[Discuss] Is MythTV dead?

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 09/12/2011 03:11 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 02:27:48PM -0400, Rich Braun wrote:
>> In order to have a user-friendly front end, it has to be able to pull online
>> content from a variety of sources (Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, plus whatever else
>> got invented in the past 15 minutes) and convert it into a unified look and
>> feel to match the familar PVR and DVD/BluRay content that most people have. 
>> The back-end should be set up to bookmark and archive anything you might want
>> later, without making its presence particularly apparent except when it wants
>> you to add more storage.  (And I'd actually like to be able to have 2 or more
>> back-end machines with complete fail-over capability, perhaps even set up as a
>> shared grid between multiple people's homes.)
>>
>> Suppose I wanted to go off and write such a thing from the ground up.  What
>> would stand in the way of creating a new open-source project to accomplish
>> exactly that?
> 
> Hulu and Netflix put encryption in your way; Youtube has terms
> of service. DVD is solved, but Blu-Ray isn't, really.

DMCA is something you'd need to be careful about.  Not a showstopper
(there are fair use exceptions that cover making backup copies of your
own media), but when it comes to local storage of Hulu/Netflix it's less
clear that you can legally break the encryption like you can for DVDs
(even if it were as technically easy as DVD encryption).

But beyond encryption, distributing the video codecs isn't legal if
you're in the US (unless you have an appropriate license from MPEG-LA).
 Practically speaking everyone today says "getting ffmpeg on your system
is your problem", and goes from there.  I wasn't sure how 'turn-key' you
intended your solution to be...

Matt