Freevo vs. MythTV

[Jarod Wilson]

On Sunday 03 June 2007 21:52:08 Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> A decent comparison from 2005 -- may be a little out of date.  Jarod
> can probably tell you what it irrelevant now...
> http://www.labowicz.com/blog/freevo_vs_mythtv.php

IMO, nearly all of it is irrelevant.

From that page, with my comments intertwined:

MythTV
    * Can pause/rewind live tv

True.

    * Requires QT/X, why do you need to run an X server on your TV?

Because Xv and XvMC video acceleration are a Good Thing, especially once you 
start doing HDTV. Oh, and this statement is also simply wrong. You can use QT 
embedded and run in framebuffer mode sans-X with MythTV too.

    * Requires MySQL

True.

    * Has a built in tv/audio/video player (codecs can be troublesome)

Have to strongly disagree about the codecs thing, even with a 2-years-back 
perspective. Myth can play back everything it records just fine, and external 
video sources most of the time as well. Just like with freevo, you can set up 
mplayer or xine as your video player for stuff imported from elsewhere into 
your video library.

    * No plugins for SNES/Genesis/NES emulators

This guy has no clue what he's talking about. MythGame has definitely 
supported SNES and NES going back at least three or four years. Not sure how 
far back Genesis support goes, but that definitely works today. Along with 
N64, Playstation, Atari, C64, etc., etc., etc. support.

    * Packages are hard to find for some distros, a compile from source is 
recommended

Perhaps for some of the less popular distros, but all the big dogs have 
packages readily available. His experience may be more specific to Debian, 
which was in a bit of flux around that time, as mdz *was* maintaining mythtv 
packages for Debian until he started working for Canonical.


Freevo

    * Can run off the framebuffer, you can run it in X if you want to

Obviously, didn't do his homework, since MythTV can do exactly the same.

    * Uses SQLite (less resource intensive than MySQL)

The MythTV devs took a look at sqlite and found the performance to be pretty 
crappy when it came to handling large tv schedules and scheduling with 
multiple tuners. Also makes having multiple backends that operate in concert 
much more difficult.

    * Uses Mplayer or TvTime for video playback

MythTV uses its internal player for tv playback (I assume this was supposed to 
be 'tv' instead of 'video'). It actually uses a lot of the same libs as 
mplayer, and stays reasonably in-sync with upstream ffmpeg/libavcodec.

    * Uses Mplayer or Xine for video playback

MythTV can do the exact same thing.

    * Uses Mplayer or XMMS for audio playback

MythTV uses an internal player (though I'll admit the internal player isn't 
that great -- I highly prefer iTunes)...

    * Has many more plugins including most game emulators

Not sure if he's just saying that freevo has many more plugins available, or 
that it has many more plugins than MythTV... But MythTV can handle all the 
game emulators too, and has quite a few plugins itself.

    * Cannot pause/rewind live tv

Lame. :)

One other thing I don't see mentioned: commercial auto-detection and 
auto-skip. Works fabulously in MythTV and is one of the big reasons I really 
like MythTV. I'm guessing this doesn't exist in Freevo, since its just 
mplayer or tvtime doing the tv playback.

    * Written in Python, easy to modify if you need to

Of course, Python isn't exactly known for high-performance. Oh, but wait, it 
relies entirely on mplayer or tvtime for most of the heavy lifting... :)

    * Packages are easy to get off the Freevo main site for most distros

Gross over-simplification here. The packages are mostly useless without 
mplayer/tvtime/xine, so you'd better make sure your distro has those 
available somewhere too.

[skipping the Both section, nothing interesting there]

"n general Freevo is easier to install, and easier to configure. I also think 
there is more momentum behind Freevo, more development is going into it."

I think he thinks wrong.

"Finally, I like how Freevo is designed... it's structured using the UNIX 
design principles of creating something bigger our of various small parts. 
MythTV is more monolithic, which makes it harder to troubleshoot and adapt to 
your needs."

Not sure whether I agree or not with the part about monolithic being harder to 
troubleshoot. I think its six of one, half dozen of the other. As for more 
adaptable... Does freevo have a client/server model that lets me have a 
master backend system hidden away doing all the recording, and multiple 
frontends all accessing the same backend to play back recordings? Honestly, I 
haven't touched freevo in probably 4 years, but I'd be rather surprised if it 
was more flexible than MythTV...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org

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