Ask HN: Were you in the early 2000s HTPC scene? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Were you in the early 2000s HTPC scene?

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Hi HN,

Recently it occurred to me that a lot of the design in modern TV boxes - FireTV, AppleTV, GoogleTV, Roku etc - was first pioneered back in the early 2000s HTPC days, of MythTV, Xbox Media Center, etc.

Back when mainstream TV was doing giant tables of text, the HTPC people were doing film posters, and simpler, more spatial UI.

Was anyone on HN hacking on MythTV / XBMC etc in the early 2000s? Did you you end up at Amazon / Apple? Did you start your own company? Did your work end up inside another project? What was the transition from warez to licensed content like?

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I am mostly disappointed where this all ended up, especially with Netflix. The HTPC movement was all about serving up our bought content at top quality. Nowadays you don't own any content, you rent it all and its all streamed at poor bitrate with often worse audio options than what we had 20 years ago. Netflix instead of freeing existing content and spreading it across the globe ended up copying the cable company production of its own content and isolating that content to its own platform model to be sold with a monthly rental along with all its other content you don't want.

Very little of what the early HTPC movement and Jellyfin/Kodi are today has made it into the official streaming services and its every bit as geolocked as cable services were. Netflix is cable on the internet, none of the devices today are anything but multiple cable devices served over the internet, they share very little in principles with the early HTPC movement. DRM has become ever more prevalent in TV and movies not less.

TV's are hopelessly underpowered computers as well, it easily takes 20 seconds to start the app for a streaming platform, and then input latency is really bad too. Really miserable UX.

I've seen this work both ways. The original FireTV stick had awful latency, the 4K one is far smoother despite shifting four times as many pixels.

IMO a Netflix without original content would have a much harder time attracting new subscribers and retaining existing ones. They'd have to pay exorbitant rates for proven hits rather than paying less cash up front and offering creative freedom for original content.

...ah yes...countless hours were spent on my MythBox, which mostly worked. Before my MythBox went out the door, it had four TV cards a couple of huge drives and a ton of memory. It was a very nice machine. Before that, I used the XBMC on a couple of Xboxes. I remember using Splinter Cell and a memory card, I think, to perform the hack to get it going. That was a lot of fun.

Fast forward to today, I was using a a little single board computer (le potato) to run Kodi. That worked okay but always required hacking to get it working with Netflix or other services. I finally gave up and bought the Nvidia Shield Pro. It works great and I haven't had a single (major) issue since buying it. It runs Android TV and allows me to install Kodi as an app. I still run Kodi along with many of the other apps. No longer do I have to run into the room and ssh into the box to get it to do something.

While I am happy with the Nvidia Shield, in my heart, I feel like I gave up some freedom. The early days of HTPC were about figuring out how to make things work without the infrustructure of any big companies (other than the $19.99/year I paid to schedulesdirect!). Just a community of people making things work they way they wanted them to work. Yep. I am a sell out (that is watching tv with a knowing smile on his face).

My parents didn't want me taking apart the Xbox so I had to convince them I knew what I was doing. Finally got a modchip in 2002. After putting it in, the Xbox didn't boot up. I didn't know why because I was an idiot 13 year old who didn't know what they were doing and getting concrete instructions on what to do was harder back then. My parents weren't happy.

My father helped me put the modchip in ca. 2005, but I had convinced them of buying one as a way of getting a cheap PC. As I didn't really want to permanently affix it, we hammered it in instead of soldering it (I still had quite a bit to learn back then). It worked, though it might have required slapping the console before starting it up in latter years, I ended up softmodding it and removing the chip before selling it, IIRC.

I never got around to install Linux on it, though I learned some bits along the way, and ended up turning it into quite a versatile media center: DVD player, game console, HDD with movies on it, network access, etc.

