MythTV 0.20 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The latest version of MythTV, the open source PVR application for Linux, has been released. New features (as documented in the release notes) include a new menu system, an improved internal DVD player, support for DVB radio channels, and mouse support. There is also a new plugin – MythArchive – which allows recordings be written to DVD. You can download MythTV from MythTV.org."

Questions

[kevin_conaway]

For you Myth users out there, I have a few questions:

1. Is it possible to create "playlists" of TV Shows? Say I wanted to rip all my futurama DVDs to a Myth box and play them at random. Could I do that?
2. Are there any reputable places that will put together a box for me?

Thanks. Congrats to the MythTV team

what about freevo?

[Anonymous Coward]

has anyone a link comparing mythtv to freevo?
or any unofficial news on freevo 2.0 development?
Tanks

Any word on knoppmyth?

[Churla]

Any word on when this build will be on a Knoppmyth [mysettopbox.tv] ISO?

ya rly

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mythtv.son.org/tiki-index.php [son.org] should help. I don't think you'll find it under ports.

PVR for me

[drewzhrodague]

I have to pipe-up again, and say that MythTV is awesome. If you've got a tuner card, and a spare box, totally check it out. IT EATS COMMERCIALS, plays DVDs, MP3s, does a photo album, and other things that other units don't do, or don't do well.

It even has support for MAME.

Re:A Year of MythTV

[Neo Minder]

Last time I tried using a tuner card with my digital cable I was only able to get upto channel 100 or so. Nothing above that came in. Is this still an issue? If so, how do you work around it?

MythArchive for me!

[kravlor]

I've been happily running a set of Myth boxen for more than a year now, and while I love the system, the one feature I had been sorely waiting for was an easy way to export to DVD. While a more involved method was possible, I look forward to being able to just create an ISO directly from Myth itself. Keep up the good work!

Re:Sounds fascinating

[jridley]

No, but it costs time. I've used Linux as a server OS since Slackware 1.0, and have no problems configuring most things, but to date I've spent three solid days over the last 18 months on various attempts to get Myth working. Hell, I went out and bought components based on recommendations for them being good video card and capture card to use with Myth, and I still couldn't get anything that worked.

The most recent time, after blowing an entire weekend screwing around, I finally restored my Win2K backup that I'd made before I started, installed GBPVR and in about 5 minutes was up and running, and have been happy with that ever since.

MythTV rules

[Captain_Chaos]

I just finished setting up my home MythTV system. It rocks! I've got my digital cable connected directly to my backend using a PCI DVB-C card, and my projector is connected to my frontend using a DVI cable, so the backend can record the MPEG-2 streams directly to disk with no quality loss whatsoever (and including all the audio and subtitle tracks), and then the frontend can display them on my wall with not a single bit of quality loss in between! Plus it plays my videos and my music, it lets me skip commercial breaks (which it has automatically tagged for me), watch DVD's, play legacy games with MAME, etc., etc.

It really is a fantastic piece of kit. It can be pretty finicky to set up and you need to be prepared to invest some serious amount of time, but it's worth it!

One Problem

[ucaledek]

I just dropped my myth box which I had struggled with for the last few months. Admittedly, I didn't know much about Linux beforehand, just the basics so I wanted to use myth as a learning tool. I didn't mind that struggle at all. Setting up in the end was easy and relatively painless once I understood some Perl basics etc. Myth's qualities are not overstated above. Authoring DVDs of recordings was a bit of a hassle, but it seems with those release notes it might have gotten better. I could even archive to DVD all my old VHS easily with the right tuner card! But there are two basic reasons I dropped Myth: 1) I was never happy with the media players available aside from watching archived videos, including DVDs (never got that to work). 2) the picture quality tended to be pretty poor (maybe that's the fault of ivtv? but still can't get myth without drivers). My friend tried two windows alternatives--gbpvr and media portal--and the picture quality for live and recorded TV is leaps and bounds better than anything I could find after hours and hours of tweaking my myth setup. I can't imagine how it would look on a nice TV. Blue lines on the top and bottom of the feed, terribly flat blacks, fuzziness on certain channels pervaded my myth experience and haven't occurred with media portal. I have other problems with media portal and wouldn't mind going back to myth, but it just seems the limitations of the drivers out there really kills the experience for me.

