Re: MythTV

On 9/11/06, Luke D <jules.inu@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have been hearing a lot about MythTV lately and I was wondering if it
> was
> as good as they say.
> Has any one set one up and what hardware did they use. And how long did it
> take them to set up.

Ive done one.

Figure out which distro you want to run and make sure the HW you are going
to use is well supported in that distro.

The basic install was quite easy, but getting some of the edges working
right was a big challenge.

I had a box with only 1 serial port which was controlling my sat-TV tuner,
so I needed a USB IR receiver... tried 3 different models all with limited
success, mostly failure, and finally punted and went with an IR keyboard.
The GF is highly pc literate, so a KBD didn't bug her, but when
family/friends come over no one can seem to run the TV.

I am running a medium-high quality rate and use about 2GB/hour (SD). I have
a 250G drive in the system and that is very much too small to hold all my TV
needs.

I was considering going to sage tV under windows so I can do HighDef
recording. Where I live the only HD option is satellite, and right now the
only satellite HD option is R5000-hd.

Also has anyone used it to archive there DVD onto the MythTV so they can
> watch them at any time?

I think some folks answered this backwards. What you are asking about is
ripping, not archiving. The myth dvd ripper is nice. I only use it
occasionally, so I can't make too many comments one way or the other.
 0.20just came out and is supposed to have a substantially enhanced
dvd player
now.

A few of the 'killer' features I love.
Commercial skip. It is so seamless on many shows that others watching it
don't even notice that there was supposed to be a commercial. Also many
shows do a 30 second lead out to commercial setting a 'hook' so that you
won't surf away, with myth you can hit a key and make the jump to the end of
the next break before you hit the start of break. When you come back you can
skip the 30 seconds of show re-cap.

Time scaling: You can watch a show at XX% faster/slower than normal. Audio
is adjusted so the pitch stays normal. With time scale + commercial skips I
can watch football/nascar in about 1/2 of the actual show air time.

I find I watch the same number of hours of tv as I used to, but I see a lot
more shows now.

-j

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Received on Tue Sep 12 02:37:30 2006