Very savvy consumers will hack together ["PC-TV hybrid"] setups themselves.
Yes, we are indeed building them ourselves. However, we are doing so primarily because we can't find what we want on sale anywhere for any price. The below is an adapted version of a recent Usenet post of mine describing what I have come to daily take for granted with my high-definition MythTV setup: ------------ . . . MythTV works, and works well, for those who are interested in a "HD TiVo" without any of TiVo's limitations. I must admit to chuckling whenever I see a question in alt.tv.tech.hdtv or elsewhere asking how to record from a HD video source with a computer in terms that make it clear the poster and the respondents view the task as something akin to cavemen discovering fire.
I work long, long hours and, when I get home, often don't have any more energy left to do more than want to just relax in front of the tube. When I do so, I want to have as much choice in what to watch as possible. Let me tell one and all of what I with 100% reliability do with my MythTV setup every day:
Push a button on the remote[1] to wake the 47" 1080p[2] LCD panel[3] from its DPMS slumber.
Pick from a gigantic library[4] of high-definition programs that MythTV constantly adds to[5] based on my choices.[6]
While playing the program, rewind, fast-forward, and jump to arbitrary points as desired. I can also adjust the playback speed anywhere from 0.5X to 2X without affecting audio pitch.[7]
I can push a button to instantly and accurately skip over commercials.[8] If I've gone too far, another button will skip me back to the previous spot.
If I exit a recording, the next time I watch it the playback will continue where I left off.[9]
If I ever need to restart MythTV, pushing a button on my remote twice within three seconds will cause it to do so.[10]
If I want, I can run MythTV on my MacBook and watch the exact same programs[11] with the exact same elegant and attractive user interface.[12]
All this time, MythTV is silently recording yet more for me to watch.[13]
If any of this intrigues you, I recommend visiting:
A well-regarded MythTV reference design [mythic.tv] for those who want to either buy it off the shelf from the vendor or build it themselves. I'm neither a customer nor an employee; all I did for my own setup was buy a Sony Pentium 4 [amazon.com] system on sale at Fry's then add the video card, ATSC capture card, gigabit Ethernet card, remote, and NAS. However, in retrospect, there's something to be said [gossamer-threads.com] for buying at once all the parts except the NAS in one convenient, already-integrated form.
[1] Home Theater Master MX-500 [remotecentral.com] universal remote. I programmed it using a $30 infrared keyboard/mouse combo [gossamer-threads.com].
[2] MythTV does an *excellent* job of deinterlacing 1080i recordings into 1080p for those displays that can handle it. Any Nvidia video card from the FX5200 to the present will work.
[3] Westinghouse LVM-47W1 [westinghousedigital.com]. Under $2500 from Crutchfield [crutchfield.com] for 1080p LCD goodness.
[4] MythTV tells me that I have "242 programs, using 1.7 TB (427 hrs 33 mins) out of 1.8 TB (54 GB free)." For storage I use an Infrant ReadyNAS 600 [infrant.com] with four 500GB drives.
[5] In addition to an ATSC capture card and an indoor antenna, my MythTV box has two high-definition Motorola cable boxes [motorola.com] connected to it. My cable provider is one of the few that permits access to all subscribed channels, unencrypted or not, through FireWire (and, thus, why it's won my busines); unfortunately, most people have to live with only getting the FCC-mandated over-the-air channels over FireWire and the rest in lower-quality, downscaled form with the analog outputs.
[6] Thanks to the good graces of Zap2It [zap2it.com], North American MythTV users have free access to the same high-quality, two-week programming data from Tribune Media that TiVo subscribers get. All Zap2It asks is filling out a brief online demographics survey every three months. Outside North America and the UK, there are screen scrapers available for generating equivalent (or so I'm told) data from online TV Websites and such.
[7] A very, very neat feature. Great for zipping through late-night talk shows.
[8] After MythTV records a program from a channel marked as having commercials, it goes through (and does a surprisingly-accurate job of) marking up commercials. Two buttons on my remote are dedicated to jumping to the next and previous commercial marks.
[9] Although I don't know why anyone would ever want different behavior, this can be customized, just as pretty much everything within MythTV can.
