MythTV 33 Released – open-source all-in-one DVR
mythtv.org
mythtv.org
I used it extensively. I obsessively recorded everything off over the air digital TV and wrote it to DVDs. I had a little script to look up ratings of movies in IMDB, apply weighting factors due to personal tastes and record all the ones which made the grade. I'd then edit the commercials out and burn to DVDs all losslessly.
However, this all came to an end when my 2 year old son took the running hosepipe from the garden one summer, through the open patio doors into the house and proceeded to fill up the MythTV computer with water (along with the TV, VCR, DVD player and sofa!).
I never quite had the heart to resurrect the system after that and it was an end to my MythTV obsession. It was fun while it lasted.
"Poor genetic material?"
...
"Bad guess."
(Calvin and Hobbes)
I got an email while I was at work on a night shift with a cou temperature increase. Sshed in and could see the temperature rising and rising. 70, 80, 90, 100 (c)
Then my ssh command died.
Finished work at 10am and started the 90 minute drive home, wondering if there’s be a home to sleep it. Fortunately on inspection it was the fan that failed. Everything had died, couldn’t get it to boot, and so ended my mythtv adventure.
It was great, had a little usb box which plugged into my sky box and send remote control command to switch sky chal lens. A hardware mpeg2 pci capture card to record, etc.
But for me it was a product of its time. I haven’t watched linear tv since 2016 except for a few special live programs.
I thought it morphed into xbmc to be honest.
As a Canadian, I was the only one in town with TiVo ( MythTV ) when it was a US only thing.
I was obsessed with it but I do not really remember how it ended. I guess at one house I had MythTV and then at the next I had XBMC. So my guess is that torrents were enough of a thing that I just never got around to setting up MythTV again.
I believe that XBMC became Kodi. Myth has always been its own thing.
Mine deleted my game save slots in Metroid Prime 2 when I was about 99% through. I didn't have the heart to start over, so it will remain forever unfinished.
That doesn't even come close to watering the electronics, though, I can't even imagine the patience required in that situation.
I was in college at the time and had free HBO on the dorm cable network, plus completely unfiltered 100mbps ethernet throughout the campus. It was fun to have a "DIY Tivo" server that could automatically remove commercials and make my library available to my suitemates.
Used that for a while then went down the XBMC path (for windows..pre-Kodi for a while). Ended up with a Boxee Box (first real dedicated hardware). Then moved to Plex hosted on a Windows Home Server with various clients over the years (Sony NSZ-GS7 Google TV, OG Chromecast, Nexus Player, one of the older FireTVs, Chromecast Ultra).
The Home Server died so I moved to UnRaid with containerized Plex. Had a HDHomeRun Prime integrated with Plex for a bit. But dropped cable in favor of streaming TV services. That's the closest I ever got to a MythTV setup.
I ended up creating a barebones DVR from scratch in FreeBSD, which I was more familiar with than Linux. I kept adding incremental features over the next few years, until it was a very usable system, and exactly suitable for my needs.
Then the internet became fast enough to stream and download content, and the old workhorse ended up in a closet somewhere.
It's ability to identify and skip commercials was awesome and I'm sure it's gotten better. The biggest issues I had were hardware related to the capture devices and getting remotes to work.
Honestly, given the state of streaming (40 different services all carrying different content), it might be worth looking at again.
We had 3 TVs hooked up, each with its own instance and a central recording instance with 3 capture cards. It worked great, you could record or playback from any of the TVs.
Main issue we had was getting the remotes to work correctly. I remember editing configs constantly to get correct behavior from the remotes.
These days I use an HDHomeRun Flex 4K. Four tuners, 4K ATSC support, clients for virtually all platforms (including Smart TVs) so you don't have to connect a proper "computer" to the TV or fumble with remotes, has cheap "bring your own storage" network DVR support, it's a real neat device for $200.
It picks up 82 OTA channels where I live. Just crazy how much content is on OTA TV these days.
Because that's usually what people really mean when they say that they need cable for sports. They want to watch some big game that ESPN paid big money for the broadcast rights like the college football national championship. Or they want to watch their local professional NBA or MLB team and the regional network paid big money for exclusive broadcast rights in the area so it's blacked out on League Pass (NBA) or MLB.tv
So many people complain about having to pay for cable. I watch all of my Sunday football for free OTA.
ESPN of course has monday night football and Amazon now has Thursday and you are right that there are thousands of other sports events on pay channels. But I am surprised at how many people in the reddit game threads don't realize that you can watch CBS, NBC, and Fox over the air for free.
There's lots of channels, but nothing to watch :P with cable, there'd be a lot more channels, and still, nothing to watch :)
Sports are actually one of the pros of cord-cutting in some scenarios, as you will generally get much higher quality streams OTA. But if there are black-out rules or you care about specific national/international teams then all of a sudden completely cut off. It all just depends on the specifics.
