Media Portal vs MythTV

bush doctor

Has anyone used these two applications?

I installed Media Portal on a Windows partition to test and plan on installing MythTV on Ubuntu.

The Media Portal functionality seems pretty good with a decent interface. Is there much more to MythTV, essentially is it worth the extra effort for a relative linux noob?

QuartzIte

I have mythtv installed on a server machine serving recorded tv/live tv/music/videos to two other rooms via slave machines. I installed using Knoppmyth and this is a very straightforward install with plenty of guides/support on the web. A good one is http://knoppmythwiki.org/ which has a number of how-to documents.
A number of good features that mythtv has:
A web interface so that you can control it from a remote location to set up recordings, monitor status, and download recored programs

It also has samba installed so i can use that also to copy files on and off it to your windows machine

From the web interface you can also stream recordings to any machine that has a network access. I use VLC media player on my windows machine to play back recorded programs

I have set up my music on mythtv so that I can play it around the house. Its handy in that it builds a DB of all your music so that if you have a large music collection its easy to browse

One of the nice things about mythtv that took some getting used to was skipping all the ads. At this stage I almost never watch live tv as it faster to watch recorded programs and jump through the ads, for example on sky you can watch about 2 hours of tv in about 1.5 hours when you take out all the ads. which is handy when you get home late or miss the start of your program as you can catch up quickly

From the interface you can also watch DVDs and listen to CDs. If you have movies (divx etc) you can also store these in one place and watch them wherever. The movie section allows you to use imdb to fill in the details on the movie and associate a picture with it

Watching live tv on mythtv is good also as you can pause & rewind live tv, watch tv while browsing the listing and if you have multiple tuners then have picture in picture. One feature I use a lot is setup mythtv is auto record all my favourite programs and when they come up it auto-records them.

For example you can setup mythtv to record all episodes of say southpark with no repeats and mythtv will record every episode it finds without repeating any on either a particular channel or all channels and fairly soon you'll have a large collection of them.

The tv listings uses listings from the radio times website so it has all the channels including the irish ones and you can set it up to auto update so that you always have a listing two weeks into the future of whats coming up

Another couple of things that mythtv has is news feeds, a game emulator, a weather program and a phone module (though I haven't used this one myself yet).

The latest version of knoppmyth is very good and it auto detects most hardware which makes it much easier to install than older versions of knoppmyth. For a linux newbie I would recommend this route as opposed to install mythtv onto ubuntu as all the software required is on the disc so you won't have as many problems with the config etc.

Sorry for going on but I'm a big fan of mythtv and knoppmyth. My 2c anyway

SouperComputer

sorry for going on but I'm a big fan of mythtv and knoppmyth. My 2c anyway

Thank god, im not going mad it seems. What IR receviers and remotes are you using BTW?

MythTV gives you total flexabilty and networkability and requires a MUCH lower spec. Playback machines can be as low as a PII 400. Knoppmyth for teh win, it covers most hardware and ensures you have all needed packages

Media portal is grand, but generally ive found it to be buggy and slow to start up. Not to mention that its not really designed with networking in mind. You will NEED a DX9 card to run it decently.

bush doctor

Nice one

No contest then knoppmyth for me

adrian.s

bush doctor wrote:

Nice one

No contest then knoppmyth for me

Knoppmyth seems to be ok for a starting point, but if you want to be really fleixble with myth it's probably worth building the system up yourself.

I'm using mythv, pretty much extensively right now and I must admit, from a reliablility perspective it's absolutely class.

BTW, Mythtv 0.19 is due out in the next few days so keep an eye out for the release. Looking at the release notes, it would appear to have got a lot of nifty new things to play with.

For those interested in thin myth clients, I've just ordered myself one of these cases:

http://www.iwill.net/product_2.asp?p_id=40&sp=Y

Anybody here on boards used one?

A.

SouperComputer

@ adrian.s

Just wondering if there was anything in particular that stood out that you could do by installing from scratch, rather than using knoppmyth? Im guessing the security implications are one.

How much is the iwill BTW? Im hoping to get to cebit this year and see more of that kind of thing.

adrian.s

SouperComputer wrote:

@ adrian.s

Just wondering if there was anything in particular that stood out that you could do by installing from scratch, rather than using knoppmyth? Im guessing the security implications are one.

How much is the iwill BTW? Im hoping to get to cebit this year and see more of that kind of thing.

Yip security was one aspect, the other was I wanted to be able to easily plug and play drivers to get the best combination to work, finally I built the machine on AMD 64 so I wanted to get everything working in a 64 bit environment. So far so good, I'm pretty pleased with the results.

The iwill was $136 from a site called geeks.com in the US. $68 to ship to Ireland but it was still a pretty reasonable price.

Adrian.