[10] This is more for safety's sake than anything else; in practice MythTV has proven itself to be very, very stable during the eight months I've run it, thanks in no small part to its Linux underpinnings.
[11] This is possible because MythTV uses a decoupled frontend/backend architecture; one, or multiple, backends can serve one, or multiple, frontends. My MythTV box runs both the mythfrontend and mythbackend applications and is what I normally use, while my MacBook runs mythfrontend. Recently, while awaiting my new TV (and thus leaving my main MythTV system headless), I substituted my MacBook with surprisingly-nice results, even over wireless Ethernet.
[12] There are many MythTV user-interface themes, but I think most of them are eye-meltingly revolting or, failing that, merely stupendously ugly. Two I very much like are MythCenter [fotoniq.nl] and Retro [aldorf.no].
[13] My MythTV box can record from all three program sources simultaneously while also running background jobs such as scanning recordings for commercials, or converting MPEG-2 HD recordings to MPEG-4 to save space. I can also simultaneously view recordings, but for best results (i.e., avoid skips in the playback) it's best to do so when only one or two simultaneously recordings are occurring. ------------ Now, two caveats. Many people who fail in their efforts to build a MythTV box do so because they try to use whatever parts they have left over in the closet. While this may work for standard-definition video, HD is a quantum leap ahead in terms of both video quality and necessary horsepower. You get what you pay for [gossamer-threads.com].
Yes, MythTV takes times to set up right. That said, the resources I mentioned earlier go a long way in answering whatever questions may arise. In my experience 90% of peoples' questions on the mythtv-users list have already been answered sometime in the past. Conversely, while many people swear by KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv], its inherent inflexibility (When I tried it it didn't support USB keyboards and mice or SATA drives!) didn't impress me.
Let me close with another quote from the article:
My tech-savvy friends who can afford anything they want set up a huge HDTV with TiVo, cable, and DVD players--then sit in front of it with a laptop on their knees. They use Google and AIM while watching TV, but they keep their 2-foot and 10-foot gadgets separate.
That's exactly what I'm doing right now, down to the laptop on the knees. Even with the wireless keyboard/mouse, trying to use the MythTV box as a computer is a pain at best; were man meant to browse the Web across a living room, God would have given him telescopic vision. With a good remote, however, and used solely as the high-definition wonder box it's meant to be, there's nothing else that comes close.
I looked into MythTV before going with SageTV, but I couldn't find documentation on how to get EPG listings. Is there a way for North American users to get listings? Or is it just that XMLTV stuff that only appeared to have listings in other countries?
And if you take away TV input (DVB or whatever) and add in torrents, it can be even easier to set up. I built a perfectly fine "media" PC with a mini-ITX VIA EPIA 1Ghz board. No horsepower needed to decode MPEG4.
I've had a mythtv box set up for several years. While I don't have any problems running my own setup, I expect that my parents might. For them, I've built a setup similar in function but requiring multiple devices. They have a ReplayTV for the PVR capabilities and a Mediagate MG-35 for the video-on-demand functions. That setup works better for them even though there is an additional remote.
I wonder when Myth will support DLNA [dlna.org]. It's a really cool [wikipedia.org] way of streaming media off a server to be viewable by a television, basically. And all the big manufactureres are getting certified for it RIGHT NOW.
This dungeon is owned and operated by Frobozz Magic Co., Ltd.
We are indeed building them ourselves, with MythTV (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, we are indeed building them ourselves. However, we are doing so primarily because we can't find what we want on sale anywhere for any price. The below is an adapted version of a recent Usenet post of mine describing what I have come to daily take for granted with my high-definition MythTV setup:
------------
. . . MythTV works, and works well, for those who are interested in a "HD TiVo" without any of TiVo's limitations. I must admit to chuckling whenever I see a question in alt.tv.tech.hdtv or elsewhere asking how to record from a HD video source with a computer in terms that make it clear the poster and the respondents view the task as something akin to cavemen discovering fire.
I work long, long hours and, when I get home, often don't have any more energy left to do more than want to just relax in front of the tube. When I do so, I want to have as much choice in what to watch as possible. Let me tell one and all of what I with 100% reliability do with my MythTV setup every day:
If any of this intrigues you, I recommend visiting:
[1] Home Theater Master MX-500 [remotecentral.com] universal remote. I programmed it using a $30 infrared keyboard/mouse combo [gossamer-threads.com].
