The MythTV Convergence

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Well, I know some linux, and I tried installing MythTV a little over a year ago, and it is NOT the "happy shiny" experience that myth boosters claim. As soon as you try to do anything even a LITTLE advanced, you end up being catapulted into the deepest regions of linux hacking. By the time I was done, I was deeply versed in SAMBA, video drivers, capture drivers, RAID drivers, etc., etc. - and still the system didn't work right. As long as you are installing Myth on known good hardware configurations (i.e. lots of other people use the same hardware), you should be OK. But the minute you setp off the reservation, you can hit deep quicksand.

And the vaunted "user community" only helps when they feel like it, not when you need the help. I tried numerous times to get some assistance (politely, with detailed descriptions of the issues and my attempts to resolve them), only to be totally ignored. That's because there is no formal support for the system, so you are at the whim of whoever reads your request and decides they feel like helping that day.

I was told outright that if I expected to get help from the community, I should "contribute" by beta testing, writing code, or writing documentation. Only then would I have a high enough profile in the community to get a helpful response. I was also told, directly, that the lead developer of Myth considered it to be a personal project, and if someone else got use out of it then fine, but not to expect him to go out of his way to help people.

I'm not making a word of this up. Maybe the situation has changed, maybe not. But I'm a very happy SageTV user, and don't see much reason to switch.

Regarding the article itself, can you guys please label it clearly as the biased boosterism that it is? It is nowhere near an objective review, and the "detailed comparison" table is an absolute joke. What, exactly, was the point of throwing up the logos of SageTV and others, without any discussion or comparison whatsoever? This isn't journalism, it's blatant promotion, and should be clearly labelled as such.
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This is SPOT ON. I fought with mythtv for 6 months to get it to do exactly what I wanted it to do, and was never fully successful. I then turned to other linux based htpc software, then to 4 or 5 windows based HTPC-based software, including gb-pvr, snapstream (which I purchased), the open-source one (cant remember its name, sorry) and sagetv.

After NONE of them worked for _me_ (not that they didnt work. They didnt do everything I wanted them to), and thats an important point I'll exapand upon, I bit the bullet, swallowed my pride and installed MCE 2005, and thought I was in heaven. After installing the OS, drivers, and the updates, I had a 100% fully functional PVR in 10 minutes. It just worked. The very first time. Now, MCE has some definite tradeoffs, such as being stuck with the windows IR remote, and no front end/back end, but I'll deal with that.

When you are looking for PVR/HTPC software, the most important thing for you to do is list exactly what you want it to do. Some software does TV well, some are better for watching your ripped movies and/or DVD's. Some are easier to setup, some have better support than others. Take all these things into consideration as well.

Mythtv, while a nice idea, is disasterous if you, as the quoted person said, deviate in any way from a standard installation, using hardware thats fully supported. I would say without a doubt, the biggest crutch for mythtv is lirc. Its simply horrible, and again, straying off the beaten path leads you into known and fully (community) unsupported territory rapidly.

I might touch on mythtv support as well. I reported a VLC bug to the mythtv mailing list twice. The first time, my post was implied as mailing list "noise", the second time I was referred to the mythtv-users list. THE USERS LIST! to report a bug?! Let me say a few more things about mythtv. I needed it to play my rather large library of online (stored on my hard drives) movies. They are a collection of divx, xvid, dv, and dvd img files in various container formats. Neither xine nor mplayer will play them all properly, and the one piece of software that does, VLC, is unsupported.

Lastly, let me mention that purevideo, the dvd codec and framework from nvidia widely regarded as the best there is, doesnt work with linux. So keep that in mind as well as you weigh your choices.
 
This is the first time I'm posting on tomshardware's forums and it is a sad day. The summary table is just a big lie (save the two most uninteresting items). It is fantastic that it is published as it is. It is hard to consider this as a semi virtually serious article as it is...

Note: I haven't used MyTH TV at all yet, but I am a user of MCE, and here is my take on it:

MythTV: Open Source; free to obtain, use, and modify
MCE: Proprietary; pay to obtain and use but not modify
That's correct. They at least read the licenses.

MythTV: Interchangeable codecs (OSS and proprietary)
MCE: Proprietary codec cannot be changed
What the heck does that means? You can install all the codecs you want on a windows machine. They'll work on MCE just fine.

MythTV: Software and hardware decoding support
MCE: No software decoding support for 2004
Software decoding? What does that mean? Decoding videos? You can disable that anytime you wish on MCE.

