w00t! w00t! I got MythTV working!
Now all I need is a TV card that isn't crappy. I've tested time shifting and recording just fine. Unfortunately if it's recording it's playing on my speakers, and I don't have another system to dedicate to this function with a fast enough CPU so it has to be on this one. DVRs were never so cheap.
Here's a screen shot set it to your current resolution for the best idea of how it looks, I'm at 1600x1200, and it is full screen. The horizontal interlacing really doesn't show while the image is moving, you're going to get that nearly any time you do a screen shot of normal analog TV on a computer, reguardless of source. The vertical fuzzy bars are because my TV card is crappy. I'm going to get a new ome sometime soon.
To fairly answer your question:
I can't tell it's a recording. It looks just as good (or in this case crappy) as the program looked when it came over the cable to begin with. Beats VHS hands down.
One thing to bring up:
It likes to own the computer. Right now I have the back end running as a root owned process. I could tell it started recording Stargate SG-1 as I was typing this at 3:00 because the sound came on (I got delayed, didn't take THAT long to type this), other than that I can't tell it's running other than a little performance lag, a seperate HDD would probably help that. The program runs at full screen, and the ideal control interface is the remote control. I've never gotten my remote to work, so I'm using the keyboard, you can use the mouse to a limited degree, but you actually have to dig through menus to enable the cursor through the menu system. What I'm getting at, it would probably be better to dedicate a box. When you're using the front end, that's all your going to be doing with your system unless you do a goofy alt+tab run in the background thing. You have to use the front end to watch the recordings, they have a .nuv extension, so I really don't know what format that is. It can probably be converted or watched with MPlayer, I just haven't messed with that yet. If your card has an MPEG encoder it may be different, I don't know. I'm stuck with software encoding at the moment.
Yes I like it, but unless you dedicate a system, it's not a true Tivo replacement. I will probably use it to record my Friday Night Sci-Fi, it does have a better picture than VHS and if I happen to be away from home at a hotel I could sftp them to my laptop and watch them, I hope, time to look at that format closer.
Reply
Leave a comment