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Media Software Linux

MythTV 0.21 Released 68

Posted by kdawson from the i-want-my-i-want-my-i-want-my dept.
kormoc writes "The new release has lots of new stuff, notably: autodiscovery (less manual configuration of new front-ends), storage groups (no need for LVM/etc), support for multiple recordings on one DVB/ATSC multiplex, a couple of new plugins, some new deinterlacing / video display options, and many, many other things. The release notes page in the wiki has the list of what's changed, but it's currently a couple thousand checkins out of date. Grab the release from the download section and please at least try to read the docs before asking questions. The binary packages should hopefully be updated to 0.21 soon."
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MythTV 0.21 Released More

MythTV 0.21 Released

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  • I'm pretty sure that MythTV used to use Zap2It to get their tv listing info, but a while ago we discussed [slashdot.org] that Zap2It was no longer going to provide this service for free. Where is this release pulling the listing data from?

    • Re:TV Listings (Score:4, Informative)

      by shadow42 ( 996367 ) on Saturday March 08, 2008 @09:11PM (#22689706)
      The MythTV box I use at home (version 0.20) is pulling listings data from Schedules Direct [schedulesdirect.org], the service created to replace Zap2it's listings service.

    • Re:TV Listings (Score:5, Informative)

      by The Stranger ( 24022 ) on Saturday March 08, 2008 @09:16PM (#22689714)

      I'm pretty sure that MythTV used to use Zap2It to get their tv listing info, but a while ago we discussed [slashdot.org] that Zap2It was no longer going to provide this service for free. Where is this release pulling the listing data from?
      MythTV can get listing info from various sources, but I think most folks (at least in the USA and Canada) are now using Schedules Direct (http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ [schedulesdirect.org]). Schedules Direct was set up by various folks involved with open source video/television related projects like MythTV in response to the Zap2It free listings shutdown and has reached its goal of getting enough subscribers to hit a price point of $20 per year for listings data (with a 7 day free trial). My experience with the transition was that it was pretty much seamless.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
        If you want continual quality listings, you're probably going to have to pay for it. I got SageTV, and with the $80? I spent, I get free listings, for well, I guess as long as they stick around. I've been using it for like 2 years now, so I guess based on that rate, it would be $40 worth of listings. I think people should be thankful that Zap2it lasted as long as it did. You can't expect some company to just feed you data that they've spent a lot of time gathering for free.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pembo13 ( 770295 )
          If you paid for it, are the listings really free?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by BobPaul ( 710574 ) *
            Not technically, but what he paid for was the SageTV PVR software specifically. Since the listings are tied to SageTV (can't use them with MythTV AFAIK) it's not really something that would interest me, anyhow, but at least it's not an annual subscription like the alternatives.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )
          But you can expect the TV companies to make the listings available for free, so all you really need to do is grab from all the different tv station's listing pages.
          Some services also broadcast listing data with the program stream itself.
          • Yes, but then you have to convince them all to deliver it in the same format, and then contact them when the mess up the format, or forget to deliver their feed. You've obviously never dealt with trying to get a data feed from some company who's main interest isn't sending out data.
        • In the UK, you can either get listings straight from the DVB-T signal, or free (for personal use) from an XML feed served by the Radio Times (a commercial arm of the BBC).
          • "In the UK, you can either get listings straight from the DVB-T signal, or free (for personal use) from an XML feed served by the Radio Times (a commercial arm of the BBC)."

            That's way different, though. In the UK, you've already paid for that data from your TV's taxation. That's the same reason that non-UK IP addresses can't access new TV content on the BBC's website --non-UK citizens can't get free programming because we didn't pay our tax to the BBC.
          • Are those listings available for all 70 channels you get on analog cable?
      • Ok, let me see if I understand this right. . .

        People were upset that Zap2It wasn't giving free listings (and they'd rather not pay for the pay service), so they setup another *pay* service as an alternative? Why not just pay for Zap2It? Were they asking for an outrageous fee for the listings?

        I mean, I could see it being reasonable to pay a small monthly fee for listings - I mean, it's gotta cost some money to assemble the listing data, and then the cost of running servers and Internet connections to publish

        • Re:I'm confused about something. . . (Score:4, Informative)

          by digdogger ( 460799 ) on Saturday March 08, 2008 @11:21PM (#22690258)
          The problem with Zap2It labs was that there was no pay service (and they apparently weren't interested in providing one). Their main beef was the many commercial products that were using the service.

