[mythtv-users] Success story and my own Tivo comparison (long and windy)

[James L. Paul]

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I have an original Philips Tivo that I hacked almost 4 years ago, so
much of what I expect from a modern PVR UI has been shaped by that.
Prior to the Tivo, I used a crude windows-based ATI All-In-Wonder setup
with homebrew scripts, macros and X-10 IR mouse/remote fed by 3 DirecTV
receivers controlled through their serial ports.

My wife never got the hang of the homebrew setup. She was actually the
one who suggested I get a Tivo and "get all those computers and cables
out of the room." ;)

I've been watching MythTV, Freevo, and similar projects for the past
year, and decided that MythTV 0.11 is where I would start with a new PVR
box. I built mine 4 weeks ago and have been tweaking and testing.

Old hardware I had lying around (literally under the bed ;) was:

IWill KK266+ MB with 384MB and Athlon 1.4GHz, several 40GB drives of
various brands, Yamaha SCSI 16xCDRW, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI adapter, 3C905
network adapter, 4U ATX rackmount case, Hauppauge WinTV Go Radio PCI
card, and Nvidia GeForce3 GTS card.

In about 3 hours I got it all assembled with Redhat 9 running on a
custom 2.4.22 kernel from kernel.org and all required packages installed
via apt-get including the MythTV suite. About an hour of that was
learning to load the btaudio module at the right time, configuring the
XF86Config for TV out, and getting lirc working with the crappy WinTV
Go's IR remote.

In the first day I decided I really needed to get some decent IR remote
working, so I abandoned the Hauppage card IR and bought the $12 of parts
at Radio Shack to build one to work with lirc_serial. I also wasn't
happy with the CPU usage, plus the WinTV Go card had a bad tuner. (The
lower the channel, the worse the quality; channel 2 was unviewable and
they improved gradually up through 40. Channels in the 70's had maybe a
P4 image at best.) Since I would be replacing the tuner, I decided on a
PVR-250 since general consent seems to agree with that. 5 Days later I
had 2 PVR-250/Freestyle system pulls from Gateway Mediacenter boxes for
$89 each on Ebay.

Swapping the bttv modules for ivtv modules was quicker than I expected
and I had both cards working inside of 30 minutes. I had spend the days
waiting for the PVR-250's tweaking various things, notably the TV
overscan via nvtv. I had GDM autologin working and running everything
just fine on startup, but couldn't get nvtv to help me out very well. If
I use the "Huge" mode it's way too much, but the "Normal" mode isn't
enough. I tried for a couple days to create an acceptable mode using the
BT Calc page, but although I found some settings that were close, every
custom mode I tried broke video overlay. (I could see the GUI, but video
just gave a blue area.)

I have replaced the GeForce3 GTS with a GeForce2 DDR and with this card
the "Huge" mode is almost perfect. It's just a bit too far to the left,
and needs to be adjusted using the nvtv gui position page 4 steps to the
right. Unfortunately, there is no way to adjust the position from the
commandline with nvtv so I can only script the other settings. For now I
just ssh into the box and use the nvtv gui to set the position. I poked
through the nvtv code hoping to hardwire it, but it was non-obvious in
my 15 minutes of digging. ;(

I have the MythTV box running alongside the Tivo on our 36" Sony
flatscreen CRT for comparison. I have the PVR-250 bitrates set at
3500000/5000000 for 352x480 and I'm getting 1 hour for 1782MB with image
quality subjectively equal to VHS. I have a spare 120GB drive I'll
probably install this week, it's on temporary duty in a RAID array in
another box. (For the first time ever I had 2 drives fail in the same
RAID5 array in the same week, I had to get a spare while waiting for the
replacement units. I'm still not used to being able to walk into a local
OfficeMax and buy a WD 120GB/8MB cache 7200RPM drive with a 3 year
warranty for under $100, fun stuff!)

That about sums up my MythTV background. Now here's some thoughts:

Does anybody know how to script nvtv (or anything) to bump my
overscanned image slightly to the right? I can set the position using
the nvtv gui, but I'd rather add it to the script and not have it be the
only thing that needs manual correction.

