Kodi, MythTV, Backend, Frontend

[john_72]

I have cut cord and now rely on over the air signal for my TV viewing. Untill recently I used Windows Media Center to allow me to pause shows, backup and replay shows and to record one show while watching another. It also allowed me to look at a schedule of programs currently showing and to select future programs for recording. Now I have upgraded to windows 10 and must find an alternative to WMC since it is not supported by windows 10. To this end I have downloaded the relevant files for MythTV and am working up the courage to install and configure it to replace WMC. In the meantime, I keep seeing “Kodi” as to most frequently mentioned alternative to Windows Media Center. My question is: Should I be Using “Kodi” or “MythTV” or a combination of both to accomplish my goals? Also, could anyone clarify the distinction between “frontend and backend” and the relevancy of these terms to the issues described above?

My system
Mother board: ASRock Z77 Pro 4 with integrated sound and video
Hard Drive 1: WDOEM WD1TB BLUE SATA6.0 HD (1000 Gb) w/Ubuntu 14.04.3 Desktop OS
Hard Drive 2: Toshiba (500 GB) w/Windows 10 OS
Memory: CRUCIAL 8GB 4X2D3 1333 DIMM CL
TV tuner: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 (two tuners)

I assembled this system in order to better understand computer hardware. And to learn something about linux.

 

[skittle]

Kodi, formely XBMC, is a complete HTPC software which provides a nice user facing gui for watching movies,music,dvds, and also can use mythtv as a DVR. Kodi does not have this functionality built in and mythtv only provides a basic gui by its self. But you can use mythtv by its self without kodi.

Maybe also look into OpenELEC which is an small linux distribution that only runs kodi (and other htpc services) and is designed to run off a flash drive.

 

[dmroeder]

Mythtv is a fantastic piece of software that can be super frustrating to get running. That being said, I've been running it for several years and I can't live without it (and it's frustrations).

The backend is the part of MythTV that deals with managing all of your media. It does the recording, database management, manages all of your media files and so on.

The frontend is the interface that will allow you to do the recording scheduling, play the files you've recorded, play the videos and so on.

I guess you could think of it like this: Frontend tells the backend what to do, backend does it.

For your mythtv system, there will be one backend. You can have multiple frontends telling the backend what to do. You can have a frontend on the same machine as the backend (as I do), you can have a frontend on a completely different machine on your network, or you can have both.

I happen to move all of my mythtv storage directories to another hard drive on my system, so this is usually the headache for me: file permissions. Every time I've setup my system, I've struggled with the permissions when I move away from the default storage directories. You'd think I'd write it down, but I end up getting it to work by what seems like accident.

The other thing that I've typically struggled with is networking portion of setting up the frontend and backend.

Once you get it running, it's pretty cool. Cool enough that I still deal with the headaches of getting it installed and running. Once it's running, it just works. I usually schedule my stuff through mythweb. I use a mythtv app on my android devices to play my media. My TV's and blu-ray players have DLNA media apps, so I can watch my media and recordings. I have most all of my movies converted to mkv and stream them via MythTV to my TV's. In fact, I'm converting more movies right now.

I think I have the little brother to that tuner (1600 maybe?). Hit me up if you run into trouble.