MythTV: Output to DivX and MPEG2
MCE: No support for DivX or MPEG2
This is just a (intently?) badly phrased sentence, which is trying to induce readers into thinking that MCE cannot play DivX files (or MPEG2 files for that matter)?

MythTV: Setup requires moderate Linux know-how
MCE: Simple setup and configuration
Here it is even more funny since it does MCE a service to actually lie in this instance. MCE is a PITA to install, believe me on that one. The reason is simple: It was designed to be an OEM OS only, so only retailers had to deal with installation. So either you buy one (HW+SW) or you buy the software alone and you spend nights trying to get the thing up and running.

MythTV: Runs on Linux and MacOS, feeds to Windows
MCE: Runs on Windows only
Duh? A Linux app vs a Windows app. summary table needs to remind the reader of that fact? Besides, MCE can feed to an XBox or any media center extender for that matter.

MythTV: Ultra-low system requirements
MCE: Modest system requirements
Here I don't really know but for one thing: h264 decoding. There is no codec on Linux capable of decoding an High Definition H264 video on anything less than a 5GHz computer - and that would be 720p only. My sempron 3000+ is able to do that under windows. Search for CoreAVC which is just about 50% faster than any competition to this day. And it only runs on Windows... damn!

MythTV: Support for companion and third-party plug-ins
MCE: No plug-in support
No plugin support? I have 7 plugins installed at the time of this writing. What the hell?

MythTV: Scalable network architecture (master/slaves)
MCE: Basic TCP/IP network support (single unit)
The reviewer has never heard of a media center extender (such as both xbox). One can view all the content and access the tv recordings and scheduling with this. How is this "single unit" ???

MythTV: Record once, transcode and play anywhere
MCE: Record and play locally only
See issue above. True, MCE cannot transcode.
 
I built my first knoppmyth box in 2004 (as a linux newbie) on a P3-500 with 256mb of ram.

Within 30 minutes it was all running and I was recording and watching my first shows. All this on a 10GB drive no less. It was just a test system. The WinTV PVR-350 doesn't even work in Windows with less than 600mhz.

There are lots of solutions out there, pick one, who cares? MS has a good solution, it costs money. Linux has a good solution, it costs time.

Figure out which one you are willing to part with.

As for my knoppmyth system, it's evolved several times over the years. It does things I'm very happy with and I have media freedom with it. I did it because I wanted to start learning linux. Now I have a backend running in my office, a front end in the den, another that I will hook via wireless in my bedroom and I'm happy with it.

If you are interested in it, go out and do it, pick which ever one you want. Time or money, thats the only choice you have to really make.
 
I guess I'm the only one that caught this typo?

Related savings can be rolled into expanding your underlying hardware infrastructure to provide better storage space - how about a fast RAID-1 implementation across four serial ATA drives? Can TiVo do that easily?
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I'm assuming that should've said RAID 0.
 
Why in the world would you compare MythTV to an old version (2004) of Windows Media Center? And you mention features that are only available in an SVN version of MythTV. Horribly biased article.
 
If proposed legislation is passed MythTV may not be worth the effort to install. The MPAA is lobbying hard to take comtrol of all PVRs.
 
If proposed legislation is passed MythTV may not be worth the effort to install. The MPAA is lobbying hard to take comtrol of all PVRs.
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It is really quite difficult for the MPAA to take control of a PVR.
TIVO, and ReplayTV are easy because they can get a court order against the companies who operate the infrastructure the PVRs run off of. The same goes for Comcast, RCN, etc... PVRs.
PC DVRs are a different story. In order to stop you from recording a program, the signal between the output device (cable tuner, DVD player, etc...) needs to be encrypted so it can't be picked up by a computer's video/TV capture device. To the best of my knowledge, the only encrypted content comes from HD-DVD and Bluray players. This does not affect DVRs much, as they are typically used to record television broadcasts.
While its true the MPAA might like to have control of DVRs, they are probably a long way off.
 
