MythTV 0.19 Released

slummy writes "After much anticipation, MythTV 0.19 has been released. The release notes outline the new features and bug fixes, and the official announcement for this release is available on the MythTV site." From the release notes: "The major changes in this release [include]: LiveTV rewritten to support saving buffered content while watching. Signal Monitoring for DVB and pcHDTV recorders. Ending times may be changed while recordings are in progress. Playgroups allow for default playback options on recordings. Channel changes can be made across tuners without changing tuners manually first. New popup keyboard simplifies setup using remote. Preview schedule changes when making adjustments to recording schedules. Added ability to control MythFrontend through a telnet socket."

Ubuntu Breezy packages

[Plug]

Ubuntu Breezy packages for MythTV can be found at http://deb.thehunter.ws/ [thehunter.ws]. Huge thanks to those Drunken Caffeinated Monkeys.

Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[TechyImmigrant]

MythTV is a bitch to configure.

I have to lspci, then spend weeks messing around with mythtv-config and mythfrontend to try and get it to receive TV. I've done this with three different cards, all of which are supposed to work with MythTV and still the dumb program fails to be able to do the most basic things, such as let me change channel, or use more than one card at a time, or be able to use an NTSC/ATSC card in anything other than NTSC mode.

It's not like I'm uneducated in these things. I was a principle engineer on a DVB set top box in the past. I do have a clue. However MythTV takes all that is obvious about television and renders it obscure and crash prone.

The thing they need to fix is autoconfigure code that scans for TV cards, asks you some basic questions (OTA/Cable/SAT? What country are you in?) and works out the rest, scanning for available NTSC/ATSC/DVB-T/DVB-S/DVB-C/DVB-H, logging them, mapping them against known channels (all available from the feds in the US and public sources in other countries).

My TV gets by without knowing what channels are being sent. It just finds them. MythTV should be able to work out of the box in the same way.

It would be nice if it could actually watch or import DVDs, like it claims it can. WatchDVD drops out after the first intro section, playing only 1 section. Import DVD does nothing. Yes I did install the CSS library. It did not help.

MythTV needs a configuration and functionality fix before they address minor UI issues.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problem getting it configured to run with my WinTV PVR USB2 device which is not supposed to run with it at all. I can watch and decode DVD without a problem. I am not *uber* geek like most people claim to be on this site. However, with Jarrod's howto and Fedora 4 I was able to get this up and running in less then a half day. I used to be a die hard TIVO fanatic but now I don't know how I got by without MythTV plus now I have a reason to have a Fedora server at home that I can add stuff to it.

I just trialed BeyondTV and SageTV on a Windows box and all I had was problems getting that to work on the most supported OS on the planet! BTV and STV just kept crashing out on me, but right now my Fedora MythTV box has been running for 48+ hours without a need for me to reboot.

Installing MythTV is a breeze just follow Jarod's howto. Heck, I even build 0.19 from source but I want to wait for ATRPMs to update just in case I'm missing something.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[atrus]

Right and wrong. The capture card does not contribute significantly to the delay (there IS a delay though, but its on the order of ms, not seconds). The biggest delay is the recording spooling, which allows you to pause and rewind live TV. The encoder runs a few seconds ahead of the decoder/display to prevent any glitches. You'll see this in any PVR device. This is pretty much unuseable for games of course.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[NormalVisual]

No, actually he's not. I see the same behavior on my v18.1 system with a PVR-250 and PVR-350. The delay exists because the "live TV" signal that's displayed on the screen is actually played from the buffered data, and it takes a short period of time for the system to buffer enough data before it displays it. The same delay is seen during channel changes. In my particular case, it's about two seconds.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[rtos]

MythTV is a bitch to configure.

Actually, I found that MythTV itself was rather easy to configure. What was hard was all of the subsystems required by MythTV.

For example, on a fresh Gentoo install, I have to get audio working (ALSA or OSS), and then video (Xorg, nvidia drivers, tv-out, etc.) and then get the capture/tuner card working (bttv, ivtv, etc.). And get them all working nicely together...

Once I had all that done, MythTV was a snap to configure and have up and running.

