MythTV Compared with Windows Media Center 248
legoburner writes "Tom's Hardware has a nice comparison of MythTV and Windows Media Center Edition, and it seems that they preferred MythTV by quite a margin: 'Enter MythTV, a grand unification of personal digital video recording and home theatre technology, and a magnum opus of modular design, freedom of expression and personal entertainment.'"
Re:what would be really nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Rich media experiences are a Faustian bargain. The EULA is an abstract goatskin, and that's your blood you're click/signing.
The reality is that the bulk of people are perfectly content to sign over to a proprietary vendor.
Paraphrasing Mellencamp: "Free Software goes on, long after the thrill of getting mugged by the proprietary vendor is gone".
Sub $500 HD-PVR? (Score:2, Interesting)
Some comparison... (Score:1, Interesting)
On top of that, they failed to go into any sort of interesting detail *and* ignored every other media thingymabob out there like MediaPortal, SageTV, etc.
I hope the follow-up articles they're promising make up for it but this is a disappointing article from the likes of Tom's...
Why I love mythtv... (Score:5, Interesting)
The potential for separation of backend and frontend allows me to have my loud, big, lots-o-storage system somewhere far away from my TV, and a quiet, yet affordable box with my TV.
My frontend is nothing but a micro ATX case with a motherboard (ASUS A8N-VM CSM), processor (Athlon XP64 3000), and 1 512M DIMM. No hard drive, no extra video card, booting diskless. Thanks to the linux base I'm able to PXE boot, and have a tmpfs root with about 40M of ram used, and nfs mount usr. Now I have a really slick frontend that I can sleep and resume, and it comes up in less time than my TV takes to turn on its lamp right back to whatever menu I left it at, but still have no hard disk whatsoever in it. It's very quiet, and passes the WAF test. The kind of power and flexibility I can get out of a mythtv on linux solution is far beyond anything that involves Windows (try having a fully persistant-storage free (including optical drives or usb storage) windows box that can run MCE and serve reliably as a frontend, persisting through all sorts of activity including sleep... My backend records OTA HD and uses a free service to get TV listings, no subscription, has everything stored on a software RAID5 with 4 250GB disks, and I can access it to make scheduling changes from anywhere via the web if someone say recommends a show while I'm at work. Can also download other media (i.e. fansubs), dump them in a particular directory tree, and the frontend can access it in an easy-to-use interface as well.
One thing I will say is that for more exotic configs, it naturally takes more work to set up than probably other things do, and in allowing the exotic configuration, a lot of confusing options end up facing the novice user (kinda like vi vs. notepad). Also, as it is only part of a full solution, it can't even simplify some config options because it quite frankly has no idea if the user will have a remote, if so what remote, if they will use a keyboard, maybe a joystick, if a joystick no idea on the keymapping... If it will be running backend and frontend type tasks on the same box, if separate the frontend may not know where the master backend is... It has various playback options that work better depending on your video card and such, and while they have a 'decent' default behavior, it doesn't de-interlace by default, doesn't enable any sort of sync to vblank by default, and doesn't enable XvMC by default, because it can't assume any of these are wanted or will perform right with the frontend's hardware. It could be assissted by a discovery architecture for the frontend (if localhost not responding, discover backends), and maybe a hardware/configuration database where it uses, say, lspci data and checks for XvMCConfig and other config files to have a better guess as to what the user can do, but it shouldn't sacrifice the power of it's configurability whatever may happen.
Once configured, it's slick and easy to use, no one has ever been confused by the interface that's used it at my house, I've never had to answer any questions pertaining to usage and once I got everything behaving correctly, I haven't had to touch configuration. Other people have scheduled recordings without being confused or anything, and that's about the hardest task left to do with the frontend. It could be leveraged as a part of a pre-configured solution where hardware and software config is already known (last I heard MCE had particular config requirements, so mythtv's ability to cope with a wider config probably contributes to this criticism).
KnoppMyth is freaking awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
however, getting MythTV running on my brother's box proved to be really, REALLY difficult.
Enter KnoppMyth.
20 minute install and 10 minutes to configure. And it all just worked. I'm sold.
Plus, he can use his main machine, a Tiger-running Mac, as a front end as well. Its terriffic. Download it. NOW.
Re:what would be really nice (Score:4, Interesting)
whereas most end users have a rudimentary knowledge of Windows and can fix small things when they break.
I really wonder where people get this impression. Most people can't even change their resolution in Windows, although that seems to be something people bitch about with Linux. Most people don't even realize they are missing drivers when (if) they take the plunge and decide to reinstall windows because "it is slow". A lot of users cannot even install applications in Windows, even if it is the "next, next, finish" type.
Re:Sub $500 HD-PVR? (Score:2, Interesting)