I built another one with only a softmod, and a larger HDD in 2008, and only retired it around 2011 as it couldn't play 1080p videos. I feel like I never found a proper replacement. HTPCs are generally bigger and more expensive than the original xbox, but I should have a good look at the Android TV market soon-ish (I suspect I'm going to try a Xiaomi device), with a USB DVD player and Kodi as a launcher, plus content served by jellyfin. Or I'll bite the bullet and buy a NUC.

I had high hopes for the Firestick, but not being able to change the launcher is a dealbreaker. Stay away from that toxic waste of a backdoor for advertisement and lock-in (the remote and CEC integration is nice, though, I wish pine64 offered something similar).

Ha, yes. I purchased an ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner[1] in 2010 and hooked it up to my custom built HTPC running Windows 8 PC Media Center edition so I can use it as my DVR. I watched TV like that for 8 years and enjoyed every minute of it. I even developed a Windows Media Center app in MCML[2] that allowed you to access streaming sporting events on ESPN[3].

[1] https://www.cnet.com/products/ati-tv-wonder-digital-cable-tu...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d...

[3] https://www.amarkota.com/portfolio/espn3

I hacked on the original TiVo and MythTV a bit; did not contribute much back, but I had a lot of fun. Video output from my few boxes were fed back into NTSC modulators; I added extra channels to the CATV distribution and could tune into my TV, music, music video, and movie library from any TV. Basically I built a mini VoD system in my house. I tried to keep this up into later years to little success using gradually more purpose built hardware. I think the dream finally died for me after my Dune HD gave up the ghost.

I started an Internet radio business in 1998 so this actually predated my involvement in the HTPC stuff. We programmed several genre stations of our own, properly and legally and built audio encoding appliances that we would sell as a simulcasting service to traditional broadcast stations. Even though we were operating legally and paying licensing, we eventually got killed by the Metallica v Napster suit which prompted the licensing agencies to retool their fees and prompted commercial broadcasters at the time to put a hold on all Internet streaming.

Everything in one place is what customers want, but the businesses that own the stuff want customer attention and lock in. Why anyone would want to dedicate their career to enforcing this attitude for a giant multinational corporation is beyond me. This idiocy is the reason the youtube mobile app doesnt let you watch video in the background and hides the clock, for instance. It's untenable. Ultimately I gave up on the whole mess. I still own some TVs, but these days they are mostly off. I don't have the stomach for it.

The music services fortunately have mostly figured it out: there are a number of places where you can choose to either select and purchase from or subscribe in bulk to "nearly all the commercially distributed music there is" for a fee commiserate with your desire to either buy the product or be the product. For video, it's alphabet shit soup.

I can't claim to have hacked on MythTV or XBMC, but I certainly used them back then, and worked on television set-top box software for much of the ~2001-2017 time frame. As a systems programmer for these devices, I'm afraid I don't have much insight into high-level details like content licensing.

However, as a developer of commercial products in those days, I can say that our hands were tied in some ways. For example, showing the electronic program guide as a grid was problematic due to patents owned by TV Guide. I suspect the grassroots projects were able to play a bit more fast and loose with these things, thus leading to the UI differences you observed.

Likewise, much of modern automotive infotainment is just catching up to where the duct-tape geniuses of mp3car.com were twenty years ago.

Relevant blast from the past:

https://aaroncake.net/projects/mp3player.htm

300MB boot partition for Windows! Oh how far we've come...

What a massive waste of space! ;)

Funny you should mention this; I posted elsewhere on the thread about my experiences with the topic at hand, but my BMW E46 M3 project was the top viewed project on the mp3car forums for the better part of a decade. I don't have the car anymore, but I still have all the crazy parts in a box somewhere.

I implemented a small frontend in linux; I tried to implement a GUI directly from scratch in SDL+GL so it never really got far. I read yesterday about GM licensing unreal engine to build their in-car UI and thought back to this early work even though it didn't go anywhere at the time. I did have a relatively popular touchscreen-friendly windows app for tuning XM satellite radio using the XM-PCR and later the XM-Direct receivers. It supported AM/FM as well using the "RadioShark," a USB connected AM/FM radio. My software supported buffered playback so you could pause and rewind. On the non-public version, it could automatically encode, tag, and save the songs based on the metadata.

