My experience with my MythTV high-definition video recorder

[Posted on alt.tv.tech.hdtv, alt.video.ptv.mythtv, and mythtv-users to
serve as a comprehensive introduction to the benefits of MythTV for
those who aren't familiar with it.]

There is a certain MythTV user and Usenet poster whose abrasive tone
has not won him many fans. Howver, he has a point when he says that
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 who aren't this aforementioned
poster, 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:
* URL:http://wiki.mythtv.org/ and
URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/ (The two
largest repositories of MythTV knowledge.)
* URL:http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ (The terrific installation guide I
used.)
* URL:http://mythic.tv/dragon_FAQ.php (A well-regarded MythTV
reference design for those who want to either buy it off the shelf
from the company or built it themselves. I'm neither a customer nor
an employee; all I did for my own setup was buy a Sony Pentium 4
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 for buying at once all the parts except
the NAS. See
URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/176328#176328
for more on this topic.)

[1] Home Theater Master MX-500 universal remote
(URL:http://www.remotecentral.com/mx500/index.html). I programmed it
using a $30 infrared keyboard/mouse combo
(URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/170450#170450).

[2] MythTV does an *excellent* job of deinterlacing 1080i recordings
into 1080p for those displays that can handle it.

[3] Westinghouse LVM-47W1. Under $2500 from Crutchfield for 1080p
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 NAS with four 500GB drives.

[5] In addition to an ATSC capture card and an indoor antenna (which I
can't do better than given than I live in a high-rise apartment), my
3.0GHz Pentium 4 MythTV box has two high-definition Motorola cable
boxes connected to it. Unfortunately, my cable provider is one of the
few that permits access to all subscribed channels, unencrypted or
not, through FireWire; 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, 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, 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 mythbckend and mythfrontend 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 available for perusal at
URL:http://mythtv.fotoniq.nl/ and
URL:http://www.aldorf.no/mythtv/.

[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 (avoid skips in the replay) it's best to do so when
only one or two simultaneously recordings are occurring.

--
URL:http://www.pobox.com/~ylee/ PERTH ---- *

Homemade 2.8TB RAID 5 storage array:
URL:http://groups.google.ca/groups?selm=slrnd1g04a.5mt.ylee%40pobox.com

On Sun, 06 Aug 2006 08:03:15 +0000, Yeechang Lee wrote:

There is a certain MythTV user and Usenet poster whose abrasive tone
has not won him many fans. Howver, he has a point when he says that
MythTV works, and works well,

I assume you're talking about me. :-)
For the record. I don't try to be abrasive. I just like to keep it short
and to the point and I don't take crap from anyone. Especially the
lying idiots in the Tivo group.

--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html Usenet alt.video.ptv.mythtv
My server http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php
HD Tivo S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm

"Yeechang Lee" wrote in message
...
[Posted on alt.tv.tech.hdtv, alt.video.ptv.mythtv, and mythtv-users to
serve as a comprehensive introduction to the benefits of MythTV for
those who aren't familiar with it.]


DISCLAIMER: I am new at this and the following may be incorrect.
As I understand it, if most of your favorite shows are on cable HDTV
channels that aren't locally broadcast, you are limited in what you can
record, unless you stay home to change the channel on your cable box
whenever a show you want to record comes on.

Even if your favorites are on locally broadcast stations, they might not
come through well enough on straight cable (bypassing the cable box) for you
to record them unless you get an antenna... if you live close enough to the
broadcast source to receive HDTV on antenna, that is.

Adam Corolla wrote:
DISCLAIMER: I am new at this and the following may be incorrect.
As I understand it, if most of your favorite shows are on cable HDTV
channels that aren't locally broadcast, you are limited in what you can
record,

As I wrote in the post you responded to:

Unfortunately, my cable provider is one of the few that permits
access to all subscribed channels, unencrypted or not, through
FireWire; 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.

unless you stay home to change the channel on your cable box
whenever a show you want to record comes on.

This is a completely unrelated issue, and one that has been long
sinced solved. If the cable box connects to the computer with
FireWire, channel changes go over FireWire. If the box connects to the
computer through analog capture cards, inexpensive IR blasters
(similar to the ones that come with every TiVo) will handle the
channel changing on the box.

Even if your favorites are on locally broadcast stations, they might
not come through well enough on straight cable (bypassing the cable
box)

You're talking about receving unencrypted over-the-air channels on a
TV with QAM tuner functionality without the cable box.

for you to record them unless you get an antenna... if you live
close enough to the broadcast source to receive HDTV on antenna,
that is.

Now you're talking about receiving over-the-air channels (which are
all unencrypted) on a TV with ATSC tuner functionality plus a UHF
antenna.

There are high-definition capture (*not* encoder[1]) cards that can do
one or both of these things; i.e., act as the equivalent to the TV
with QAM or ATSC functionality and capture the HD streams from cable
or antenna. They simply write the data onto disk instead of
immediately displaying it. Such cards, just like TVs with QAM tuners,
can only display unencrypted cable channels.

Me? My flat panel doesn't come with a tuner of any kind; everything is
done through the cable boxes/ATSC capture card and the computer they
are connected to. The latter, in turn, connects to the panel.

[1] This is because all these cards need to do is write the MPEG-2
data streams onto disk. They don't need to do any of the heavy lifting
that is turning analog video and audio into digital data. In other
words, it's *easier* for a computer to record HD broadcasts than it
is to record non-HD broadcasts.

--
URL:http://www.pobox.com/~ylee/ PERTH ---- *

Homemade 2.8TB RAID 5 storage array:
URL:http://groups.google.ca/groups?selm=slrnd1g04a.5mt.ylee%40pobox.com