[mythtv-users] Thinking about switching to MythTV

[Mattias Larsson]

Hi,

I'm currently using another PVR software (running on Windows XP), but 
I'm sick and tired of the lockups I get with my system. I currently have 
two EPIA machines, one M9000 and one M10000 machine. The M9000 machine 
is the backend, and it has 2 x PVR-250 PCI cards (with Dish Network 
satellite recivers connected), and 1 x PVR-USB2 box (Cable connection), 
and a bunch of disk (3x250, 1x60). The client machine, M10000, is 
connected to my projector using the PVR-350 for output and it is also 
used to record Cable, for a total of 4 receivers. It looks like the 
MythTV's PVR support is quite mature now, but there are a couple of 
issues I'm still facing:

- Where do you get decent XMLTV data? Last time I used XMLTV, it 
provided very bad data, with unreliable show IDs and rerun information. 
I realize that this question might be more appropriate on the XMLTV list.

- I'm concerned that maybe the lockups I get on my Via EPIA systems are 
related to hardware and not software, thus a switch to Linux wouldn't 
help anything. Has anyone else successfully run MythTV on EPIA hardware 
without experiencing lock ups?

- PVR-USB2 doesn't seem to be supported, and I suspect that it will be a 
long time before it is. I dont really need 4 tuners anymore, but, I'm 
wondering, would it be possible to implement and encoding backend for 
Windows? I have no idea what the network protocols look like, but I'm 
imaging some kind of lightweight app that I'd run on Windows and just 
pipe the MPEG-2 stream back to the MythTV backend. I dont know wether or 
not the encoders are separated out from the backend, or if I'd be forced 
to run a complete backend on the windows machine for this to work. I 
relize that there is no Windows version of MythTV, but I'd be willing to 
be in the effort of coding this if there is a reasonably easy way of 
accomplishing this.

- Can the ActiSys IR-200L ir blaster be used to control the satellite 
receivers?

- Is the IRMan supported for IR control of the mythtv frontend?

The advantages of going with MythTV are very tempting though. 
framebuffer on PVR-350 and the ability to rip the noisy harddrive out of 
my client and boot over the network would be really welcome.

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks,
/dml