MythTV light

[claes]

Below is my PVR. I "at" to schedule a program:

#at 18:00
warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh
at> rectv 1 1h simpsons
at> <EOT>
job 18 at 2006-09-12 18:00

#!/bin/sh
 
if [ -z "$3" ]; then
    echo "too few arguments"
    echo "Usage: record-tv channel duration name "
    echo "channel: 1-9"
    echo "duration: 30m, 1h"
    echo "name: simpsons"
    exit 1
fi
 
CHANNEL=$1
DURATION=$2
NAME=$3
 
BITRA TE=4000000
 
VIDEO_DIR=/home/claes/media/video/re cording/
 
FCHANNEL[1]=E5
FCHANNEL[2]=E7
FCHANN EL[3]=SE16
FCHANNEL[4]=E6
FCHANNEL[5]=SE19
FCHA NNEL[6]=SE20
FCHANNEL[7]=SE17
FCHANNEL[8]=SE13
    FCHANNEL[9]=SE14
 
#Set channel
ivtv-tune -teurope-west -d /dev/video0 -c ${FCHANNEL[CHANNEL]}
 
#Set quality
ivtvctl -d /dev/video0 -c bitrate=$BITRATE
 
#Start recording
mkdir -p $VIDEO_DIR #Just in case it does nto work
cat /dev/video0 > $VIDEO_DIR/$NAME.mpg &
 
CAT_PID=$!
# $! is PID of last job running in background.
 
sleep $DURATION
kill $CAT_PID

The resulting simpsons.mpg I play using XBMC.

Google Summer of Code

[Viper_Viper]

Any idea when the Google Summer of Code projects will be included in MythTV? I am guessing .21? These projects are going to be very usefull to MythTV, especially the AutoConfig, Make Myth Multi-user, and the Windows Port. http://code.google.com/soc/mythtv/about.html [google.com]

Re:Sounds fascinating

[itsdapead]

I've spent three solid days over the last 18 months on various attempts to get Myth working

Ah, a casual user then :-) Took me at least a week (but then I was compiling Gentoo on a diddy 1.2GHz Epia box)

MythTV is complex to set up because it is doing complex stuff - plus its supporting lots of different modes of use (analogue TV, DVB, with/without hardware MPEG are all rather different kettles of fish).

Any free/open (and especially non-windows) media centre is liable to be driver hell - there is not much that developers can do when TV cards rely on firmware "blobs" and manufacturers play musical chairs with chipsets without changing model numbers or packaging - and a media centre relies on so many different drivers.

When MythTV is working it is jolly impressive - the new release sounds like it fills a lot of important gaps (DVD archiving was a glaring ommission).

It does indeed kick ass.

[Orrin Bloquy]

I've had one of these for about five months and while it was a PITA to install, it definitely increased my e-penis with the local LUG. It looks great and is popular in the household.

Is it easy to install? No. Myth isn't an application, it's a platform inside Linux relying on MySQL, Apache, PHP, tuner drivers, lirc drivers, and the willingness to tweak the things which aren't guaranteed to work correctly out of the box (e.g. PHP5 not registering itself as a MIME type with Apache 2, streaming requiring not only hardcoding your box's IP in Myth's settings but having to run a SQL query to update all references to 'localhost').

Daniel Hyams' advice for installing Myth under Ubuntu makes it clear that there's some room for improvement in terms of startup and housecleaning -- creating a system that automatically logs in without passwords, that backs up its own databases, etc. -- and structure (putting /home in a separate XFS partition for faster disc access on large files than ext* can do, resetting Myth's own pointers to this location). It's frustrating to try to rip your own DVDs only to find that this requires opening a terminal and starting a service which isn't normally running. Users of bttv based tuner cards received a nasty shock when the L4TV kernel module maintainers inadvertently wrecked audio support with recent kernel updates.

And yet, even with all the negatives mentioned above, the end result is hella impressive. Your rules for recording can be simple, complex or even regex based. With a Hauppauge card with MPEG2 encoding chips, you can run it on a 450MHz P3.

However, what it needs most is a wrapper installation program which installs the AMP stack, requests a master AM password and configures it into Apache, MySQL and Myth, manages dependencies, establishes services at startup, bypasses login, sets a database backup schedule, ties DVD ripping to the necessary background services, and runs checks to see that Apache and MySQL are behaving themselves.

MythTV should be included with OS X.

[Anonymous Coward]

Myth TV is exactly the type of application that should come standard with a Mac.

People have been asking for a DVR application to be added to the Mac Mini,
it should be added to all versions of OS X (as well as video in / out jacks for all systems).

Apple could learn a few things from Myth TV.

Re:Questions

[Minwee]

I _think_ you can run as many as physically possible in your box.

You can run as many as are physically possible on your _network_. If you were a major cable-hound, or running a PVR service for your entire building, you could stash a room full of back-end servers in the basement with half a dozen tuner cards each and then network them to tiny front-end machines that sat on top of everyone's TV.

There really is no limit to how many channels of late night porn you can record.

