[mythtv-users] MythTV vs XBMC

[John Marshall]

On 5/8/2014 9:17 AM, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 09:08 -0400, Phil Bridges wrote:
>> Is commercial skipping now supported on the XBMC MythTV plugin?
>
> It is, but it's either none or automatic.  No option to just have keys
> which skip using the commercial break information.

That's a serious knock in my book.  Skipping in general seems better on 
Mythfrontend.  I was testing the new Gotham last night on my combined 
FE/BE with local storage.  Skipping back and forth (+/- 30s) in a 
recording is just much quicker and more seamless with Myth than XBMC, 
which often seemed to pause and struggle to figure out where it was. 
Maybe this is a local-only advantage, but it alone would keep me from 
using XBMC daily on my main machine.  Live TV channel changes are also 
much quicker and smoother in Myth.

Another dealbreaker is the lack (I think) of timestretch in XBMC.

XBMC can probably do these two things, but I have buttons on my remote 
dedicated to bringing up the guide in Live TV, and also for cycling 
through the zoom options, both of which are very also important to me.

As far as eye candy and metadata and things like that, XBMC may do it 
better, but it's not that important to me.  Vertical lists of 
titles/filenames is good enough for me, and in fact animations or 
anything else that reduce the speed and responsiveness of the UI are 
negatives in my book.

I like that recorded programs are separate from long-term media.

That being said, I do use XBMC for a few things.  I use the MLB.tv 
plugin often to view highlights, and have considered buying the package 
to watch games.  (I even contributed a different game highlight section 
to the plugin, since it's just a self-contained Python script in a zip 
file.  My impression is that the startup cost for a Myth plugin is much 
greater.)  There are some other video plugins I use as well.  I also 
prefer XBMC for playing music, and usually check the weather app while 
I'm in there just because I never set up Myth's.  I'm not sure I prefer 
either for pictures, but one problem with XBMC that I think Myth handles 
is that Myth will play videos that are mixed in with pictures, something 
fairly common for me since my digital camera does both.

I do think the ability for XBMC to run on cheap Android devices is a 
real advantage.  The main issue right now is the lack of mpeg2 HD 
hardware decoding (or enough oomph for software decoding) on a lot of 
those devices, but for the ones that do support it they can be a great 
solution.  For example, my father's house has 7 TVs that now need STBs 
due to Charter's move to encrypted digital.  Outfitting each with a 
$200+ PC when some are little used isn't attractive, but neither is 
paying $7/month each to rent an STB.  Getting a few cheap TV sticks that 
can play TV, whether directly from an HDHR-Prime or a Myth backend, in 
addition to supporting Netflix, etc., is an attractive idea.

John