The grand unification of personal digital video recorder technology converges. In fact, we think you would do well to treat the MythTV suite of software applications as a harness for exercising greater control over those appliances that govern our daily activities outside the workplace.

I have worked with Windows and Linux for years in my office. I have no time to play with a linux box at home, when Windows does the same thing in less time. Give me a Windows app any day of the week. I am currently using MCE 2005 with 3rd party plugins and have no issues with playing, recording or networking it with my various home PCs.

from the sounds of it (I have never tried MythTV), only the intial build and configuration is slower and more cumbersome. The article seemed to suggest that the front-end clients can be windows based anyways if you wish, and those are the systems you would be interacting with daily.

Granted, I am sure setting up the server environment would take a dedication of some significant time. However, if the end result is a FREE software to interact with so many different kinds of media on a potentially FREE OS, that is a huge bonus for those of us on a budget. Plus, Linux can run quite well on antiquated hardware, or even extremely cheap new purchased hardware. Every aspect of this project could be done for very little money, especially if you have access to some spare older pc's.

I am extremely curious to see the upcoming articles. I only wish they would create PDF versions we could print up later to reference (hint!).

Just a side note: it is pointless to make a post about how much you love M$ and how you don't care about *nix.

I definitely do not love MS. I am simply saying, the MCE alternative is not "better enough" to make someone who already has it switch. Though, I agree with the post that if you did not get the OS free with the PC, cheaper alternatives are nice. If you do not want to hassle with the extra work and already are gaming with a MS PC, something like MediaPortal would be a better solution.

Well, I know some linux, and I tried installing MythTV a little over a year ago, and it is NOT the "happy shiny" experience that myth boosters claim. As soon as you try to do anything even a LITTLE advanced, you end up being catapulted into the deepest regions of linux hacking. By the time I was done, I was deeply versed in SAMBA, video drivers, capture drivers, RAID drivers, etc., etc. - and still the system didn't work right. As long as you are installing Myth on known good hardware configurations (i.e. lots of other people use the same hardware), you should be OK. But the minute you setp off the reservation, you can hit deep quicksand.

And the vaunted "user community" only helps when they feel like it, not when you need the help. I tried numerous times to get some assistance (politely, with detailed descriptions of the issues and my attempts to resolve them), only to be totally ignored. That's because there is no formal support for the system, so you are at the whim of whoever reads your request and decides they feel like helping that day.

I was told outright that if I expected to get help from the community, I should "contribute" by beta testing, writing code, or writing documentation. Only then would I have a high enough profile in the community to get a helpful response. I was also told, directly, that the lead developer of Myth considered it to be a personal project, and if someone else got use out of it then fine, but not to expect him to go out of his way to help people.

I'm not making a word of this up. Maybe the situation has changed, maybe not. But I'm a very happy SageTV user, and don't see much reason to switch.

Regarding the article itself, can you guys please label it clearly as the biased boosterism that it is? It is nowhere near an objective review, and the "detailed comparison" table is an absolute joke. What, exactly, was the point of throwing up the logos of SageTV and others, without any discussion or comparison whatsoever? This isn't journalism, it's blatant promotion, and should be clearly labelled as such.

That was one of the most incomplete and one-sided articles I have ever read. None of the common problems are listed and there isn't any comparison to other products that goes beyond lip service.

Would you like to record HD pay channels from your cable or dish provider? I'd like to be able to switch back and forth between HD pro football games from my dish provider on Sundays while recording both. Try doing that with your Myth TV box for less. Try doing that without spending 30 hours on getting everything setup. If 30 hours sounds reasonable to you, you don't value your time enough.

Bo

unless the football games you are referencing are available in Free To Air satellite, I believe there is currently now way to accomplish HDTV recording in North America with a HTPC to my knowledge. The reason, is that unless things have changed, the North American cable/satellite companies will not release their encryption information to video card manufacturers, so those video cards are incapable of descrambling the signals. If what you are looking for is in Free to Air, the article does describe being able to support multiple video cards for input and recording at the same time, and therefore my guess would be that is supported.

I believe I have read this is not the case in Europe, where you can directly use a video card for decoding incoming television signals, because those television companies cooperate with video card manufacturers.

We have to keep in mind, that right in there it states this will be a multi-part article, so of course the first one will be incomplete. However, I have the impression that follow-up articles may not go into detail of comparisons with equivalent products, that is a good point.

Have you tried any of the Linux distributions that have MythTV Suite all ready built such as MythDora (Fedora based www.g-ding.tv) and KnoppMyth (Knoppix based)?

I had MythDora up and running in a couple hours.

You are correct in that there is no way to record satellite or cable HD channels using a computer. There are no HDTV capture cards available in the NTSC standard. There are HDTV tuner cards, which can be used to record OTA (over the air) HD signals. So if your local TV station also broadcasts in HD (uncommon) you can record that. But as far as I know no one has been able to record HDTV off of satellite or cable.

Now, I run one of these boxes in one of the most self-configuration required environments there is (Gentoo + MythTV). And I'm a linux noob. But I got it to work. Maybe some people just have an aptitude for it, maybe I have widely used hardware, I don't know. But I love it, it does everything I want and runs on a PC that I spent a total of about $250 on (since I had some parts laying around already). It does all the things a good DVR should do: record, cut commercials, transcode to smaller files, built in TV guide. That much was good enough for me.

