Review: MythTV 0.19 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 8, 2006 0:09 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Not that I don't watch tv on a tv set time to time, but 'my' tv set is gone (as opposed to the household's tv set).

For the times I want to watch television I just watch on my desktop or laptop.

It's not realy obvious but it's possible to run Mythtv in non-fullscreen mode. You have to go into the configurations and enable 'window' mode and then when you start up you have to go mythfrontend --geometry 640x480 or whatever size you want.

Unfortunately I can't resize the window yet, but that's not a big deal.

For the 50 bucks on a WinPVR-150 video capture card, or if you want to spend more money you can get a USB2 based Plextor ConvertX PVR (models PX-M402U and PX-TV402U)

The advantage of these cards is that they both do hardware encoding and are pretty much fully supported by Mythtv and Free software drivers.

The nice thing about the ConvertX is that:
A. The manufacturer released GPL'd drivers themselves (rather then reverse engineered drivers with the Happauge WinPVR stuff)
B. It encodes in mpeg4 (divx-style) format which allows for much smaller files then normal mpeg2 encoding cards.
C. It's USB2 based so that you can use it on laptops or without openning your case and it's easier to use multiple ones.

The nice thing about the PVR-150 is that it's much more inexpensive.

Also there are 250 and 350 pvr models that offer different features (such as cable out)

Also don't forget the Designed-specificly-for-Linux http://www.pchdtv.com/ pchdtv card. No windows drivers for that bad boy. The new version also has the ability to do most HDTV-over-cable stuff now as well as terrestrial broadcasts, as long as it is unencrypted.

For Europeans there are all sorts of DVB cards that you can use with Linux, but I am not familar with them.

The nice thing about Mythtv over something like Windows Media center is that it requires much less resources, doesn't impliment DRM, and is much more flexible. It is able to handle many different sorts of inputs at a time (cable versus traditional tv broadcast for instance) can opperate many different backends with multiple capture cards and can have many multiple frontends.

I use both my desktop and laptop with mythtv. It works fine over 802.11g networks...

Fun stuff.