why you should try MythTv

[Tim.Keller at stratus.com (Keller, Tim)]

The thing with a Myth box is that you >really< want to use a hardware
encoder/decoder.  That's how a TiVo can get away with having such mediocre
hardware inside.

I read that Cringely story and I found it cool, but Cringely didn't go into
the details for some very good reasons. If you sit down and make a list of
the stuff this guy would need to run his setup, I came up with about 3 full
height racks full of equipment.  Not to mention the 3 meter C-band dish in
his backyard and whatever other antennae's you'd need for all the wireless
networking gear.  The other side of this equation is all of the support that
this setup would need, not to mention the customer support.

Tim.
"Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6
fire damage"

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Pollak [mailto:pardsbane at offthehill.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 10:50 AM
To: miah
Cc: discuss at blu.org
Subject: Re: why you should try MythTv



On Oct 6, 2004, at 10:42 AM, miah wrote:

> They did, its called KnoppMyth
>
> http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html

Tried that. Its ok I suppose.

> As for hardware
> http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1

Yeah, I've poured over that. Its not nearly specific enough. The 
discussion on video cards has only passing mention of overscan 
abilities on the NVidia drivers. That could be a lot clearer.

> And LIRC has a list of compatible hardware on their page.  If you're
> using something else, sure you'll be playing for a while.

Yeah, I've got an ATI All-In-Wonder RF remote... I could get it talking 
with LIRC, and got MythTV working too, but even so, the controls were 
not very clear. Also, I frankly like having the nice simple TiVo 
remote, as opposed to having to mentally map the buttons myself.

Also, I just found MythTV too unstable (on my Gentoo box). It wouldn't 
update overnight, it was slow, whatever. Perhaps I was using hardware 
that wasn't powerful enough, but it seemed pretty powerful to me. But 
again, MythTV promises to let you build a TiVo-like device yourself, 
and one of the points of that to me would be that it should be cheaper 
than a TiVo itself. My hardware costs alone were more than the TiVo + 
life-time subscription. Over time as PCs get cheaper, I'm sure the cost 
might make Myth more attractive.

-Josh
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