MythTV... floored.

[mledford]

You've heard me talk at length about my MythTV box that I have built. Last night I did a small "upgrade" to my setup.

All I have to say is... ^*&#*#! This thing rocks.

So what did I do? I enabled multiple frontends and used a pre-built Mac OS X package that allows me to use my MythTV box on my OS X machine. And the scary part... it works. It

Comments

Expensive argument...

[mledford]

Actually, I believe that the boxes for TiVo and MythTV come out to be about the same. Sure, there is a lot of time involved and time is money... but what else is more fun to a geek than the challenge of getting something to work?

I saw a TiVo Series 2 box for sell over the holidays... it's $99 after mail in rebate. It was really $199. The box only had a 40GB hard drive! Sure you could upgrade it to a 160GB with a kit... but that would make the TiVo $199 again (roughly the cost for a 160GB these days.) Then you either pay for lifetime membership $299. Or monthly fee. With the monthly fee you are a head of Myth for two years. With lifetime you are even. And in two or three years when you want a better TiVo or MythTV box you start to fall behind on TiVo as you don't need a new case and whatever else you can keep.

So it's a toss up. For me, I decided to go as cheap as I could to just have a PVR ~$350-$375 after all is said and done. And then upgrade the hardware later to be able to use all the functions of MythTV. Remember, my box is running a C5 processor at 800MHz. That's why I invested in the hardware encoder and decoder. The motherboard and CPU was one of those $12 things from Tiger Direct after rebate.

Anyway, enough rambling. I respect TiVo and think they do some things a lot better than MythTV... but then again they are a commercial product. I would hope it's better. I just like the hands on approach I have...whatever you do is cool. Just wanted to throw in my two cents.

Re: Expensive argument...

[blackwolfga]

Actually, I do believe that MythTV supports Serial Connections to cable boxes, which means that it can send a signal via the COM port to the digital cable box to change the channel. (My TiVo is capable of the same thing, except it doesn't have the drivers for my Motorola box. I'd have to get around to hacking it and install the drivers onto the Linux box via a hack to do that.) Then what you'd do is just take the straight signal into your capture card.

If I did this, I'd want to get the hardware pretty good so I wouldn't have to upgrade it in a year to get more stuff done. It looks cool and can do a lot, but I keep hearing about the hassles and all that fun stuff. I wish Comcast would actually get the Moxi service on their DVR's, that would get me to tell TiVo byebye...