MythTV 0.20 and Ubuntu Edgy Eft
by bhartsock on Feb.28, 2007, under MythTV, Software
Since MythTV is one of my favorite hobby projects, I figured I should start blogging about it. I started building my Myth box over the summer of 2006 with MythTV 0.19 and Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Since Dapper had no built in package support for MythTV, everything had to be compiled, including MythTV, IVTV, and LIRC. Edgy Eft has a MythTV package and it makes installing a lot easier.
The newest release of MythTV, 0.20, has many new features over 0.19, but only one stands out to me. MythTV’s internal DVD player is awesome compared to Xine. It is definitely the biggest improvement to Myth. MythArchive is also new and promising, but I haven’t used it so I can’t really comment. Once I get an HD card, I see myself using archiving much more. Its hard to waste a DVD on low quality shows.
Now that I have filled you in on my history with Myth and its newest features, I figure I should tell you what some of my favorite things about Myth are.
- MythTV recordings are near perfect, I haven’t missed any of my favorite shows in months.
- Transcoding compresses recordings to about 70% their original size, with very little quality loss
- MythDVD
- MythMusic + SSHFS to my desktop is amazing
Even though I love my MythTV box, Myth has many shortcomings. Here are a few of my least favorite things about MythTV:
- MythDVD doesn’t allow ripping of entire DVD’s, just the main movie. I use K9Copy to backup my DVDs.
- MythDVD digital audio pass through doesn’t work (I have an awesome home theater so this is really annoying)
- MythDVD autoplay doesn’t work
- Setting HELL
- Transcoding/Post recording processing is a pain
- Audio configuration is horrific
- XV vs. XVMC
- And 1000 other things that I barely understand
- Transcoding: Can’t make it happen by default
- MythBrowser never works good
- MythWeb is buggy
I will continue to keep everyone posted on my MythBreakthroughs and eventually I hope to post a script that will basically install MythTV on any Ubuntu system.
(Oh yea, Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn supposidly includes an IVTV package, awesome)
March 30th, 2007 on 11:07 am
I am glad you like the internal player, me too, however it does not work for me in some situations, namely playing protected DVDs, Full ISO images, or .avi files.
Internal player playing .iso images does not buffer enough so the audio breaks up the the image skips
Ditto for DVDs
I cannot make the internal player play .avi files either.
I wish I could use one player ( the internal player preferably ) to play .iso, .avi, and DVD. As it is, I need to use xine for .iso and .dvd, mplayer for .avi, and internal player for .vob Do you have any suggestions for settings to make this all work with one player?
p.s. I fixed the mythbrowser problem by running firefox instead. I figured out how to do this on a minimyth frontend.
May 4th, 2007 on 2:04 pm
What kind of problems are you having with the digital audio? I am running 0.20 on Edgy with digital audio out to my A/V receiver.
What kind of sound card are you running? Have you checked out the following page on the MythTV wiki:
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Configuring_Digital_Sound
Also I have had no issues playing .avi files in the MythVideo plugin. I am using mplayer to play them. I do like the internal DVD player over mplayer or xine however.
Andy
May 28th, 2007 on 4:45 am
I use myth running Ubuntu on a shuttle SB61G2 v3:
My previous version was running on Ubuntu 6.10 with a custom 2.6.29 kernel (to get support for my saa7134 tuner card) and also a custom build of the wireless module to make that work.
My SPDIF output was never functional on 6.10 and I never got around to looking into fixing it but i recently upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04 and now all of the above customization is no longer necessary as it all works by default and now my SPDIF is also functional.
So I would guess that you problem with the Audio pass through is not Myth related but driver related.
Cheers, Gavin C.
May 28th, 2007 on 4:51 am
ALSO:
The internal player for MythTV uses ffmpeg to decode the files and for legal reasons (at least in Ubuntu) the full build of ffmpeg is not included in the OS. I haven’t tried this myself as I am quite happy using Xine to play AVI’s but if you build and install the full ffmpeg library then maybe the internal player will play avi’s ??
here is a link on the topic.
http://po-ru.com/diary/fixing-ffmpeg-on-ubuntu-edgy/
Cheers, Gavin C.
May 28th, 2007 on 12:02 pm
I couldn’t play AVI files until I ran this command.
# apt-get install mplayer