I could easilly put together a basic box to just be a DVR, but add in the raid controller, client systems, SAMBA support, etc., etc., that I needed and you end up fighting a nightmare.
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I guess the idea of software RAID was completely lost on you 😉
 
Ed and I've jointly written two books in this area, one on MCE the other on MythTV and have spent hundreds of hours working with each of these two environments. Among
the many things I learned during this time was that

(a) if you look at the number of add-ons, the types of data and
applications, and the kinds of media that the two environments can support,
there's no disputing that MythTV can handle more kinds of data in more ways
than MCE can

(b) if you look at the architecture of the two environments, there's also no
disputing that MythTV's client/server front-end/back-end architecture
supports distributed systems with more capture cards and playback
capabilities than MCE can. In fact you can easily record and playback more
kinds of media at the same time using MythTV than you can with MCE
This is the basis for our belief that MythTV is technically superior to MCE.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but ours is based on many hours of
interaction and solid, inarguable experience.

As for the 2004 MCE chart, that was a place holder that came from a draft and not the final copy. We're looking to correct this soon.

By the way, what MCE 3rd-party plugins are you speaking of specifically?

Justin Korelc
 
I have limited Linux experience and have never set up mytTV, however I've been thinking about it for a while. One thing I note though is that according to the documentation, the hardware requirements are not insignificant.
Looking at the hardware database of working configurations, I would say they seem to be comparable to MCE2005, albeit a bit less demanding but hardly 'ultra-low'.

A quote from the mythTV documentation:
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html
For a good MythTV experience, you must understand that MythTV exercises your hardware more than a typical desktop. Encoder cards generate DMA across the PCI bus. The CPU is busy encoding / decoding video. Hard drives are constantly reading and writing data. Building a MythTV system on older / "spare" hardware may be an exercise in frustration and can waste many hours of valuable time.
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Personaly I'm thinking of re-purposing my current desktop, a 2.8GHz P4 for a mythTV installation.
 
The ultr-alow implication stems from the fact that you can get by with the ultra-compact VIA Eden series boards. See: link
for an example of this. I would say that qualifies as 'ultra low'.
 
These were the best captures I've ever seen!
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Not sure what card, but they all look like upsampled DVD and HDTV signals. If they are, that would explain the impressive quality of the images.
 
I'm probably showing my ignorance but I'm confused: (a) I didn't know myth suported HDTV cards. In fact I thought there were hardly any available. (b) When you say upsampled, do you mean on a PC? Does that mean the TV/capture card plays no part? It doesn't seem likely. And they look like TV programs, not DVD's...

As I said, excuse my ignorance. 😳
 
HDTV is doable on Myth: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Configuring_HDTV

When you are dealing with upsampled/scaled DVD or HDTV content, you are dealing with digital data. Because of this, the images will already have a headstart in image quality over anything that is processed vai an analog tuner or analog input card.

And Yes. A PC can/does the upsampling either at the CPU or the GPU level depending on if there is a hardware accellerated product like PureVideo installed (Only available for Windows).
 
Good luck with that Firewire thing. I called my cable company about it, figured it'd be awesome to use a relatively low end computer that had firewire support to watch some HDTV and do the PVR thing.

Basically, cable companies ain't dumb. They figured this out fairly quickly and unless you get lucky and get issued one of the early boxes, you'll find that the firewire port is disabled when you go to use it for your PVR box.
 
I'm using beyond tv and it does everything most users would require. I'm using beyond tv after having tried for months to get gbpvr to work properly, i wish I had been one of the MANY people for whom it worked instantly and completely.
Here is my problem... my old roommates had a mythtv system up and running and sweet Jebus was it nice. This was at least 3 yrs ago and it seems things have only gotten better. We had our main box in the livingroom running dual tuners with two other boxes on the network (each with a single tuner ) transparently "merged" . all recordings all media all IN ONE PLACE!!
I have NO linux experience myself and will be taking the mythtv plunge this weekend once all the parts for my new pvr/home media server have arrived. I am moderately competent in windows system building and will report back on exactly how this attempt goes down.
I'm thinking LinuxMCE... it looks snazzy
 
FYI, there's a major new release of the FOSS project LinuxMCE that includes whole-house HD PVR from MythTV, movie, music and photo server, integrated telephony and smarthome.
All a/v source devices, DVD jukeboxes, and online media are shared through the home so you can put all your a/v gear in a rack in one room,
with only thin clients in the rest of the rooms. It includes a gyro-controlled UI that lets you navigate long lists of media and the TV's EPG by
waving, like a Wii, for fast, smooth control. Also wave to scan through your media and adjust volume and lights.
Watch a demo walkthrough on <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2176025602905109829">Google Video</a> or download the video in
high-def at <a href="http://linuxmce.org">linuxmce.org</a>. Installation is 25 minutes and every step is shown starting with a clean PC.
 
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