Does everybody really prefer navigating a hierarchical menu system
instead of single buttons on a remote? Most remotes have plenty of
buttons, I'd rather just press one for a 'TV Guide' grid or whatnot,
rather than navigate out of wherever I am and then dig through more
menus arrowing around to get to the appropriate gui page. I intend to
poke through the code to see if I can easily add some unused keys to
jump me to commonly used features that I can map to my IR remote. Is
there already a way to do what I want that I missed seeing?

Being a Tivo user, I'm addicted to the simplicity. For example, if I'm
browsing the "Watch Recordings" and want to delete a show instead of
play it, I don't want to back all the way out of where I am and switch
to the "Delete Recordings" menu, I want to just hit a "Clear" key on my
remote and delete the recording. Or, at the very least, I want the
option to delete it on the list of choices when I select the recording.

I have a lot of little usability issues like that. It's not that I want
to duplicate the Tivo gui, it's just that I'm lazy and don't like to
arrow all over the gui. It's too modal, I should be able to take any
action that's possible for the current context.

The "Program Finder" is a good example of utility, but it could be much
nicer with one very simple change: I'd add an "All" category in the
alphabet. It's annoying to browse through everything and have to arrow
left, down, right just to get to the next letter of the alphabet. As it
is now I have to notice that the list has wrapped and I'm looking at the
same shows again, so I have to navigate to change the list to the next
letter. It's great when you are looking for something specific, but when
you are browsing everything it's just so much nice to page through one
big list.

The "Program Guide" is also very nice, but could benefit from a simple
addition as well: When I'm browsing around the grid and I find something
~ on that I want to watch live, I want to just press a button and be
watching that channel. I don't want to have to memorize the channel,
quit the guide, select "Watch TV" and manually change the channel. Is
there a key that does this that I've missed?

While I'm watching live TV the "M" key gets me a different grid where
pressing the "M" key again on a selected program will change to that
channel and exit the grid. I just wish there was the same functionality
on the main program guide grid.

Is there a howto for creating themes? I didn't see one and haven't
noticed any answers to others asking the same question. I've hacked one
of my themes up without too much trouble, but I'd like to make some more
original changes without reverse engineering more than I already have.

One of my biggest issues isn't with MythTV at all, it's with zap2it's
listings. I can live with them not being as detailed as Tivo's, although
I really miss not having the year in the program description or being
able to easily tell if an episode is a first-run or a repeat. What I
really hate is timezone inaccuracy, and I suppose it ends up being
Tribune's fault to some extent. My timezone is UTC-10 and we don't do
DST. We have several channels on our Oceanic Time Warner service that
are frequently off by 2 or 3 hours in Tivo and Zap2It's guide.
Apparently I'm the only person in Hawaii who notices, since weeks can go
by before I call Tivo for some channels I don't watch often and I'm the
first report. An interesting thing though: This week I had Tivo make
Tribune fix our TBS listing (it was off by 3 hours) and today my Tivo
got the lineup change (TBS changed back to TBSP) and the Zap2It website
also reflected the change. Last week Zap2It showed TBS for channel 45,
today it shows TBSP and has the correct times. But what would I do if I
couldn't call Tivo? ;)

Which brings me to a final issue: XMLTV is a great piece of work, and I
hope nothing gets in the way of that. And I know it might be considered
rude to scrape Zap2It's site repeatedly, but MythTV really falls down
here compared to Tivo for guide accuracy because once a day's worth of
listings are downloaded, that day is never updated. An extreme example
is that my next 2 weeks of TBS listings are off by 3 hours since they
were downloaded before Zap2It made the correction. I'm not aware of a
simple way to update my database to correct that so I'm faced with
waiting to get past the stale listings. A less extreme example is any
one of the myriad program changes that happen with a week or less
notice, and TBA listings. Of course, Tivo updates the entire set of
listings each day, but Myth doesn't update at all. Whatever was on the
listing more than a week in advance is what will stay there, no updates
or corrections as the actual day approaches. I'm not sure what to do
about it, it's not a technical problem, it's an etiquette and abuse
issue. Tivo has seen my money, but Zap2It hasn't.

Thanks for MythTV.
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