[mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Doze solutions

[Nick Tan]

> I know this is like pissing in church, and I try to avoid Microsoft as
> much
> as possible, but:
>
> Has anyone run MCE, and can they give a breif comparison as to what it and
> MythTV will do?
>
> Also, how is live TV quality in MythTV compared to, say TVtime, which
> seems
> to have far better picture quality than, say XawTV. How flexible is MythTV
> about using alternative backend programs??
>
> Cheers
>
> Marius
> Registered Linux user

A friend of mine uses MCE and has tried to get me to switch over.  I tried
it for a little while but came back to MythTV.  Some of the reasons why:

MCE has very limited recording schedule options.  For instance, there's no
"Record one showing per week", which I use with MythTV.

MCE doesn't support an analogue card alongside a digital card.  I use a
PVR-250MCE and a DVB-T card with MythTV.  The PVR card captures on s-video
from a cable box, using a serial IR transmitter for channel changing, and
the DVB-T captures over-the-air digital transmissions.  MCE cannot do
this.

I don't like the MCE interface, but thats just my personal taste.  And
with MythTV I can choose a different theme if I don't like the default
one.

As far as I know, there's no web interface that comes with MCE.  Mythweb
is very useful for me.

MCE isn't a bad product, but it just doesn't offer me anything over
MythTV.  Plus, MythTV is free, whereas MCE is not.

As for TV quality, I've never used TVTime so I don't know.  But the
quality is very good, especially with DVB.  I had quality issues with the
composite input on the PVR250MCE card, but I switched to the S-video input
and its all good now.

Hope this helps.

Nick