        • Re:I'm confused about something. . . (Score:5, Informative)

          by grommit ( 97148 ) on Saturday March 08, 2008 @11:55PM (#22690424)
          Because Zap2It wasn't offering a pay service for individuals anymore. Zap2It doesn't have the infrastructure in place to accept payments from thousands of individual people. They are built around accepting large payments from dozens of companies for those companies to use. Zap2It got tired of individuals taking advantage of their free service and they didn't want to bother with setting up a pay system for individuals so Schedules Direct was created to fill in the gap.
          • That's incorrect from what I heard. Zap2It got tired of companies using their info without paying for it and thus had to shut down their free service.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by jack455 ( 748443 )
            I was on their mailinglist and they mostly complained about companies, but there were some references to people using multiple machines with the same key I think. It probably would've helped if users had voluntarily limited the number of updates they requested. I miss the service, but am thankful they were as accommodating as they were for so long. I still use zap2it.com for web based tv listings, but I don't scrape their site for the data.
    • Simple scripting... http://zap2xml.110mb.com/ [110mb.com]

      • Screen scraping, which is what this is, may be against the site's policy, and might be illegal.

        Besides, this solution generally requires high maintenance as small formatting changes tend to de-rail the scripts.

        I was not using MythTV in the pre-Zap2it screen scraping days, but I understand that it was a veritable nightmare of script maintenance

        $20 per year is difficult after it being free for so long, but in my opinion, it is well worth it.

        Beny
  • I have a Myth TV machine using a SAA7134 (MSI TV Anywhere Plus) TV Tuner card, and although this card worked fine in TVTime, and mencoder/mplayer, I had horrible problems with automute in MythTV and I am wondering if this bug has been fixed. I can manually turn off the mute in the saa7134 Mixer, but really, it made me feel ripped off by the guy who sold it to me promising me "This model works in Linux" Well he was telling the truth.

    • Re:Bug Fixed in the SAA7134? (Score:4, Informative)

      by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Saturday March 08, 2008 @09:36PM (#22689798) Homepage Journal
      "I have a Myth TV machine using a SAA7134 (MSI TV Anywhere Plus) TV Tuner card, and although this card worked fine in TVTime, and mencoder/mplayer, I had horrible problems with automute in MythTV and I am wondering if this bug has been fixed. I can manually turn off the mute in the saa7134 Mixer, but really, it made me feel ripped off by the guy who sold it to me promising me "This model works in Linux" Well he was telling the truth."

      I'd say it is best to go with the Haupauge (sp?) cards that are proven winners with MythTV...cheap and you can slap multiple ones in there to record/watch on different channels at the same time. That and they have hardware decoding/encoding which allows you to run slightly less powerful processors on the box itself....

      • Re:Bug Fixed in the SAA7134? (Score:4, Informative)

        by jerkychew ( 80913 ) on Saturday March 08, 2008 @10:34PM (#22690070) Homepage
        Or if you have a cable box with firewire ports you can jack directly into it. 0.21 has huge fixes for firewire.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jo42 ( 227475 )
          The assumption being, of course, that the cable box has a firewire port and that it actually works.
          • ... and isn't disabled by the provider, like most are.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
              Comment removed based on user account deletion
              • Well, they have that option for any broadcast channels available locally OTA. For any other content, they may discover the provider has enabled encryption, at which point firewire is no better than an ATSC tuner.
      • I'd love to set up a myth box, but every time I try to find out what tuner cards are available and work, I get a huge mess of conflicting opinions, long dead forums and disappeared sites. Can you possibly point to a current list of known working hardware? Cheers.
      • It's a shame if Hauppauge cards are the best out there. I've been using them for the last 7 years or so. Picture quality has been horrible compared to my walmart generic TV. Although it's not relevant if you use Myth, the included software is pretty bad too, and I had to switch to MS media center handling all the recording (which does an awesome job, btw).

        If you have media center on XP, I would highly recommend using it. The channel guide is downloaded for free. Handling of showtime conflicts, lack of
    • I'm pretty sure this will fix your problem. I had a similar problem with some KWorld BT878 cards and after I updated to a pre-release version it fixed all my problems. I'll be switching to stable 0.21 here soon.

  • DVB Multiplexing! (Score:5, Informative)

    by batkiwi ( 137781 ) on Saturday March 08, 2008 @09:55PM (#22689894)
    Finally you can record overlapping shows on one tuner!
    Example: You are paranoid of slight time changes, and record ALL shows with 5 minutes pre and post buffer. In the .20 and below this would use two tuners if you wanted 7:30-8pm and 8-8:30pm. Now it is smart enough to pull two streams off the multiplex.