From experience I've found that when building a new MythTV, it's best to test/debug each subsystem as you go along.... most times the problem you are having has nothing to do with "MythTV" per se.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[RelaxedTension]

It does a bunch of things, not all unique:
- Split frontend/backend to spread the load around. Multiple backends can be slaved together for a lot of recording cards and storage, and lighter frontend-only machines can be used just for viewing. Or do both on one machine.
- Tivo-like recording tools, live tv pause/rewind, and commercial skip
- Play and rip DVD's, play video files (avi, mpg, wmv, etc)
- Play CD's and online music in various formats, as well as rip music to various formats
- Obligatory picture viewer
- Basic web interface
- Weather info
- Game interface for mame, snes, Linux games, etc.
- RSS news interface
- SIP compatible phone setup
- Extensible plugin architecture
- Web interface to most of the functionality

The plugin/addon part is where the fun is. A variety of people write stuff for it, like streaming recordings to a web browser, recipe lookups, etc. I realize there is a lot of etc.'s in this post, but that's the bestway to describe a lot of it, there is a lot more detail and variety available.

A lot of of people bitch about the setup, but using the right hardware and a good guide like Jarod's for Fedora Core makes it quite easy. And if you enjoy tweaking or full-on code and feature changing, then that is available as well since it's open source.

Nope, you are the one who is wrong

[Andy Dodd]

Capture cards with onboard MPEG encoders (the kinds you *want* to be using with MythTV) have a 1-2 second delay inherent in their operation. They are completely unsuitable for most games out there, except for possibly puzzle games where reaction times mean nothing.

Yes, "dumb" capture cards are fine for games and I use an old BT848-based card with my Xbox, but such capture cards are not a wise choice for anyone serious about reliable TV recording, since they require large amounts of CPU on the encoder box.

Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure

[nmos]

You really should consider reading the setup guide. If you were running incompatable hardware then I could see how it would be difficult but otherwise it's really pretty easy. In short, if it's taking you weeks with supported hardware then you really need to stop thinking you already know it all and try just following the instructions.

MythTV *IN THEORY*

[Andy Dodd]

Define "full rate ADSL"

Most likely your upstream rate is still not nearly high enough to stream video at a decent quality reliably.

MPEG-2 from a hardware encoder card at good quality will be 5-8 Mbits/sec. Transcoding to MPEG4 at good quality will take it down to around 1 Mbit/sec, which is still faster than 90% of the DSL upstream connections I've seen. Even with 1.5 mbit DSL, overhead means you're going to be pushing the limits of your connection.

For streaming internally within a LAN, Myth does EXTREMELY well. I routinely stream MPEG2 recordings over an 802.11g connection. (11b will not work for MPEG2 stuff, it will work for transcoded MPEG4.)

Re:Windows?

[ImaLamer]

A good alternative for Windows systems is GB-PVR:

http://www.gbpvr.com/ [gbpvr.com]

It is free, as in beer, and runs great on XP, 2000 and even Media Center (2004 & 2005). I've been using it on a Windows 2000 system with great success (the mainboard sucks and most features aren't supported in Linux, damn HP!). The PC has a 900 Mhz Celeron, 192 MB of RAM and the WinTV-PVR 500 (dual tuner) - works great, I watch a show while it records two with no problems.

MythTV 0.19 is better than the Release Notes

[zzxc]

This release includes a lot of enhancements, even though it doesn't look like it from first glance at the release notes. MythTV 0.19 can save cut commercials from MPEG2 video streams without transcoding. This saves you disk space. It also has many bugs fixed, resulting in better compatibility with video hardware. (some framegrabbers that wouldn't work before work now) Now, when you watch live TV, shows are automatically recorded. If you want to keep (rather than have them expire) them after you are done watching them, you can do so in the "watch recordings" menu.

MythWeb has been greatly improved, allowing you to better control MythTV from a web browser. The frontend can now even be controlled from a telnet socket. Overall, you won't be disappointed. (0.19 is so much better than 0.18.1 that I've been using the SVN snapshots of the development code)

MythTV as a Separate Head

[Schlaegel]

I have MythTV running in the background of my primary system. Using the hardware accelerated encode/decode/tvout of the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 350 I can watch, pause, ff, and rw live and recorded television with little impact upon my system (doesn't even register in system monitor or top). I use a separate instance of the Xserver only displays on of the tvout of the 350 and only receives input from the remote of 350.

Before I took the plunge and set up MythTV the process confused me. There is so much talk of a MythTV frontend system and a backend system, that I was unsure if it was possible to run both parts of MythTV on the same system. I found that with a hardware accelerated card, both the frontend and the backend can be run in the background with little impact upon anything else. I do wish it didn't require MySql to save on ram usage.

