Why I'll never use MythTV

[siliconaudio]

So the other day, I thought I'd take a foray into MythTV. I did a little reading and found that I could forget about getting any real use out of my ATI video card. Right-O, I buy an nVidia for just over $100. OK, now I'm sure my garden variety Azurewave (Twinhan) AD-SP200 DVB-S cards will be supported, after all they're common as mud - WRONG! OK, how about my two USB DVB-S units - NOPE, in fact only two or three of all the USB DVB interfaces ever made are supported in Linux... By the time I realised I'd need to drop another couple of hundred bucks on a pair of Linux supported DVB cards, I gave up.

I thought after all this time, the driver support in Linux would be pretty good. The truth is there is a mountain of hardware out there either not supported, or only partially supported.

Sure, I guess if I had started out with the intention of building a MythTV box before I had bought any hardware, I could have done my research and chosen hardware carefully. The real "Myth" is that you can use any old hardware to build a linux box and use it for MythTV. As an example, none of the hardware video enhancements are available to me if I choose to use my recent ATI card, and it's not even clear it it will use all the GPU horsepower to off-load video rendering.

Every couple of years I have a crack at Linux, find it absolutely useless for anything more than web browsing, and un-install. Sure, it can be useful as a back-end server, but as a desktop OS, it's still a waste of perfectly good PC hardware.

[stustunz]

yeah and it sounds like a headache to load the drivers once you actually do find them
love or hate windows its pretty slick to install these days

[pcostanza]

For about 2 1/2 years I had a dual boot and Ubuntu morphing into Myth Ubuntu and never got far at all. I wasn't nerdy enough nor did my system, which was more than enough muscle, like what was going on. I honestly wanted to see this bloom into something much easier and popular but I can't see that happening. Of course, those in Myth land are laughing their arses off when they read stuff like this.

[BigMoose]

My first PVR was Myth based (s-video SD out, comp video in from a set top box), ran it for a year or two but it all went arseways when I was in a position to receive HD and output to an HDMI telly. It just couldn't cope. Then I realised that the drivers were useless, no GPU/accel support for ATI and little chance of it appearing. While hunting around for solutions I came across GBPVR and have never looked back!! I'm a big unix/linux fan, but without full driver support it's a waste of time.

[johnsonx42]

Every year or so I try real hard to make a go at using Linux seriously on the desktop. It never works out. There's always too much stuff that just doesn't work. My server is Linux, as are several customers' servers, but on the desktop it's still a no-go.

[pcostanza]

I love the cube and 3D effects even though it's not that useful But, if Windows 8 wants to add some eye candy, and have a cube desktop where each side could be independent and virtual would be nice. I think you can buy that for W7 now but as part of the UI would be great. Sorry, I got us off course again.

[nitrogen_widget]

Mythbuntu.
nvidia 8400GS or an HD radeon 4000 type card.
Haupauge pvr 1600
Windows media center remote.

It just worked for me.

However, Flash 10.1 does not support hardware acceleration so no smooth Hulu desktop fullscreen (even on a 3ghz dual core pentium D)
Silverlight is MS & Apple only so no Netflix.

Both deal breakers for me.

Other than that I really didn't like the onscreen menu.

windows 7 has been really solid for me & actually runs better than XP on older hardware.

[pcostanza]

In the system I have Mythbuntu on it has an nvidia 8500 and the same PVR1600. Nothing but trouble. Even tried the drivers for the HPHR and gave up. I tired to like Linux and have installed a number of distros but I'm just no feeling it.

[pBS]

same with XBMC...biggest problem is getting accel working for HD...
funny thing is,i get better video support in some tiny linuxes than Myth which shouldn't be so...
ATI does have an 'official' driver for linux these days, but where it works correctly is a crap-shoot..only with certain apps in certain releases with certain cards...
same with Intel..

hopefully in a year or so the support will widen, but who's gonna hold their breath with the history Linux video accell has...
every tried verifying accell in linux? it ain't easy as it sounds....lol

[siliconaudio]

Right, ATI does have an "official" driver, but you can't use most of the video-specific features. I use a small amount of edge-enhancement and noise removal and I get a lot of comments about how good my SD video looks (we have no HD where I live, just SD via satellite).

The only feature I would like to borrow from MythTV is that the video refresh rate will follow the media, so you can have a mix of 24, 50, 60 Hz video files in your video library without needing to manually change the refresh rate of your video card. This is somewhat of a deal-breaker for me and why I have my library of movies on my Popcorn Hour and not my PVR.