[mythtv-users] It's not the TiVo that she loved...

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Wed Apr 5 22:56:36 UTC 2006


Jesse Guardiani writes:

> hear hear. MythTV only makes sense as a hobby or if you need the added 
> functionality/disk space.
> Tivo is cheaper (and probably easier to use and possibly more reliable) 
> by far. I suspect that might
> change as time marches on though.

Tivo is about to drop lifetime subscriptions.

I bought a series 1 very soon after it came out, and paid $200 for a 
lifetime subscription.  About a year after series 2 came out, Tivo made an 
offer to their existing customers to transfer their series 1 subscription, 
if they buy a series 2 at a regular price.  I took them up on their offer, 
and I'm still on my lifetime subscription.

I forget how many years rolled by, in the meantime; someone else who's more 
of a Tivo fan can figure out if I did better, or worse, than if I were to 
pay the monthly fee.  I'm pretty sure I'm way ahead of the game, it's gotta 
be at least 5 years, now.  200/5/12=$3 a month, and dropping.

So, when my current series 2 box eventually croaks, I would have to look 
forward to paying $13/month from that point on -- and that was why I began 
hacking mythtv.  And I hope to finish hacking, before my Tivo finally 
croaks.

I can certainly understand Tivo's motivations -- they must have a large 
number of people on a lifetime subscription, who are not generating any 
revenue for them, meanwhile they have to pay a non-zero cost, per 
subscriber, for dialup access and for the TV listings.  I would guess that 
their original business plan was to at least break even on their lifetime 
subscribers through advertising (which is why I wasn't bitching when Tivo 
begin pushing ads into the main menu), but I guess it's not working out…

The way I see it: a standalone box is certainly more expensive, but if 
you put together a high-end server, and use an MPEG encoder card with 
MythTV, the your real extra out-of-pocket expense is really just the encoder 
card.  With an encoder card, MythTV's extra load is light, and you should be 
able to use the box like any other workstation/server.  mythfilldatabase 
would probably generate more load then recording a single TV stream.

I picked up a Hauppauge PVR-350 for $145.  That's the extra cost, as far as 
I'm concerned.  Maybe later down the road I'll splurge for an IR 
transmitter, to drive the cable box; for now I'm just using the card's 
tuner.

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