Now I do write, email, program, and browse on my system on the primary head, while my wife skips commercials on the television using the remote! Don't be afraid to try it, my system isn't a speed daemon and isn't even in the same room as my television. I just connect the system and television with some long high quality coax.

Thank you MythTV developers!

My MythTV experience: Great, but . . .

[Yeechang Lee]

I've been running MythTV for about two months, and have previously posted [slashdot.org] on my experience. I've been 100% Unix at home for ten years last month and my MythTV box is one of three Linux boxes plus one OS X box at home.

My experience with MythTV is can be summed up in the statement "It's great, but . . ."

Great:
* Support for recording and playing back HDTV broadcast feeds from FireWire (cable box) and MPEG-2 capture card (over-the-air) sources.

But . . .
* FireWire input is generally reliable, but nodes sometimes mysteriously and unpredictably move around based on when and how the cable box, mythbackend daemon, and the MythTV box get started and restarted. (I don't think this is a MythTV problem, but more to do with the current state of the Linux FireWire libraries plus some unreliability on the part of the very common Motorola DCT-6200.)
* MythTV's current state of over-the-air channel detection and setup is so, so horribly bad as to be nearly unusable. It's still not completely clear to me how the combination of Zap2It's program data and mythtv-setup's transport scanning are to work together. Anyone setting up over-the-air reception is going to run into the utterly baffling "missing PIDs" issue. Despite this I previously had, after enormous amounts of grief and multiple tries, three over-the-air HDTV channels working and working well; then all of a sudden one stopped working despite signal locks and an unchanged antenna orientation. Right now, with a rebuilt box, I only have one channel working right.

Great:
* Very, very nice user interface (I really like the Retro theme and Isthmus OSD) with tons of great features.

But . . .
* Holes in the most obvious places. For example, I have two HDTV cable boxes and the aforementioned over-the-air capture card. Let's say cable box #1 can't be used at the moment because fo the aforementioned wandering-node issue or because the preset channel is not broadcasting due to an outage. There's no way to, in Live TV mode, skip that tuner and go on to the others; instead, mythfrontend bounces me right back to the menu (if it doesn't crash completely). If the over-the-air card can't lock into the channel it's preset to, mythfrontend again bounces me right back to the menu or crashes instead of letting me instead try a channel that is working.

So on and so forth. (By the way, I really dislike the way its fans tend to push KnoppMyth as some kind of all-in-one, turnkey MythTV box-on-a-CD for dummies. It's not, unless you want to call lack of support for SATA drives in the install script and USB keyboards and mice a "feature" (unless things have improved since 5A26), and portraying it this way simply hurts the MythTV cause.)

Don't get me wrong; I still *really* like MythTV, am very happy with what I can do with it and how I've set up my little quasi-home theater setup, and it's quite possible 0.19 has taken care of some of the more glaring issues. But it's labeled 0.19 *for a reason*. Everything I wrote in my previous posting still holds, for better or for worse.

Re:MythTV Usage?

[acid_zebra]

I've been using it for ~ ayear now, it's permanently got around 3 months of recorded TV on it (which gets scanned for commercial breaks, cut up, and then converted to xvid to save space), I use it (of course) to watch live TV (the 'pause' and tv guide functions rule) , it's got all my downloaded movies/series on it (it uses RSS+bittorrent to get new stuff automatically), it's got and plays my MAME and SNES rom collection, it indexes and plays my MP3 collection (from a network share on a different comp).

It also keeps the GF off my back (honey, you can't watch Charmed now (because I'm going to watch $SFSERIES) but I'm recording it for you :)

I don't have/plan on having a video ipod any time soon but as I can turn TV into xvid I can't imagine it'll be very hard to save a copy to ipod format, mencoder and transcode are some of the most powerful video conversion tools I've seen.

Re:p2p tv

[SynapseLapse]

MythTV offers transcoding options to automatically convert the video to xvid/divx after it's finished recording.
So, while it may not be "live" tv, it's pretty easy to setup the machine to record say, The Daily Show, each night, save the file to xvid format, then you just shared the folder on the network and stream away.

1 idea anyway.

Re:DVB Subtitles

[coldcut]

You are correct. ETSI document EN 300 743 describes the subtitle stream specification, which includes both RLE subtitle image data, and actual character codes.

The specification can be found here: http://webapp.etsi.org/action%5COP/OP20021004/en_3 00743v010201o.pdf [etsi.org]