Re:Sounds fascinating

[uglyduckling]

I've used Linux as a server OS since Slackware 1.0, and have no problems configuring most things, but to date I've spent three solid days over the last 18 months on various attempts to get Myth working.

Hmm... I've had server experience but it sounds like less than you, and I managed to get usable mythtv in under 2 hours. I've been tinkering with it for three weeks since then, but it was working acceptably almost straight away. The main thing you need to do is take a structured approach - if you were putting together a LAMP system you wouldn't mess around with PHP until you knew Apache could serve a static page. Same thing for myth - get known-supported cards and get them working with a standalone TV app, check your sound card is working well, maybe get DVD playback working because that's a known quantity and will test your display drivers, then look at installing myth. I was using DVB-T so followed one of the several howtos I found on google.

The only weird, non-obvious thing I found is that what the configuration GUI calls "video sources" really should be called "channel allocation/listings sources" - although this may be a quirk of DVB and make more sense in analogue (can anyone enlighten me?).

Re:A Year of MythTV

[Lumpy]

Comparing WMCE to mythtv is like comparing a burning car in a junkyard to a new fararri. Windows Media center edition is 100% pure unadulterated crap. it sucks so bad that it spawned people to build things like Mediaportal that blow away every bit of MCE in every possible way. I have helped convert many Windows Media Center machines from the buggy as hell Media center to Media portal + XP pro and gave the users more features, higher stability and removed ALL the damned MCE DRM it adds to your recordings.

Mythtv is far superior and wows the hell out of people... even the Diehard windows guys drop their jaws when I plug into CATV and start tuning the digital Cable channels directly... something that is 100% impossible under windows because of "safety" features built in the driver.

I personally prefer mediaportal, but nobody in their right mind can like Media Center edition.. ot simply sucks and feels half done in every part of it.

Re:HDTV Lockout

[Captain_Chaos]

MythTV has HDTV support for broadcast and Cable HD, but lacks a means of decrypting these streams.

There seems to be a lot of this going around. It must be an American thing, perhaps something to do with ATSC, the DMCA, the FCC or some other three or four letter word? Like I said in another post, I can watch encrypted HDTV channels fine with my DVB-C PCI card (specifically, a Technotrend Budget C-1500 [technotrend.de]). But I think DVB is the European standard.

OSS Versioning

[_Neurotic]

Has anyone else ever wondered why so many OSS projects are afraid to ever reach v1.0? Here's an example of a project that has been in development since 2002. It's undergone cycles of feature additions and bug fixes, and it's just now hitting version 0.20?

Myth is awesome!

[mindcrime30]

Using Knoppmyth really takes the sting out of setting it up. I built a back-end box with 500GB (~220 hours SD), 3 PVR-150 tuners (USA, Cable), and an HD-3000 card (USA, HD-OTA). It makes my 320 hour TiVo jealous. I don't use the Mame/Weather/DVD/Video file features since it just sits in the basement and records stuff. We watch everything but the 1080/720 HD recordings with a Modded XBox (XBMC + xbmcmythtv), the HD stuff is just getting started for us, but we can watch that on the Ubuntu systems temporarily until I get a better front end box for the HDTV.

Overall, Myth is a very serious contender, not to say that it doesn't need some spit and polish here and there. Better cooperation from hardware companies would certainly help too, especially for TV-Out capabilities and Tuner-Chip-Du-Jour companies (I'm looking at you, ATI and Hauppage...) The web interface is fantastic! How many times have you been at work/school/the office and heard about a new show that you might want to see. You can find and schedule that show from your computer anywhere or even your phone (I use a Treo 650).

Being able to convert recorded shows into XviD, Divx, vcd, etc. is extremely handy too, and works with PSPs, iPods, GP2Xs, Treos, etc. I really don't care to pay $1.99 for a show I already recorded just to get it into the right format to watch on an airplane/train/boat.

Making compilation DVD's of the kids cartoons without commercials is great for those long car trips, as is being able to record the decaying laserdiscs and the occasional 8mm video or VHS tape into DVD's with full menus.

Just my $0.03 (inflation, you know.)

Re:Questions

[harryk]

Having built a few for friends and family I have to say 2 things. One ... give it a go for yourself, it's really not that terribly difficult, especially if you are dedicating a box to it, and starting from scratch. Second, if you really don't want to do it yourself, I'd be happy to build one fore you.

The biggest costs are the base components, tuner, motherboard/cpu/ram, storage. A case ... well... everyone has their own opinions, but I cannot justify spending 200 to 300 on a decent htpc case, I'd rather just find a decent beige box, or a 2u server case on the cheap.

If you're seriously interested, I could build one for you.