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)