spin-off distro for one single specific application seems like the biggest waste of time and effort to me.

I think that's true now, but back in the day there were very good reasons for Mythbuntu: first, it was used for single-purpose Home Theatre PC "Appliances" - often small-form-factor systems with mediocre resources. MythTV needed X Window, but you didn't want the bloat of a full distro. TV tuners, hardware-assisted video playback, infra-red remote control didn't work straight out of the box on regular distros - you had to at least build and install kernel drivers, if not customise the kernel, then faff around to get it to boot straight to full screen MythTV. Mythbuntu had a lot of this already set up.

Now, things have moved on - the standard distros now typically include all the LinuxTV kernel drivers so well-supported cards are plug'n'play, and the unsupported ones usually rely on binary blobs or customised versions of the LinuxTV stack that can't be distributed with Mythbuntu either. As someone already pointed out, PCIe-based cards that support HD are like hen's teeth (YMMV depending on which standard you use) and the "driver-free" HDHomeRun seems to be cornering the market.

Also, now, any streaming box that can run Kodi or MrMC (XBMC as was) can be a MythTV frontend - a Raspberry Pi works brilliantly, or you can use a FireTV, AppleTV, or Android TV box - so it makes much more sense to run the backend on a server or NAS and keep that noisy spinning rust out of your living room. That cuts out all the frontend/video/remote control setup stuff, at least on the MythTV side. You're probably using the server for other things so you don't want a dedicated distro.

Finally, sadly, MythTV is getting long in the tooth - all the support for analog TV is now redundant, it depends on everything from X.org to MySQL to Apache (if you want the web interface) so its not great for a NAS/Server, and all the tedious X.org GUI configuration screens desperately need ripping out and replacing with web-based versions.

I stopped using the MythTV frontend some time ago, in favor of Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, and I've actually just (tentatively) dumped the backend for TVHeadEnd + HDHomeRun with a MrMC frontend running on a FireTV. TVHeadend is quite a bit less sophisticated when it comes to managing recorded programs (the plus side is that you get a bunch of media files with human-readable names) but, boy, is it easier to set up. I'll see how it works out...

Plex have a PVR app in beta, as do HDHomeRun.

Still, thanks to both the Mythbuntu and MythTV devs for years of service...

When asked..

[Chris Mattern]

...Adam Savage said he had no comment.

DRM ruined Myth

[Chewbacon]

Loved using MythTV over my cable company's box. It worked so well with more features and control. Then the DRM started rolling out and I started losing channels to the point I couldn't use Myth anymore. Plus, Cox cable is rolling out "all digital cable TV which will provide a better ..." blah blah blah let us cram our dick down your throats and rent you this cable box for $5/month while the FCC twiddled their thumbs promising to stop us.

Re:Myth - use external tuner (hdhomerun)

[Per Bothner]

In the old days I used old-fashioned tuner cards, but for years I've been using an external HdHomeRun network tuner. Just put one of these little boxes where convenient, connect antenna cable, and ethernet (WiFi is also an option). This means you can run MythTV on almost any PC, such as an discarded laptop, as long as it has HDMI output and sufficient storage (optionally USB).

XBMC interface was better in the end

[SkunkPussy]

I feel like a lot of mindshare moved over to XBMC. Kodi has a better user interface, but I think MythTV had a better backend.

It was always somewhat challenging to get everything working perfectly, but the ability to set up recordings on one TV (or remotely by web) and watch them on another TV was/is fantastic.

Playing music was always wierd - you needed to set up nfs mounts from the music server to play the files on your remote screens - it would make a lot of sense for them to be streamed automatically from the mythtv backend. But I get the idea that maybe some quite old protocols are in use and it would be a lot of work to change them.

Long Live MythTV/ MythXubuntu

Re:Myth - use external tuner (hdhomerun)

[fluffernutter]

Again, more questions.. looking at the HDHomeRun box, it looks cool.. but how does this work? Where does the signal come from? I have a choice of exactly one cable TV provider in my area and they insist I use their box.