New MythTV Based PVR Available 214
aotea_Joe writes "OpenMedia is putting together a mad crazy Linux based home media pc. It's DVB-T and HDTV capable, network ready (streaming, control, sharing). Has all the standard PVR features (real time pause, scheduling, listings etc). Plus you own the hardware, get support and get updates/maintenance. Is it too good to be true?"
Re:money (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Trully (Score:4, Informative)
I think a more significant problem is DVB-S support. Speaking as someone who uses Myth with Sky by having an S-video connection between the sky decoder and the Myth box, I would far prefer to just stick a DVB-S card in my Myth system. There are currently 3 problems here:
1. Sky encrypt their channels using VideoGuard and won't produce a CAM to decrypt it. This ties you into using an official Sky branded decoder (which are also completely useless for picking up stuff not covered by Sky). There are 3rd party CAMs available which claim to decrypt VideoGuard but they are relatively expensive (~100ukp) and I suspect the EUCD renders them illegal. I've yet to find a SoftCAM that will work under Linux.
2. DVB-S cards with a common interface are still reasonably pricey compared with DVB-T cards and DVB-S cards which don't have a common interface. This is probably down to lack of demand caused by (1).
3. To record multiple programs at the same time would involve having multiple CAMs and multiple Sky subscriptions. Ideally what would be better is to either do the decoding on playback (like Sky+ does), or (better) do the decoding in a post-processing job much like the commflag and transcoding jobs.
which means that analogue PVR's like this won't work, period.
Well I'm not sure what the GP is smoking here, as you pointed out the PVR being discussed in the article is DVB-T (i.e. digital), however I use my MythTV box with a plain BT878 card in it to record the analogue S-video signal off my Sky box and it works just fine.
Until I can sit back and fire up a PC that displays the same interactive guide data I am currently getting in a proprietary cable box, I don't think these things will find any success.
Infact, I get _better_ guide data through my Myth box than I do through my Sky box. The Sky box gives me a week's worth with often very short descriptions, whereas the Myth box gives me 2 week's worth of listings (pulled from radio times). Additionally, having looked at the Sky+ feature set I'd say my Myth box is a hell of a lot more capable (especially when I hear my sky+ owning friends complain that they missed the first episode of the new series of $foo because sky+ doesn't automatically record it, whilest my Myth box noticed the new series had started and automatically scheduled in the recordings).
Re:money (Score:3, Informative)
Does[sic] the mythtv people get anything out of this?
Yes, sort of. They get any changes or bugfixes this company makes to the code. Basically, they get free labor. Since MythTV is an open project the license is designed to benefit the users, not the developers (except in that the developers are users, which is why they are developing it).
Myth Project (Score:3, Informative)
Pluto - Combines Security, Home Automation, Telecom (and other things) into a single package. Uses bluetooth roaming to follow your audio around your house.. OpenSource, and it also utilizes Myth. I thought Its a neat project.
Link - http://plutohome.com/ [plutohome.com]
Re:Digital Broadcast flag? (Score:3, Informative)
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The HD-2000 was a 5v PCI card with two RF inputs and mono sound for NTSC. The HD-3000 is a similar card with one RF input, one SVIDEO input, one COMPOSITE VIDEO and AUDIO input and one audo stereo output for NTSC but the HD-3000 also supports Cable/QAM. Neithor card detects the broadcast
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Re:Bye, bye DRM-crippled Intel Viiv (Score:3, Informative)
the part that says :
"home media pc. It's DVB-T and HDTV capable, network ready (streaming, control, sharing). Has all the standard PVR features (real time pause, scheduling, listings etc). Plus you own the hardware, get support and get updates/maintenance."
Re:mythtv is still alittle too arcane.... (Score:1, Informative)
Xbox-linux.org has info [xbox-linux.org]. They even have an image you can just download and chuck on your E:.
Re:Nope, it's too true to be good (Score:2, Informative)
MythTV + Bittorrent (Score:3, Informative)
Until I discovered TvTorrents.com [tvtorrents.com]. Why bother going through all the trouble of recording, waiting for the backend to flag the commercials and transcode to Xvid when I can just subscribe to a RSS feed using Azureus and have the final product appear automatically (almost... you have to manually rescan for them to show up in the list of videos).
In my opinion, this is the future of TV, whether the networks want it or not.
Re:Would need a lot of work (Score:2, Informative)
Re:money (Score:2, Informative)