[Eug-lug] A look at KnoppMyth

[T. Joseph Carter]

Okay, so as part of my move, I sold and gave away a lot of hardware.
Shipped with me were my trusty Sony SVR-2000 TiVo and a terabyte worth of
external hard drives.  Two of these drives and the 60 gigger in the TiVo
did not survive DHL's handling of fragile packages.  Because DHL delivered
them so much later than promised through their own package handling
errors, the packages arrived in Colorado just two days before I left for a
week in Texas, so naturally I discovered the problem long after they would
not honor their shipping insurance.

This left me without a functioning television, but I happened to have a
cheap framegrabber card[1] in saito, so so I figured it was time to try
out MythTV.


My first choice was KnoppMyth, because let's face it, MythTV is a pain in
the posterior to set up if you don't know what you're doing.  The first
thing that hit me was how much of Myth's setup didn't have any sort of
back button.  I entered 97403 for zip code without half a thought, for
example.  It was much later that I learned how to fix that mistake.

The other thing that KnoppMyth did strangely for me was lirc setup.  I
just told it not to try--I know that what I have for a remote isn't going
to work with the guided setup and frankly the thing is just more
complicated than I wanted to investigate at the time.  I have some
thoughts on how to improve the setup of lirc a bit as part of MythTV, but
I don't know how practical they are just yet.

By default, if you have a framegrabber, MythTV wants to record using
RTJpeg.  This takes huge amounts of disc space and is still a lossy
format, so you might not want to use it.  Transcoding is possible as part
of the setup, but I haven't investigated Myth well enough to see how one
would set that up to always be done just yet.

Unlike a TiVo, when you are neither watching live TV nor recording, the
tuner is basically not operating.  Also unlike a TiVo (as of 0.19), live
TV is not simply buffered, but recorded just like a scheduled recording
is.  It just has bottom priority.  I haven't decided if this is a good
thing or a bad thing yet, but I'm leaning toward good.  Less steps to turn
a program I'm watching into one I'm saving, and I don't have to choose to
either lose the last half hour or record at lower quality.  In fact, the
Myth setup means I can record a movie I've been watching for an hour and a
half and will now have to miss the end of, and I'll get the whole thing.

I haven't played with commercial marking and removal yet, and because I
have to use the audio patch cable to onboard sound, there are issues with
setting up the sound card properly and getting a decent recording volume.
The latter of these I'm still looking into.

I have played with remote front-ends.  This required changing two settings
in mythtv-setup (IP addresses, both) and one in /etc/mysql/my.cnf (comment
out skip-networking), and then I was able to connect the Myth frontend
running on my iMac 20" to it.

The menus are a bit strangely laid out.  You have Watch TV (if you have a
single tuner, it may tell you that you can't watch TV because the tuner is
busy recording, and you can only watch in-progress shows if they are not
being transcoded after watching), and then you have your media manager.
The first item under the media menu is to watch TV recordings, which are
separate from stuff you just happened to download or rip from DVD.  The
menus can be restructured, but this layout works well enough--it just
doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you understand the underlying
structure.

All told, MythTV is quite functional and it's not really that hard to set
up thanks to KnoppMyth.  With the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 and more
importantly its double-tuner brother the 500 being considered stable
nowadays, getting a working high-quality setup is actually pretty easy and
pretty inexpensive.  I'd easily say that's the route to go--skip the $25
framegrabber card like I've bought unless you just want to plug in your
Playstation or something (which is actually what I bought it for.)

The setup is currently very good, but it could be better.  It's the little
details in the UI that could turn something very good into something
that's simply great.


One more thing: a machine with two tuners, playback, and perhaps a
transcode going on at the same time is going to play hell with your IDE
bus.  Do yourself a favor and move to SATA if you haven't.