There is an opening for a very beginner friendly pirate platform to rise again. Not because nobody wants to pay exactly, but because doing it legally is complex now.
Tons of ad spam, but seems to work eventually.
No. Popcorn time was a massive free rider/tragedy of the commons problem and a new version of it will continue to erode the good parts of piracy culture that exist.
If you're too lazy to contribute effectively to these cultures, you should just keep paying for Netflix or IPTorrents.
Yes, popcorn time failed, but I was referencing the thing where it had once made inroads with non-technical people in some part because of the ease and not just the "Free" part.
Culture matters. Understand what maintains it. Protect it.
It's like you're complaining about the eternal september except focused on people that didn't make any posts.
What contribution are people expected to make? Why does culture or level or tech aptitude matter if they're not interacting with anyone?
If this is just about seeding duration that can be adjusted.
> What contribution are people expected to make? Why does culture or level or tech aptitude matter if they're not interacting with anyone?
Again, if you don't understand how popcorn time was tragedy of the commons, I'm not going to sit here and lay it out for you. Fact of the matter is, piracy does not need to be made more accessible, and doing so would be a grave danger to the good parts of its culture.
I understand how tragedy of the commons works just fine. I just don't understand why culture matters if you're not talking to someone and they're not breaking anything. And they're not going to be on a private tracker.
It's true that I've never been on a reputable private tracker, but every time I've looked at one it had an obnoxious process to join that has nothing to do with my ability to seed lots of bits for a long time.
That process did its job of filtering you out quite well. Thanks for confirming my suspicion on the dot!
2. Could you please address the phrase "has nothing to do with my ability to seed lots of bits for a long time".
Unless you think "inexperienced with private trackers" is a disqualification for joining one...?
That's damage to Netflix, Hulu, and etc. What was the damage to piracy?
Piracy culture is human ecology.
This became more clear to me a couple weeks ago when my Boomer parents started exploring 'cutting the cord'. To get them access to everything they are now being offered by their cable company (including multiple on-demand streaming options) won't actually save them that much money and would introduce a nontrivial amount of hassle.
They still may be doing it, but it's going to involve a lot of help from me. I almost would rather have just paid them the difference to not deal with it. I suppose teaching our elders the new ways has some value in itself... I just need to keep telling myself that...
Paired with an HDHomerun and Jellyfin, MythTV really gives one a pretty good poor man's Youtube TV with no recurring fees. One of mine runs in a virtual machine in the garage at my family's farm, with a custom script beaming me my childhood local news to enjoy over coffee in the morning.
I still use MythTV (with additional PCs as backends and frontends) to record Comcast digital cable with HDHomerun Cable Card tuners. It also serves my small library of music files and can play DVDs and BluRay discs. I've ripped 4k UHD BluRay discs using MakeMKV and MythTV can play the files but the colors are wrong since a lot of the plumbing needs HDR support.
Number of shows: 442
Number of episodes: 25061
First recording: Monday February 19th, 2007
Last recording: Sunday February 5th, 2023
Total Running Time: 15 years 11 months 16 days 5 hrs 30 mins
Total Recorded: 2 years 1 month 13 days 18 mins
Percent of time spent recording: 13%
Specs: 2-core Intel CPU, 8GB RAM, 250 GB SATA SSD root, 6TB of mirrored storage, which is perpetually nearly full.
Number of shows: 256
Number of episodes: 6817
First recording: Thursday May 14th, 1998
Last recording: Sunday February 5th, 2023
Total Running Time: 24 years 8 months 23 days 8 hrs 45 mins
Total Recorded: 11 months 8 days 8 hrs 59 mins
Percent of time spent recording: 3%
It'd be nice if there were consumer-ready hardware for something like this. I know a few people with VCRs (yes, in 2023) that still record to tape from their digital receiver and play back over composite.
I'm amazed that you can't just buy a device that acts like a VCR, with composite and line in and out, but records and plays back via digital files instead of tape.
I want to try this, perhaps using an older Intel Mac mini, but I'm wondering how to "sell" it to someone who just wants a VCR.
You can. They're called digital video recorders (DVR). I had one around 15 years ago (I don't remember brand or model). A quick search on Amazon had this one as the first result:
https://www.amazon.com/ClonerAlliance-Recorder-Playback-Conv...
This is expensive, but may very well be worth the money. Thanks!
HDHomerun does this.
If you don't something cheaper/more DIY oriented I'm really happy with channels dvr. It interfaces with Youtube.TV and many others (anyone who partners with TV Anywhere) and can do Over the Air recording with HD Homerun. What I really like is it provides one unified, central location for the majority of the services I care about.
