rusty0101's Journal: Recomended, Knoppmyth R4

I now have a working PVR that does what I desire. I may have a couple of minor changes to make yet, just tweeks to improve audio, etc, but my platform is working.

Hardware wise I have upgraded the motherboard since my last note on building a pvr. I am now using a Athlon XP 1800 processor, with 512 Meg of ram, an nVidia FX 400 video card, two model 401 Hauppauge! capture cards, and a SB Live sound card. I was able to pick up a 120 Gig Segate 7200 rpm drive. All of this is in a stock beige box, with a 19" lcd flat panel as my display. I do have a tvatior scan converter to pump it to my TV if I would like, but the resolution takes a noticable hit.

The software is from the knoppmyth location, www.mysettopbox.tv, and is the R4 distribution of the disk. There is an R5 in the works. On the forum there I have added the primary changes I had to make to get my system up and running, as well as a more detailed hardware listing.

Along the way I have picked up an extra sound card, (I suspect I will find a use for that) Capture card, (again, I think I can find a use for it) and have decided to unload my 27" TV, as it is the least desirable output, compared with a 19" flat panel lcd monitor. If the flat pannel dies on me a couple of years from now, I can use another monitor until I pick up a larger flat panel.

Myth TV does an acceptable job of identifying comercial breaks on recorded material, and has a functioning pause for live TV, with a decent Skip feature set.

I am seriously impressed with the On Screen Displays for the channel, time and information fields, they appear very professional, and are readable from across my room. The interactive guide is functional, though it could use a bit more information on the contents of shows. I suspect that this will be one of the areas worked on by the xmltv team, though I do not know.

My only real complaint when compared to TiVo is that MythTV does not have some of the nicer search features, such as actors, directors, etc. and it does not have a "recomendations" feature based upon other user's likes and dislikes. I doubt that the latter will be a feature in the future, as it would involve MythTV being able to interact with some server doing the appropriate user preference agrigating and searching. As the feature set of MythTV improves (they are on version 0.13 after all, more to come) I would suspect that the actor and director searches will be added, and more information on programs will become available. It is possible to do some recomendations based upon genra, without using an agrigation server, but I suspect that will be even longer before it gets implemented.

Over all, I like the implementation of MythTV that comes on the KnoppMyth R4 distribution, and consider it likely that I will enjoy future implementations. As I understand it, it should be possible for me to "update" from the R5 disk when that is available.