But now I can play music (samba over some files from your windows box and you're done) through my surround sound, rips CDs (VERY slowly), plays DVDs with or without menus (if you use xine or mplayer, respectively), rips DVDs, get local weather, play games, and I'm sure there's more. All from one box. That's what I think makes it worth the work to get it going.

I tried no fewer than 4 packages, including KnoppMyth, as well as 3 "home brew" installs. None of them ever worked correctly with all the hardware. I spent 2 months on the project, lost a LOT of weekends, and finally installed SageTV in an afternoon and have been running great since.

"Up and running" is vague. I had it "up and running" numerous times, just never running right, with the right options and the right features and the right hardware support. I could easilly put together a basic box to just be a DVR, but add in the raid controller, client systems, SAMBA support, etc., etc., that I needed and you end up fighting a nightmare.

I have tried several packages, myth, knoppmyth, sage, beyondtv, gb-pvr.

The bottom line, though, is that the Linux solutions required a great deal of Linux expertise to get the hardware working, while the Windows solutions generally worked out of the box.

ATI has developed an HDTV capture card with built in cablecard, but due to licensing and other legal stuff, it might only work with Vista, and even then might only work with Vista's built in software.

It is sometimes hard to justify the DIY DVR's, especially when sattelite and cable companies offer full featured devices without the headaches, but I just remind myself that a Texas court did order a cable company to disable ALL their DVR's. The order was later postponed, but that doesn't change the fact that any commercial DVR is at the whim of litigation.

I saw that a open source project MediaPortal was not even mentioned. Why not? Yes it is beta but has many followers and the features are growing and you can build it yourself with support for many TV tuner cards plus it works on Windows, not Linux, so don't ask.

So take a look at the home page of MediaPortal and look around and maybe even download the latest version to try it out. If you have problems then jump on the forum to ask for help or provide suggestions how to make it better. I think this project has more ears listening and developers working to turn suggestions into reality than any other similar platform.

Mike Zemina

This article reads like a press release for MythTV. I seem to remember tomshardware.com once being much more objective, critical, and thorough.

I have been kicking around various spare-hardware PVR systems for quite awhile and I remember several months ago being really excited to see that Tom's was doing an article on building your own Media Center PC....and then the article was nothing (not as bad as this one, which is more like an advertisement, but lame)...no explanation at all about the hardware choices (beyond 'this extremely expensive graphics card ought to do nicely'...nothing about what one might experience with a graphics card one or two steps down from the choice, etc..) very little on the software (like they read the back of the box on them and said 'so we chose Windows MCE').

What happened? Was I just spoiled by their awesome processor comparison charts and they always wrote weeks and weeks of spamacious fluff?

PS - I take it back if the next three parts contain exhaustive comparitive testing of all available software options with dozens of hardware configurations, charts, etc.....and then MythTV comes out on top in all categories (explaining part one).

I got hooked on myHTPC w/GotTV and have since bounced around between Meedio, GotAllMedia, MediaPortal, gbpvr, finally sucking it up and buying MCE2005. None do everything I want them to. I'd like to see a more in-depth current Ubuntu+current MythTV install with networked clients from a site of this technical calibur (which I would classify somewhere between a noob and a guru) to see how it stacks against all the Windows apps I've tried.

Here's what I want my HTPC to do.
1. Remote Control based GUI.
2. Media front end with some sort of cataloging system.
3. Hardware based TV tuner functionality.
4. Timeshift SD.
5. Timeshift OTA HD.
6. Support for unlimited number of simultaneous tuners.
7. MAME/console emulator front end.
8. Some sort of extender functionality.
9. Widgets like weather and Caller ID.
10. Stable!

gbpvr was very close, and a wonderful free app. I do not want to manage a bunch of client PCs, and the MediaMVP is just too limited. Despite its limitations and requirements, once MCE2005 timeshifted a live HD show on the Xbox360, I was sold.

I hope they compare it with GB-PVR!!!! It runs on windows. Why spend crap loads of time getting Linux running correctly with your hardware and then configure MythTV to run correctly.

GB-PVR can do tons of things. I would like to spend my time setting up the PVR software then having to spend so much time setting up the OS.

Hope they compare it to GB-PVR!

http://www.gbpvr.com/pmwiki/
http://www.denguru.com/2006/04/25/ [...] ith_gbpvr/

My 2 Cents....

My example using pro football earlier could have been stated in an easier way.

I think software of this nature will be able to compete with products like Tivo when it allows recording of HD HBO, ESPN and everything else out there. The missing link in every article of this nature I have seen is that they neglect to mention that HUGE shortcoming of not being able to record from premium channels. Some of us also want to record HD versions of Deadwood, Dead Like Me, Weeds, NFL Football (only available from DirecTV), etc., etc.

The ATI cablecard device is reportedly aweful. The FCC should step in and require the sat companies to standardize on an equivalent to the cable card so that software like this becomes viable to the masses and intelligent solution in a box devices can be created by anyone.

This whole bit about MythTV allowing music to be used over the surround system is just dumb. What can't do that? If you install any OS you can add that feature. My XBOX360 caan do it. Is there an OS you can't find a player for?

Knoppmyth rocks, if you want to try out mythtv I would recommend using this distro. http://mysettopbox.tv

I enjoyed the article.
I am already trying to install myth on MEPIS 6.

Look forward to the next part of the article.