[mythtv-users] General satisfaction

[Dan Ritter]

This is a good time to express my general satisfaction with
MythTV, and a big congratulations to the developers and the user
community.

I'm running 0.21 on Debian Etch, on an AMD XP3500 with a gig of RAM,
a Samsung DVD burner, a 320GB IDE disk and 2 500GB IDE disks. I have a
PVR500 dual tuner card and an HDHomeRun, both plugged into a cable feed
from RCN. Output is an NVidia 5200 via SVideo to a JVC CRT. Scheduling
information is from Schedules Direct. There's an IR keyboard with PS/2
interfaces and a $12 Sony remote pointing at the HDHR. There's a local
ethernet hub and an 802.11g USB widget which connects the den to the
network upstairs. I've installed the frontend on an old desktop upstairs;
it can run SD programs without many issues. I don't use that much. When
I upgrade it, and run a physical wire down to the Myth box, that
might change.

I have been running this for 13 months, recording over 2200
episodes of over 120 shows. I can record standard def and
high def, and play them back smoothly. Thanks to MythWeb, I can
change the scheduling while I'm at work. Transcoding takes a
while, but I generally only do that for big programs that we're
not going to watch for a while - my wife wants to watch the ISU
figure-skating championships, and 3 hours of 720P is quite a
chunk. The picture quality is wonderful, though.

I love commercial flagging. There are a few cases where it doesn't work --
generally near the end of a program -- and the logo detector is fooled
by Bravo and Food Network programs that start the bug on the inhouse ads
just prior to the program resume. But automatically skipping 4 minute+
commercials is amazingly good.

The only time we watch live TV is for breaking news, which
doesn't happen much. Even then, we're more likely to pull up
Internet news sources.

When the kids insist on finishing a program when I want them to
go to bed soon, I change to 1.3x time compression. Yes, I'm
evil; but it doesn't sound like chipmunks.

I still get recording failures on the PVR500, generally
requiring a reboot to fix. These are DMA problems in the driver,
and Hans Verkuil says they are caused by underlying hardware
issues. But RCN provides me with a lot of clear QAM channels
these days, so I've been moving recordings over to the HDHR.
That device is extremely reliable.

When I accumulate enough money, and prices drop a bit more, I'll
get a nice LCD HDTV to watch all this on. I expect it to work
nicely through either VGA or DVI. I'll probably need more disk
storage soon, too.

Thanks, folks.

-dsr-

-- 
Restore our Constitutional rights.

http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference.