I used MythTV extensively in the late 2000s to capture over the air (OTA) tv. My kids were young and it was a terrific way to capture tv shows for them (and for me when doing 2AM feedings).
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.
I was a big MythTV fan in the aughts, and this was a blast from the past.
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.
I just connected to the built in web server in my HD HomeRun and it shows 105 channels. I always see people complaining about having to pay for cable to watch sports when 90% of them are available for free over the air.
Do you get ESPN OTA? Or your local sports regional network (likely owned by Bally Sports) OTA?
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.
That really depends on the sports and maybe the teams you want to watch. Looking at my TV schedule for the next two weeks or so, I get three NHL games OTA, none of which feature my local team (which is playing seven games in the same time frame). There's usually a lot of baseball and football, but whether you teams you want to follow is up for grabs.
There's lots of channels, but nothing to watch :P with cable, there'd be a lot more channels, and still, nothing to watch :)
One thing that you learn pretty quickly if you go deep on the cord-cutter route is that every single consumer situation is unique. The feasability/enjoyment of cord-cutting is going to _heavily_ depend on your _very specific_ viewing habits and physical setup (i.e. nearby towers and your line-of-sight to said towers... in addition to direction of towers if you need to combine multiple sources).
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.
This takes me back! The first home server I ran had a TV capture card, ran Gentoo with MythTV, was hooked up to the living room TV, and was a pretty good source of entertainment for the gradstudent apartment I shared. Saving broadcasts, trimming out commercials, ... and of course fun with running a Linux server.
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)!
Same. I attribute a good portion of my linux knowledge today to setting up and running a MythTV machine. I ditched cable and moved to a place that has little OTA broadcasts so haven't run it in years but that box is still sitting in my basement.
The Tablo devices are what I use now for those few things on broadcast TV I want to DVR. Fairly cheap, no recurring cost, and reliable. The UI is a little wonky, but you get used to it. And there's apps for things like FireTV, Roku, etc, so you don't have to physically wire it to one TV.
First I thought I had clicked something that showed really old postings. I had no idea MythTV would still be around.
I never used MythTV though; I used Freevo in the 2000s. Worked quite well once I had it configured. Every once in a while I looked over the fence to see if the DVRs were greener on the other side, but never got around trying MythTV.
I still have many shows and episodes I saved with Freevo, on old hard drives somewhere.
Sort of waiting for some new iteration of what "popcorn time" was. With all the fragmentation of content across different providers, and more aggressive actions on account sharing, crossing region restrictions, etc...it feels like average people are now starting to complain a lot.
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.
Private services like this exist. For $40 a year one lets me stream any show/movie on apps across all platforms including android tv. Seamless netflix-like sync across devices, family profiles, selectable video/audio quality up to 4k, etc
> Sort of waiting for some new iteration of what "popcorn time" was
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.
I wasn't trying to compare paid/free, just that there's a renewed opening for a beginner friendly pirate platform.
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.
You missed my point entirely. Popcorn time was net negative for piracy. It led to the current state of things IMO; Netflix, Hulu, etc. may have had fewer ads, more features, and lower prices if Popcorn time had not led to so many non-technical people having ease of access.
Culture matters. Understand what maintains it. Protect it.
It's like you've missed that the Popcorn time crowd was eternal September and you've never built up a significant ratio on any reputable private tracker. You don't just do that by "seeding longer."
> 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.
99% of the time, if a file just loads up and plays in popcorn time, then you won't have to seed very long to get a perfectly good ratio. It would be nice to seed long-term, but a positive ratio is enough to not cause any harm.
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.
> Popcorn time was net negative for piracy. It led to the current state of things IMO; Netflix, Hulu, etc. may have had fewer ads, more features, and lower prices if Popcorn time had not led to so many non-technical people having ease of access.
That's damage to Netflix, Hulu, and etc. What was the damage to piracy?
I'm fairly certain we're close to the point of a la carte streaming reaching parity with at least some major cable package offerings.
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...
Forget the pirate part, I wish there were just a very beginner friendly FOSS "smart" TV platform that seamlessly integrated antenna, cable, auxiliary inputs, and streaming services (DRMed or otherwise) with PVR functionality that could be thrown on a minimal system and bolted to the back of a monitor. Basically a MythTV or Kodi minus minus.
Tvheadend on a Raspberry (if you have one) and a TV hat. I'm using it to watch TV right now, using the TVH Client app and VLC as video player. It has a popup player so I'm typing this message while watching the stream.
Wow, had no idea this thing was still around. Takes me back to neo Kodi/XBMC/Windows ME days. So much hardware and software to accomplish what a small stick does today.
Channels DVR works with quite a few streaming services (via TV Anywhere) and does commercial skip too. I use it with YouTube.TV as well as Philo. My parents also pick up OTA with an HD HomeRun on their channels DVR.
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).
Big fan of MythTV here and daily user forever now.
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.
The local stations I watched when I was a child. There are a handful of newscasters still around from when I last lived there 25 years ago. It's a pretty fun way of keeping a pulse of back home.
I was always very impressed with MythTV. It was the first project that I saw that made really good use of versioning their mysql database with SQL queries to change the schema linked to the software version.
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.
This is very relatable. I guess I should count myself lucky that my then-3yo "only" hurled a remote and smashed the TV in retaliation for TV time being over. And that I only buy the "cheap" $4-500 TVs instead of the high-end ones.
By default, no. But if you've got an accidental damage clause in your policy, it would generally cover such losses. Although it would probably help to characterize it as an unfortunate accident caused by your little cherub rather than the spiteful act of your devil spawn.
Back in 2096 I had myth running on a cube shaped PC by my TV. It had one fan, with a fancy pipe work to shift heat from the processor.
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.
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.
I love my children with all of my heart but they can be so destructive in learning through mistakes.
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'm still rocking my 13 year old SageTV installation. Even the hardware clients are still working well. So grateful they were allowed to open source the software after Google acquired it.
I moved from MythTV to SageTV ~15 years ago or so, for the hardware client.
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.
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.
I'm right at the base of a hill and I've never been able to get broadcast TV. A couple years back, I realized that I was watching cable TV less and less and the odd show/sports event/news broadcast just wasn't worth paying $1K/year any longer.
I tried to get this to work multiple times around 2004. This might be where I first dove into linux. I gave up every time. I ended up using windows media center which worked flawlessly for years. I moved on to plex and a hdtvhomerun when they released it (it handles deleting old series, etc). About a year ago I realized I don't really watch live TV anymore and unplugged it.
Similar for me, except I got it working after tens of hours invested. After wasting time with nonstandard hardware, I got a Hauppauge PVR series capture card with hardware MPEG2 encoding. That made all the difference.
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.
In case this resonates with anyone else's nostalgia, the highlight of my time with MythTV was setting up a system to automatically transcode episodes of selected shows to 320x250 for my iPod video which I could then sync and watch on a plane. Heady stuff for 2005-2006.
Similar for me but I never made a serious attempt at MythTV because I never had dedicated hardware in those days. So I ended up installing XP MCE on my main machine (you could minimize/exit Media Center and it was just plain Windows underneath).
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.
Same here. Tried multiple times, but it was just too rough.
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.
Love mythtv. I've been using it since about 2003 or so. It was definitely a janky experience in the beginning, but once I was able to ditch needing an IR blaster it became an absolute pleasure to setup and use.
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.
The reason you can't just buy a "VCR-like" device is because everything is digital now, and it's much simpler/cheaper to capture and record the digital signal than do analog/digital conversion.
> 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.
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:
Yes, you have to dig through the DVR results. PVR (personal video recorder) might be a better search term, I didn't try it. I'm sure there's some that cost less, that was just the first one I found.
>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.
Tivo has a pure OTA model that is a reasonable deal. And their UI still beats the pants off of everyone else. Heck they finally embraced commercial skipping too.
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.
It's ashame that MythWeb isn't under active development anymore[0]. The MythWeb change log in the 0.33 release doesn't have any commits newer than June 4, 2022.
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.
There's now a built-in web frontend, which I guess let the sails out of mythweb. :/
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 used MythTV for several years, until Comcast went digital in my neck of the woods, and my tuner card was useless. What do people tune to content with now? Is it all IR control of a cable box?
Check out channels dvr (getchannels.com/dvr) as a modern, actively developed DVR. I love it. I'm running Channels on an ESXi host and just use the AppleTV app as the interface.
Channels DVR is a fantastic piece of software that I have been running for a few years now. It's reliable and does not need much in terms of hosting hardware. Currently running it on a 2012 Mac Mini with USB attached SSD with an Apple TV as the client.
I've used MythTV since something like 2004. Still great to use for Digital OTA broadcasts (and free-to-air satellite / DVB if that's available in your area). Cable DRM has unfortunately made it much less useful for recording cable broadcasts, thanks to them being allowed to encrypt all QAM signals, and now aren't required to support/provide CableCards either: https://www.nexttv.com/news/charter-cuts-off-cablecard-suppo...
That's interesting. I setup a new MythTV box two years ago on a Mac mini running Ubuntu, using a Hauppauge HD PVR 1212 capture device connected over USB. I've been able to record HD cable without dealing with any DRM by using the RCA jacks of my Comcast box, which has worked great.
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.
I tired for along time to get MythTV working with limited success. The Silicon Dust tuners were new at the time and support was spotty. I eventually gave up and used Windows MCE but it was limited to a single TV.
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.
MythTV was the reason I bought and assembled my first x86 PC. I even bought a copy of Red Hat Linux 8 Personal (before Fedora) to run on it. That system became my main desktop PC and is still running more than 20 years later -- like a Ship of Theseus, with every hardware and software component upgraded multiple times. I'm not a progammer but I wanted to help fix bugs and add features, so it was also the reason I learned C++ and MySQL.
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.
Mine is lying to me (should be from 2007/2008). My specs are very similar, no SSD. Even though I haven't updated software in a while and still on 29.1, it is painfully slow now. Loading a recording takes almost a minute on the same hardware. Used to be seconds.
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
SSD for the disk with the database was the best improvement I ever made. Also, have you run the database table repair job recently? You probably have many deleted rows that haven't actually been removed.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadIt'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
https://www.reddit.com/r/nfl
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.
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)!
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...
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).
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 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.
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.
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'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.
https://www.tivo.com/products/edge-antenna
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.
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.
[0] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythWeb
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.
Comcast still offers CableCARDs to new customers at least (https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/about-cablecards)
MythTV: An Open Source Digital Video Recorder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634491 - Dec 2021 (3 comments)
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.
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.
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.
Now I don't want a TV near me in kilometers.
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%