MythTV

[tiny ogre]

My christmas present to myself, still in progress, is a new entertainment center. The keystone of this is a mini PC running Linux and MythTV. I'm here to tell you about MythTV, this is one great program. It's like TiVo on steroids.

(The website is here if you are too impatient to read my summary http://www.mythtv.org/)

Here are some reasons you should look at it if you're interested in this stuff. And I know some of you are.

The UI is slick and skinnable. There are 6 or 7 skins out of the box (at least if you follow the Fedora installation guide like I did, they may be optional if you follow the generic installation steps)

Fully remote control enabled (ATI Remote Wonder in my case, there are several other options). Most configuration is even done via in-program menus. There is very little unixy text editing required once the basic systtem is set up.

Fully functioning timeshifting. Watch programs while they're being recorded. (I mention this especially because the other main contender for Linux of this sort of program, Freevo, doesn't do this very well)

AUTOMATIC COMMERCIAL SKIP. Works about 90% of the time so far. I've seen only one false positive. It was on the Monk episode about a blackout, amusingly enough (it detects black frames to find commercials

TV shows can be edited and transcoded to several codecs, I believe using the commercial skip to take the commercials out without intervention (but also manually). Haven't played with any of that, but I've seen the menu selections.

Web interface for the program guide and other pieces.

Play DVDs, rip DVDs, playback ripped DVDs later.

CD and MP3 playback with playlists, rip CDs.

Front end (interface) and back end (recording, storage) are separate processes and can even be run on separate machines. Supports multiple back ends and multiple front ends.

Then there are the silly things like MAME and other emulator integration (haven't set that up), weather reports, an RSS aggregator and a web browser

Here's a screenshot leeched off the mythtv site to whet your appetite.



P.S. thanks to many of you for making this present possible, if you see what I mean

[knob]

Looks good.


We recently got DVR with MOXI (I don't know what it all means, but...) and I can't imagine life without it. I heard people bash DVR for various reasons, and it seems like either those complaints are fixed or never existed. (Things like "You can't set it to program a TV show, you have to set the time to record it. And if it goes over, you miss it). That isn't the case with our setup, it records it until it's over.


Being able to rewind and pause TV is great.

[tiny ogre]

Looks good.
"You can't set it to program a TV show, you have to set the time to record it. And if it goes over, you miss it)

That wasn't even true for first generation TiVos. I don't know what "DVR" that applies to, but all of them that I know of record by program.

Myth lets you choose to record one showing, record all showings, record all showings on a channel, record all showings on a channel at a given time, and one or two more options. The version I am running doesn't seem to have a "don't record reruns" option, but I saw a mention of it on one of their mailing list archives, so either I'm just missing it or it's in development code but not released code.

As for missing it if it goes over, it's true that if a program gets delayed by some other event, you will miss part of it. There's really no way around that. But if you have a station or program that consistently goes long or starts early, you can at least tell your DVR to record a few minutes extra at either end (true for all DVRs that I know of, including Myth)

[Austin]

I have SageTV. Unfortunately I could never quite get my computer to display on my TV quite right. I even bought a dongle.

[Crabbs]

P.S. thanks to many of you for making this present possible, if you see what I mean

So when do we get to come over for the Super Bowl Party.

Hmm this really looks tempting, I guess it might just be a good project instead of buying a second TiVo.

PS: Thanks for working your A$$ of for a great product !!! Loving every minutes of it. It was great to see it evolve from the early Alpha stages

[wonderpug]

I have SageTV. Unfortunately I could never quite get my computer to display on my TV quite right. I even bought a dongle. :(

Have you asked for help on www.htpcnews.com ? There are some utilities out there that should be able to fix your display issues. They're beyond me, but the people on the htpcnews forums should be able to help you.

I'll give another hearty thumbs up to MythTV and homebrew DVRs in general. I eyed Myth for a while but ended up going with Sage since I was too chicken to re-learn Linux. It's worked wonderfully, and I'll never have to be spammed with ads when I fastforward like TiVo. :P

[LawBeefaroni]

I have SageTV. Unfortunately I could never quite get my computer to display on my TV quite right. I even bought a dongle.

Ever try Powerstrip?