[2] MythTV does an *excellent* job of deinterlacing 1080i recordings into 1080p for those displays that can handle it. Any Nvidia video card from the FX5200 to the present will work.
[3] Westinghouse LVM-47W1 [westinghousedigital.com]. Under $2500 from Crutchfield [crutchfield.com] for 1080p LCD goodness.
[4] MythTV tells me that I have "242 programs, using 1.7 TB (427 hrs 33 mins) out of 1.8 TB (54 GB free)." For storage I use an Infrant ReadyNAS 600 [infrant.com] with four 500GB drives.
[5] In addition to an ATSC capture card and an indoor antenna, my MythTV box has two high-definition Motorola cable boxes [motorola.com] connected to it. My cable provider is one of the few that permits access to all subscribed channels, unencrypted or not, through FireWire (and, thus, why it's won my busines); unfortunately, most people have to live with only getting the FCC-mandated over-the-air channels over FireWire and the rest in lower-quality, downscaled form with the analog outputs.
[6] Thanks to the good graces of Zap2It [zap2it.com], North American MythTV users have free access to the same high-quality, two-week programming data from Tribune Media that TiVo subscribers get. All Zap2It asks is filling out a brief online demographics survey every three months. Outside North America and the UK, there are screen scrapers available for generating equivalent (or so I'm told) data from online TV Websites and such.
[7] A very, very neat feature. Great for zipping through late-night talk shows.
[8] After MythTV records a program from a channel marked as having commercials, it goes through (and does a surprisingly-accurate job of) marking up commercials. Two buttons on my remote are dedicated to jumping to the next and previous commercial marks.
[9] Although I don't know why anyone would ever want different behavior, this can be customized, just as pretty much everything within MythTV can.
[10] This is more for safety's sake than anything else; in practice MythTV has proven itself to be very, very stable during the eight months I've run it, thanks in no small part to its Linux underpinnings.
[11] This is possible because MythTV uses a decoupled frontend/backend architecture; one, or multiple, backends can serve one, or multiple, frontends. My MythTV box runs both the mythfrontend and mythbackend applications and is what I normally use, while my MacBook runs mythfrontend. Recently, while awaiting my new TV (and thus leaving my main MythTV system headless), I substituted my MacBook with surprisingly-nice results, even over wireless Ethernet.
[12] There are many MythTV user-interface themes, but I think most of them are eye-meltingly revolting or, failing that, merely stupendously ugly. Two I very much like are MythCenter [fotoniq.nl] and Retro [aldorf.no].
[13] My MythTV box can record from all three program sources simultaneously while also running background jobs such as scanning recordings for commercials, or converting MPEG-2 HD recordings to MPEG-4 to save space. I can also simultaneously view recordings, but for best results (i.e., avoid skips in the playback) it's best to do so when only one or two simultaneously recordings are occurring.
------------
Now, two caveats. Many people who fail in their efforts to build a MythTV box do so because they try to use whatever parts they have left over in the closet. While this may work for standard-definition video, HD is a quantum leap ahead in terms of both video quality and necessary horsepower. You get what you pay for [gossamer-threads.com].
Yes, MythTV takes times to set up right. That said, the resources I mentioned earlier go a long way in answering whatever questions may arise. In my experience 90% of peoples' questions on the mythtv-users list have already been answered sometime in the past. Conversely, while many people swear by KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv], its inherent inflexibility (When I tried it it didn't support USB keyboards and mice or SATA drives!) didn't impress me.
Let me close with another quote from the article:
That's exactly what I'm doing right now, down to the laptop on the knees. Even with the wireless keyboard/mouse, trying to use the MythTV box as a computer is a pain at best; were man meant to browse the Web across a living room, God would have given him telescopic vision. With a good remote, however, and used solely as the high-definition wonder box it's meant to be, there's nothing else that comes close.
MythTV EPG? (Score:2)
Re:MythTV EPG? (Score:1)
Re:MythTV EPG? (Score:2)
Re:We are indeed building them ourselves, with Myt (Score:2)
Re:We are indeed building them ourselves, with Myt (Score:2)
Re:We are indeed building them ourselves, with Myt (Score:2)