    It will also let you (if you're in australia) record ABC1 and ABC2 off the same tuner at the same time!
    • Out of interest where do you get your program scheduling for Australia? This has always been the thorn in my side when attempting to automate with a PVR
      • I tried using tv_grab_au and patching together scripts from several different places... I even had it working for about a year at one stage. In the end I upgraded the myth box to digital and in the process didn't bother setting up a tv guide and just left it on the 'grab from the air' option. Several days later it had and I now have seven day listings from each station. So yeah, just keep trying and it'll work some day.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by batkiwi ( 137781 )
        Shepherd: http://svn.whuffy.com/index.fcgi/wiki [whuffy.com]

        it:
        -auto-updates (can be turned off)
        -gets info from various services (oztivo, websites, imdb, etc)
        -has not failed me yet
      • I have been using IceTV [icetv.com.au] for a while now.

        It is the only truly legal way to get channel data in Australia (it doesn't scrape Yahoo's website) and it also managed to win Channel 9's lawsuit that tried to get them shut down.

    • How does it decode two streams at once?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by k.a.f. ( 168896 )
        How does it decode two streams at once?

        DVB transport streams contain four independent program streams each. You can in fact record four programs at the same time by simply writing the unaltered transport stream to disk. Decoding need not happen until you actually want to watch one of those programs.

        • is the limit 4? i thought it was as many as you can cram into the bandwidth, in the UK we have 8 TV channels + other stuff on multiplex 2 (but i don't know if more than 4 broadcast simultaneously).

          This was the 1 thing that kept me trying to figure out the less polished alternatives, but now mythTV can do multiplexing looks like ill be giving it a shot. I just hope theyve included advanced enough options when it comes to recording the multiplexes. Can you specify how long to keep an unused multiplex, so you
          • Mythtv doesn't record the raw stream. It duplicates the stream and then applies the necessary PID filters for each channel. The end result is that you get the same files you would have had you used 2 separate tuners.

  • No need for LVM? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 )
    LVM may not be needed for Myth, but as a home server/media center, its important. I LVM a RAID-1 set on my mythbox, and carve out space for pictures, mp3s, etc.
  • It's not exactly well-described in the changelog (possibly because it's relatively old), but MythTV 0.21 has a nice feature for UK-based Freeview users who use the over-the-air guide data. It can use the episode ID now available in the guide data to identify if two showings are of the same episode, which is a lot more reliable than previously-available methods. (I assume this is the "BBC Series link functionality" the changelog refers to.)
  • I have to wonder how quickly the new Myth packages will be added to MythTV distros.

    Lately I've been struggling with trying to find a working combination of things. I've tried MythTVOS-2008 and while it saw my hardware, didn't seem willing to put any readable display on the screen. Just loaded up LinuxMCE and I haven't been able to get past the initial configure screen thanks to my Westinghouse TV. (It seems to have serious issues with displaying certain resolutions)

    I've got a Hauppauge WinTV 150 card, a

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by acidrain69 ( 632468 )
      Try Knoppmyth. Yeah, it's Knoppix-based and thus Debian, but try it anyway. Go outside your comfort zone. I've been using it for about a year now. The last few versions have been very easy to set up. I don't have a digital card tho, so don't know how it will play with your ATSC card.

      http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html [mysettopbox.tv]
    • The next version of http://www.mythbuntu.org/ [mythbuntu.org] is set to include .21. Mythbuntu is on the same release schedule as Ubuntu, so expect it around April 24th. I've been using Mythbuntu since its first alpha and it's fantastic. MUCH more user-friendly than even KnoppMyth.

  • Two years with MythTV (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Yeechang Lee ( 3429 ) on Sunday March 09, 2008 @11:11PM (#22696814)
    I've had a MythTV setup at home for more than two years now, and have posted [slashdot.org] several [slashdot.org] times [slashdot.org] about [slashdot.org] it. Here's my quick take on the major changes for 0.21 [mythtv.org]:

    * Support for multiple recording directories.
    * Support for recording multiple streams over DVB.
    * New deinterlacers (and an OpenGL-based video renderer, but that's still disabled by default, as I understand it).

    That's it. There are hundreds of other changes and fixes, great and small, but for most people these are the changes that'll mean the most. Despite the 18 months since 0.20's release (a way too-long interval, I'd argue [gossamer-threads.com]), this is a testament to just how good 0.20 was feature- and stabilitywise.

    Even bigger news than 0.21 is the forthcoming $299 Hauppauge HD-PVR [avsforum.com], the first consumer-grade high-definition video encoder (and with promised Linux support, no less). Within a couple of months, anyone—not just those lucky enough to have unencrypted FireWire ports—will be able to record in real time full 720p or 1080i video and Dolby 5.1 audio from their high-definition cable boxes into h.264 format and play it back on their MythTV boxes. Be aware, however, that the h.264 recordings will for many likely require faster hardware [gossamer-threads.com] than what they're using for their MythTV frontends.
  • I can't believe that MythTV still isn't to a 1.x release... From a user adoption perspective, 1.x looks better than 0.21, which to me implies that it is still beta ( 1.0).

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