Hello F.B.I.,

Nice try.

Sincerely,

Guy who owns alot of DVDs

I remember you! Weren't you on IRC serving out missing pieces of usenet binaries? :P

Sincerely,

Guy who owns alot of Dvd burners

OP's username checks out

Yes, I started with a massive Windows 8 Media center PC in 2003 which evolved to an Xbox1 with XBMC, followed by a couple of all in one PCs which could load standalone XBMC Linux based kernels by 2010.

Around 2015, I switched to having a Synology NAS hold the content with small streaming devices around the house with Plex running on both ends.

But these days 99% of the content we want is on Netflix, HBO Max, or Disney+. We occasionally rent movies via AppleTV. I can get all the content I want more conveniently through these services. And I am rarely debugging the setup during a family movie night while my wife and daughters groan about how my stuff never works.

I built HTPC using ShuttlePC with MythTV back then. I also integrated home automation to control the lights and audio distribution around the house using X-10. Back then, the phone were still analog and one of the X-10 light module would turns on when I get a call. I had a Sony projector with a 105 in screen and 5.1 surround sound. When the movie starts the lights would dim and the curtains would close. Getting a cable card was expensive back then. I had DirecTV so set up an IR relay with X-10 to control the channels. Torn out the walls to run all the wires and consolidated everything in a closet. It was a sweet set up. Good times.

Helped a buddy who wanted to sell a HTPC box, based on a mini-ITX board in a neat small case. The motherboard he'd picked had IR remote support, and it would be running XBMC.

Main problem was mainly price, as it often is. No way it could have approached the price of my NVIDIA Shield TV box.

But he did make a few and sold it to people he knew.

I helped him automate the Linux install and setup, so he could just drop a txt file with owner details and the image on a USB stick and boot from it to install a new box. This became my first exposure to XBMC, which I liked quite a lot.

Yes,. a great many hours. Building PC's, trying to make them quiet enough to tolerate. Buying expensive Haupage hardware encoding boards, DTV tuners and programmable remotes. Getting the software to work at the right resolution, getting the driver to work.

In Australia TV listing were copywritable, so we had to crowdsource that too.

Haha yeah. I had this cool horizontal micro ATX case that housed a full computer and still looked like a media device. Had to use risers to mount the GPU horizontal.

Then a few years later a single Raspberry Pi did the trick.

I started back in the Windows XP Media Center days. Now I've settled on a simpler setup, using Plex on a PC, and the built-in apps on my smart-TV.

Wasn't Plex founded out of some of the remnants of the XBMC team?

Plex feels so incredibly over-monetised that I don't treat it as similar to Kodi or XBMC at all.

Interesting that you feel that way. I suppose compared to free and open source anything seems "incredibly over-monetized", but Plex still seems to be one of the cheaper/simpler business models in software, to me. They've got a generous free tier, a simple subscription service for some nice to haves on top of that, and offer a "lifetime" subscription option if you'd prefer to pay a bunch of months up front and not deal with it again. It seems simple and basic enough to me.

I know they are trying to do some sort of TV channel-like value add subscription as well (because everyone is in the Streaming Wars now), but they don't push upsells into the app itself (or I never have a need to go to the sections that have that, I'm not sure), just random mentions in emails that I mostly ignore.

I contributed a bit to XBMC in the past, and in comparison, .. well, I'm not too sure how to describe this.

Plex is like everything wants to be proxied over the plex.tv cloud, want a plex SSL certificate, tunneling (ok, NAT is common at home and all that) control traffic, $80 one time purchase apps/pass, it feels significantly less like "running a Plex server" and much more like "sign up for a Plex account and link everything to it and link your server to it". Plex Pass also gates a significant amount of features.

It doesn't feel like running your own HTPC/media server anymore, for all intents and purposes it feels like you're paying a Netflix subscription to use your own hard drive, at least to me.

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