[TriLUG] is anyone using MythTV as a DVR?

[Magnus]

On Jan 25, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm sick to death of the interface and serious lack of functionality of my
> DVR.  Not to mention lack of space.  MythTV on a Linux box with a big 'ol
> fat disk looks like a good option.  If anyone using one?  Would you
> recommend MythTV?

I was using it like 10 years ago. I don’t know how much it’s improved since then. The UX was tough for non-geeks, like my wife. 

Big problem was getting a feed. I could only get the local stations. Everything else was encrypted. Supposedly if you sacrifice a chicken and evoke the correct incantation, you can get a tuner box from TWC that has audio/video feed (in hi def) from the firewire port, which MythTV can handle. I wasn’t using one of those; I was using an HD Homerun. The HD Homerun was a nifty piece of hardware, which I think you can still get today. But it’s probably more useful for capturing OTA signal as Time-Warner only has local channels in clear QAM, and has been known to shuffle the channels around from time to time.

I’ve been kind of tempted to pick up a Lenovo TS140 (super cheap server), put an antenna on the roof, and dig the HD Homerun out of storage. Though I wouldn’t be using MythTV as the front-end interface; just as a convenient way to schedule recordings of series and trigger transcoding into something more useful to my set-top box (which, today, is an AppleTV).

I did play with XBMC last year on my Raspberry Pi. I would classify the UX as klugey on that, as well. Though it’s much prettier than I remember MythTV being (might be better now). 

-M