I did something a little different. My cable box has a 3.5mm TRS jack to connect an external IR receiver to it. I connected the jack to an Arduino, and send serial commands to the Arduino from the MythTV box to change channels.
Good to see the project still going 10-15 years after I first heard of it (though I haven't used it in a long time)!
xbmc with the myth plugin on the frontend is great if you own the thing that drives your tv screen. If you use appletv it seems you don't own it and can't run xbmc or mythtv frontend on it. But you can pay apple a sub and then also pay again for anything you might want to watch out of their stunningly limited selection. That's always apple's solution: Pay apple more to get something that isn't what you wanted...
Wikipedia suggests playtv works fine for standard def but not high def if you care. Maybe it's not the tuner for you? Make sure you choose one with mainline kernel driver support if you look for another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_terrestrial_television...
b) The majority of the content on free-to-air tv is the BBC. Who levy their own taxation. This is unique and provides the BBC with a massive amount of power to influence anything they want. One would hope they attempt to do it in the interests of the British public and the world in general. [1] See (a) for how that worked out?
[1] Between examples like Saville, WMD, and the current lunatic state of both labour and conservative parties perhaps the BBC isn't really going as well as the public might like for what they pay in additional tax known as the "license fee?" But of course most of the public didn't attend oxbridge so their opinions scarcely matter to the BBC? Now here's Stephen Fry. (And I quite like him, and even many of his performing "friends" but he's hardly representative of anyone much and that seems to be a relatively persistent problem).
https://tvheadend.org/ can be useful for interfacing with the tuners over USB and exposing web streams.
MythTV: An Open Source Digital Video Recorder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634491 - Dec 2021 (3 comments)
A few months ago, I moved to Channels. What I like about it is it works really well on Firesticks and AppleTVs that I already have attached to my TVs, so that means I can finally get rid of the hardware sagetv clients (one of which I've had to replace the caps in) and simplify my setup.
When looking to move last fall, I first looked at MythTV. It was still horrifically hard to setup. Given I'd never use a pc client, I then moved on to tvheadend, which had its own issues (mainly on the side of the kodi client). I finally settled on Channels because they have FreeBSD support for the server, and more importantly, It. Just. Works.
With Channels do you have to manually FF through ads?
I ran MythTV on a PC connected to my TV for a while, but when I wanted to add a second TV I had a really hard time getting a decent fanless client at a reasonable cost (this was mid/late 2000's). I ended up switching to SageTV purely for the hardware client.
A year or so after SageTV was acquired, I moved to Plex. The biggest miss was the hardware client. I went through several sub-par iterations of PC-based hardware -- including mini-ITX PCs and Raspberry Pi -- but never got a setup that could run Plex, Youtube and Netflix and work 100% without a keyboard/mouse involved. I also tried some hardware -- Roku, original Chromecast -- but nothing was even remotely good as the SageTV HD300's, even years later.
Until I found the Nvidia Shield -- though it's more Google TV doing the real magic, I think. I still have the original 2015 model in my living room, still working perfectly. My newer "media room" TV uses built-in Google TV stuff -- I originally intended to use the Shield but it requires upgrading my just-before-4K-came-out AVR to be able to do 4k, so this setup was simpler. I also have a cheap "Chromcast with Google TV" on an old smaller set in front of my treadmill.
Over the past few years, I have all but stopped using Plex, though, as we went to pretty much 100% streaming services, but it is still running.
It's really thanks to MythTV, though, that I started down this path 15+ years ago. I've never had a cable/satellite TV subscription in my name, ever. It's interesting now to look back, because all my media sources have entirely changed since I started. I do still have everything needed for OTA in a box somewhere, but I never hooked it up in this house -- maybe it's time to give it a shot again.
Maybe I'm weird but I use MythWeb exclusively even though I run MythTV on my office workstation. mythfrontend is nice but I find it easier (read: more window manager-friendly) to use mpv to play recordings.
I've never been interested in scheduling through the frontend, I just use it to playback recordings with a remote control. I find it much easier to search and browse the guide through a web browser.
I ended up replacing all of it with a 1st Gen TabloTV, Plex and a Roku. I'm still rocking that TabloTV today. There's something to be said for having an appliance that just works.
Comcast still offers CableCARDs to new customers at least (https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/about-cablecards)
Havn't looked at it; but, wish it would work with streaming services / on-demand.
The downside to Channels (and to be fair, exact same with MythTV) is the homebrew nature. I had to set up and maintain it for them. But if you have the means to run one and you like traditional cable channel content still, nothing beats Channels.
They also have AppleTV and Firestick clients further sweetening the deal. It's $80 a year - but if you have dealt with Tivo or any of the other commercial products out there, that's not a lot - and it directly funds development. And development on Channels is very active, as is the dev participation in their forums (always a HUGE plus).
Now I don't want a TV near me in kilometers.