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I was going to go to a computer market this morning and spend a few hundred dollars more to see if I could get that stupid Vista box sorted. This seems to be the thing with Vista. You gotta throw money at it. Bit like sailing boats, really.
Instead I got distracted by a collection of hardware I had at hand:
Gigabyte board, Athlon XP 3200
1G RAM
ATI Radeon 9550
ASUS Cobra Sound Card (SPDIF out)
My two old but very fine Ultraviews (no vista drivers )
One old Twinhan DBTV PCI card
One old VisionPlus DBTV PCI card
I got lotsa hard drives
10m of antenna lead to drag from home entertainment room to my Den of Iniquity (no antenna point in there)
I put it together and installed Mythbuntu 8.04 beta. Now, I've been fart arsing around with MythTv for some time now and it's always been bitter sweet. Usually I've hit a brick wall and then give up. Until next time. I probably learnt a bit as well, like how to tell my backend from my frontend.
Twenty minutes it's running. While I'm at it I set the box up as a remote backend. I'll be keen to see if it really works.
Another 30 minutes and all four tuners are installed. Working fine. Can record three, watch one. No stutters!! I even got the remote control working!!
Stuffed around for another hour and finally got the Shepherd working as well.
OK, I'm totally blown away here. But before I get too excited, surely there must be a reason why Vista is better. In the meantime, I'm going to run this thing all week, try some of the plug ins, and see what breaks.
I was going to go to a computer market this morning and spend a few hundred dollars more to see if I could get that stupid Vista box sorted. This seems to be the thing with Vista. You gotta throw money at it. Bit like sailing boats, really.
Fred, I am comtinually amazed that your Vista box is such a problem for you. Mine just works. In fact, it's so stable it's almost boring.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy you are getting some fun / success out of MythTV, but given my almost painless Vista experience, I am amazed that your experience is so poor.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy you are getting some fun / success out of MythTV, but given my almost painless Vista experience, I am amazed that your experience is so poor.
I was suspicious that there were hardware issues. For example, the constant disconnection of USB devices, especially the DVICO card and the M$ remotes. And then there's the awful networking performance? Now, I know I am alone on that one. But then I boot into an XP image and all is fine. So, whatever the issues, it's with Vista.
Anyway, it's more about the mission I'm on. I've always wanted to rid our house of Microsoft. The VMC is the last remnant and my several hours with Mythbuntu encourage me to think I'm there. And I'm doing it with second hand hardware!
I was suspicious that there were hardware issues. For example, the constant disconnection of USB devices, especially the DVICO card and the M$ remotes. And then there's the awful networking performance? Now, I know I am alone on that one. But then I boot into an XP image and all is fine. So, whatever the issues, it's with Vista.
Anyway, it's more about the mission I'm on. I've always wanted to rid our house of Microsoft. The VMC is the last remnant and my several hours with Mythbuntu encourage me to think I'm there. And I'm doing it with second hand hardware!
Cheers
Fred,
For me two things stand out from your comment...
1. DVICO - Absolutely the worst tuners available these days - drivers are so flaky under Vista I wanted to throw my Media Center out the window. After many different DVICO cards, I now have the Hauppauge Nova-T 500 PCI and with the Vista inbuilt drivers I have had a fault free experience.
2. Vista Network performance (pre-SP1) was definitely worse than XP - you're not alone on that. Service Pack 1 however has totally changed that - gigabit network connection is running as fast (if not faster) than it did under XP for me, with less CPU utilisation.
For me Media Center is a necessity as I love the whole Media Center extender technology - until someone comes out with custom software for one of these HD capable UPnP boxes to run Myth client (or whatever their "extender" is called), a PC per room is overkill and too hard for me to justify.
I will however read your posts with interest because there are many things Vista Media Center just doesn't do (the little things) that annoy me, so I'm always interested in what else is available.
Regards,
Shane.
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Fantastic to hear it's getting so easy! Can't wait until XBMC has the myth plugin finalised. There's a lot of work going on at the moment to make XBMC a frontend for recording services.
My only question is about the EPG. Is there a decent Aussie one available?
Check out Shepherd mentioned in FredZ original post. The installation instructions are a little bit daunting, but well worth the effort. I have been using shepherd for about 8 months now, and it has been absolutely flawless. The data is top notch also. Movies have data added from IMDB.com and the HD channels are fully supported. It gathers it's data from several sources and complies the best of it, so if one source falls over, the others pick up the slack. It updates itself when the authors come up with fixes, so you never even know if there has been a problem!
Back to Fredz original question, I love my MythTV, but it certainly isn't perfect. The most annoying 'feature', is not being able to browse through menus whilst media is playing! As soon as you press the Back button, the media stops playing. I believe that this will be possible with music only in the upcoming 0.21 release. Definitley a long overdue step in the right direction.
The Music UI is diabolical also. It's unattractive and counterintuitive.
It takes time to 'build' a Myth system, but the rewards are high. It's best not to rush it.Once it's setup though, it just doesn't break.
All in-one packages like Mythbuntu have gone a long way to improving things as far as installation goes, but you still need to setup your own guide, remote etc.
XBMC sounds like a great option when it gets off the ground. Myth backend & XBMC - very appealing.
Arkay, can you provide some info as to where you can download XBMC so I can try it out? I found the wiki, but I can't find a download location. Some install instructions would be good too.
Arkay, can you provide some info as to where you can download XBMC so I can try it out? I found the wiki, but I can't find a download location. Some install instructions would be good too.
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