[mythtv-users] Re: What do you do with MythTv

[Peter Lee]

The huge potential in MythTV is what makes it great, at least for me.  I
haven't yet been able to win my wife over to it, though.

I've had my Myth box up and running very reliably for about a month or so.
It's running on an Athlon XP1800+ machine with ASUS A7N8X-X nForce2
motherboard, installed in an Antec Sonata (piano black) mini-tower, 512MB
RAM and 160GB Seagate drive.  Capture via a single Hauppage pvr-250.  Video
and audio from MSI GF4 MX440 and SoundBlaster Live! cards.  I also have an
IR keyboard with integrated trackball.  Running Fedora core 1, and Myth
installed per Jarod's guide.

We have three TVs in the house.  Bedroom has a 33" tube, kitchen has a
Macintosh with 20" flat panel and eyeTV, and living room has 42" plasma and
HDTV cable box from Comcast.  We have had a Tivo since the beginning, and so
part of the reason for getting into MythTV is to build a more serious
server-based system that can provide Tivo-like services to every TV in the
house.

I am a proverbial early adopter.  Sometimes my early adoptions incur a high
"WAF" (Wife Annoyance Factor ;-).  Switching the livingroom TV to an HDTV
setup with AV receiver, etc., really had high WAF because suddenly there
were separate remote controls for dvd, tv, av, tivo, etc., until I finally
combined everything into a Philips Pronto remote.  The Pronto, while
simplifying matters considerably, has not been a big hit with me or the rest
of the family.  I think this is due, in large part, to the touch-screen
buttons.  There is just something that is more satisfying and accurate about
real buttons as opposed to graphical touchscreen buttons.

So, this is one area where MythTV is just *great*: To the extent that it
"converges" everything --- music, dvd, tv, tivo, images, etc. --- is the
extent to which control over everything is converged into a single, simple,
and easy-to-use remote.  Indeed, we are finding that the gray Hauppauge
remote really handles 99% of our daily multimedia control needs.

About the Tivo: I bought one of the first Tivos, several years ago.  It is
the one device that my wife loves.  While I find its functionality to be
extremely limited, today it is rock-solid reliable and so easy to use that
my son was able to use it even when he was just age 3.  When comparing the
Tivo to MythTV, I find the following main issues:

 - Tivo, today, is far far far more reliable than MythTV.  The mythbackend
has been very reliable, crashing just once in the month or so of heavy use.
But the mythfrontend crashes about once per week, and unlike the Tivo, does
not magically fix itself after a crash.  This means that my family is out of
luck if I am not home when this happens.  I expect MythTV to become at least
as reliable as Tivo, but today it is not (at least for me).

 - Tivo, today, produces far better image quality than my Myth box.  I am
using the VGA output from my GF4MX card, fed directly to the VGA input of my
plasma display.  While I would say that the Myth image quality is "good",
the difference from the Tivo quality is quite noticeable and this
contributes to the WAF.  I am following the developments of the pvr-350 with
great interest, in the hopes that when it becomes more mature then the image
quality deficit will be eliminated.

 - I tend to watch only recorded programs and videos.  But my wife watches a
lot of live TV and surfs a lot.  Here, Tivo is simply better than Myth.  The
only way in which the Myth experience is better is that Myth's EPG is at
least 10 times faster than Tivo's.  But in other respects Tivo is, today,
better.  For example, channel changing takes about half the time in Tivo.
When you are surfing using the EPG, it makes more sense to hit "OK" to
change channels, but Myth's interface forces "OK" to be "record".  I don't
know how many weeks it will take for my wife to get used to that, but right
now it is a big contributor to the WAF.  (She is convinced that MythTV is
"broken" and asks me to "fix" this almost daily.)  If the Tivo is recording
a show and you select live TV, the Tivo simply lets you watch the recording
program instead of telling you to go to the "Watch Recordings" area, like
Myth does.

 - Tivo has single-button access to the recordings area (ie, the Tivo
button) and to live TV.  This is another way in which Tivo is friendlier,
especially to a wife who doesn't naturally grok the heirarchical
organization of the various screens in MythTV.


Now, don't get me wrong.  I think Myth is still better than Tivo and, of
course, the future potential is way way way better.  But right now these are
the main reasons why I am struggling to get my family to go along with this.

As for what else we do with Myth: We have started watching our DVDs in Myth
and also all of our pictures and music.  Again, the convergence in the
simple gray remote is just fabulous (and will be better when, eventually, we
switch over to using our Tivo remote).  I really love the MythWeb feature,
too.  I've recently gotten nuvexport going and have managed to archive some
shows to svcd.  I am still trying to figure out how to import the .nuv files
into iMovie on the Mac, so that I can do some simple editing on the Mac.

I am now finding things just stable enough to start on building a front end
for the bedroom TV.  I am looking very hard at an ASUS Pundit-based system
for that.

Overall, what a great project!  Despite the WAF, I am having loads of fun
tinkering with this stuff...