Gadget Wisdom

MythTV itself is a Digital Video Recorder which records off of various television sources. To make it a complete media center, it also needs playback of video files and DVDs.

MythVideo is a plugin that handles all of your video needs. In 0.22, it is dramatically expanded with support for new metadata information, TV Series handling, Fanart, Banners, Screenshots, and a host of new browsing features.

The biggest change is that MythVideo now supports storage groups. The feature is still in a preview phase, but it means videos can be watched with zero configuration on the frontend. Under the older system. each frontend had its own video directory settings. Thus, if you wanted to share files from a central server, you needed to set up an NFS share.

We’ve been using the new system, which unfortunately doesn’t work for DVD isos, but otherwise works flawlessly. External players, such as mplayer or xine for unsupported file types also does not work. Both are planned for 0.23.

Metadata can be very important to media file storage. As of 0.22, MythVideo uses TheMovieDB as its primary movie grabber. It also includes support for TV series handling with fields for season, episode, and subtitle, and support for TheTVDB to fill in the information. To determine if an item is a movie or a TV program, it parses the filename.

In additional to searching within the interface, MythTV now includes JAMU. We’ve done some basic testing on JAMU, which stands for Just Another Metadata Updater. JAMU provides for mass updating and regular maintenance of associated graphics and text meta data. It can even reorganize the directory structure based on the metadata.

Check back soon, when we will be providing some screenshots off of our MythTV Frontend of it in action. We just need to organize our MythVideo directories so we can best demonstrate these features.

Terra Theme

As you may know, MythTV 0.22 has gotten to  release candidates, but now, the team has announced the final version, barring any new critical issues, will be released next week.

Since the initial release candidate two weeks ago, more than 50 updates were submitted.

We’re not sure whether we like the new default theme in actual use, but it doesn’t show of the possibilities the new MythUI offers, and is visually appealing. Our biggest issue was that highlighted items on the new theme have a light box around them which does not contrast significantly.

We’ll be continuing to cover MythTV and the 0.22 release, discussing some of the tricks, tips, and issues we’ve come across.

Yesterday, MythTV unveiled its version 0.22 Release Candidate 1. It has been almost two years since version 0.21 was released, and the change brings a great deal of welcome changes.

• Support for the HD-PVR 1212 – The Hauppauge HD-PVR captures analog HD video and digital audio from component video inputs and outputs them over USB using the H264 codec. Since cable companies are encrypting almost all of their content, this device ensures the analog loophole can be exploited. We’ve been using the development version of 0.22 for this reason ever since our cable company shut off our other alternative.
• VDPAU Support – VDPAU is a feature of certain Nvidia graphics cards that permits offload of processor intensive video decoding, include the H264 codec the HD-PVR uses, from the system processor to the graphics card. Thus a slow system can play back HD content without problem.
• The User Interface has been ported to a new standard, MythUI. It allows for inheritance and menu animation, and takes layout and behavior away from the program and puts it under the control of the theme. And surprisingly, that simplifies things.
• Automatic Prioritization, which keeps track of what you watch and uses it to increase the priority of shows watched closer to their recording times over shows that are not.
• A New Channel Scanner – This is a big one, as instead of adding channels when found, it allows you to decide which channels to select, dividing them into New channels, Old Channels, and several different channel types. For example, every time we scan we find a variety of foreign-language channels. Since we don’t speak those languages, it is pointless to add them. This allows us to tell the system to ignore them on scan.
• HDHomeRun Multi-Rec Support – Multi-Rec has been supported under MythTV for DVB devices for a while. This extends it to the popular HDHomeRun, which we also happen to have. Digital TV, both cable and broadcast, allows for multiple subchannels to be embedded on the same channel frequency. Multirec allows two subchannels from the same channel to be recorded at once, instead of discarding all but the one you are watching. It means that if your cable system puts the local NBC and CBS affiliate on the same channel, you can record them simultaneously on the same tuner.
• A score of bug fixes and general handling improvements too numerous to list, but can be checked in the Release Notes.
• MythBrowser now has support for flash and javascript, which means it could be used for Hulu and other Streaming sites(We have yet to test this feature).
• MythNews, the RSS reader, now has podcast support(We have yet to test this feature).
• MythVideo now supports videos stored on the backend. Previously, this required adding the videos as NFS shares. New video metadata grabber scripts are now part of the package, and several other features. The networked option is still in its infancy, and is considered beta till the next version.

There are some additional features that you can review, but essentially, MythTV 0.22 is everything we hoped for after all these months. It can only get better from here. And for US residents, the only possible way this software would not be a great addition to your tech offerings is if the cable company locks down their system so much as to prevent you from using it.

For years now, we have run a MythTV DVR. It is a Linux-based software package that turns a computer into a digital video-recorder, complete with scheduling of programs.

We started with a single cable box with an active firewire connection to change the channel and a PVR-250 card we got cheap. That encoded the composite output from the box to MPEG2.

Eventually, we got the hang of firewire, discovered a bunch of tricks to get it to cooperate without crashing, and we’re working almost entirely off of cable with firewire, using a digital tuner to add redundancy on broadcast stations.

Then one day, the cable company shut down every firewire connection. The channel changing still works, but not streaming directly from the box. So we ordered the HD-PVR 1212.

The HD-PVR turns high definition component video and analog or digital audio into H264-encoded files. Ultra-compressed, and requiring a good CPU to decode. It exploits the so-called “analog loophole“, allowing one to record HD video off of an HD source.

And MythTV will support it in Version 0.22. Some have backported the device support to 0.21, the current stable version. So, we upgraded our installation(after a backup) to the 0.22 ‘bleeding’ version. You use development versions at your own risk. Unless you are contributing to the process with information, complaints about things not working will be ignored, mostly.

The HD-PVR seemed very buggy under Version 0.22, capturing at all resolutions, 480i, 720p, 1080i, with AC3 audio. And all of the files were filled with corruption, making it hard to play them back. So, the other night, despite the notation that the ability of the HD-PVR to handle multiple resolutions at a time had been stabilized, we reverted to 720p and AAC analog audio. So far, it has made everything rock solid. We’re doing tests of this over this weekend, after which we’ll try bringing back AC3 audio and/or 1080i, to see how high a quality we can get with complete stability.

The HD-PVR is a decent device that is developing better Linux-based support.  It is unfortunately the best option for recording HD video from other sources, as any digital options are shut down by the content providers.

More on our efforts in this area when all tests are complete.