MythTV VS TopupTV

I've spotted a TopupTV PVR thing in the supermarket at £80, which is made by
Thomson. I've also got a Compaq PC which I was planning to make into a
MythTV box (IIRC it's a P4 1.7 with 512 megs of RAM). By my reckoning, it's
going to cost around £80-100 to get that working as a MythTV machine, as
I'll need a Hauppage 350 and a videocard with S-video out, unless I can
scrounge one, along with a linux compatable Wifi card for it.

Now, am I going to be better off with the ready built TopupTV machine or
the MythTV? I know I'll be able to watch / listen to all the stuff I've
downloaded with MythTV, but I'm not sure how much aggro and hassle it'll be
to setup - I've currently got Ubuntu working on the machine so I know it
works OK with Linux, but I've never played with MythTV. Does it work solidly
and reliably or is it like so many other open source good ideas which only
work some of the time?

 

Doki wrote:

<snip>

settopbox for girls who want to watch hollyoaks.
myth for boys who like to tinker with things all the FUCKING TIME.

My mythbox has dual tuners and a feck off hard disk, it does all my
torrenting and stuff too. It's fantastic at what it does and since I
spent a full year tweaking it to perfection, I now don't watch TV at all.

Ymmv. (my point is that you'll probably never be content with the mythtv
setup and it's SO configurable that you'd be better off viewing it as a
hobby rather than an appliance)

 

No. You don't need a 350 - any DVB-R PCI card that works with Linux will do.
Why do you need s-video out - what display device will you be using on the
frontend? Also, why the WiFi? How are you going to set up the network?

Once setup, solid and reliable. 0.22 is a classy release - I never worry
about a thing. If you've done the "hard bit" i.e. installing Linux, you'd be
crazy not to give it a go. The documentation wiki[1] and mailing list / IRC
support are both excellent.

[1] Read it before you dive in to avoid pain later.

--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

Is the 350 not *the* twin tuner DVB card that works with linux? The TopupTV
thing is twin tuner.

Wifi so that I can access music and films over the network. Manually
transferring everything to IDE hard drives is not really a practical option
for me. Network would run through SAMBA would it not?

IME installing linux is the easy bit, but I have done it a lot of times.
It's making everything work right that's the problem.

 

A telly. Not a plasma, not an LCD, just a telly.

 

No. It's an old POS. http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_PVR-350
Have a look at http://tinyurl.com/6fl79q. You can gauge compatibility via
judicious searching of http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and
searching the web for the card model and Linux.

I have a couple of these: http://tinyurl.com/5ujqhj. They work fine, see
http://tinyurl.com/53thzc. I don't think they made dual-tuner PCI cards when
I set my box up.

If you want twin tuners on one card, you could try http://tinyurl.com/47gbqk,
which is well supported (see http://tinyurl.com/2unn68).

That's fair enough. You only need Samba if you want to access stuff directly
from the filesystem, using Windows networking. Myth has its own networking
infrastructure, assuming that (a) what you want to access is imported into (or
recorded by) Myth, and (b) you have the Myth frontend installed on all client
machines.

Most important question - what OS will you be running on the frontend (client)
machines? If Windows, see http://tinyurl.com/56bmzm.

Piece of piss.
--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

What size? You might want to consider a VGA->RGB Scart converter, if the TV
is a reasonable size and you are bothered about picture quality, it might be
worth it. http://tinyurl.com/5eu3vy looks interesting, cheaper ones don't
appear to support 16:9 resolutions, but of course it doesn't matter if your TV
is 4:3.

--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

802.11n wifi is what you want. I've got a complete network now and
it's rock solid for streaming everything including full dvd and hd.

 

TBH the idea was not to stream stuff but to copy stuff over via the network.
Perhaps stream music.

 

Thinking of a combined front and back box under the telly. All the other
machines in the house will be windows, hence samba.

 

I want something that I can set up and have just working. It needn't be
simple as simple to set up, but it needs to work solidly and be usable by my
Girlfriend. The only reason I ever use Linux is when I want something that I
can just set up and leave (ie, PC for parents etc.) whereas a Windows box
will start screaming for some attention sooner or later. Day to day I'd
rather use Windows, but it needs a lot of TLC to keep it running sweetly.

 

Was that a conscious decision or did you just not realise that Myth gives you
"streamability"? Of course it's down to you, but streaming is usually
preferable, the data is more managable and efficient when it's in one place.

--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

So check out the link.

Also, if you want to share music over the network without going to filesystem
level, you might want to investigate the daap protocol. I know enough about
it to know that it lets me listen to music from anywhere on my network using
Rhythmbox. I believe that on Windows, iTunes supports daap, and I'm sure
there are other players as well. On the server you would need to install
mt-daapd.

I personally don't have all my music in Myth, but that's more for legacy
reasons than a conscious decision.

--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

I don't want to have to have 2 PCs on just to listen to music in the living
room. The way I see it is that the MythTV box will need to be on all the
time, whereas my other PCs don't. It makes sense to put the stuff that
you'll want to access from all the PCs on the one that's on all the time.
Networking seems like the easiest option TBH.

 

Are we talking at cross-purposes? I never said don't use a network. I agree
with what you say above.

--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

Networking VS streaming. I got the gist that streaming requires a MythTV
frontend on the receiving machine, whereas a SAMBA network would just be a
simple list of files to go through.

 

Let's call it copying vs streaming, otherwise I get confused, as both work on
the network. I don't see that copying is better in any way, unless your
network is flaky.

Did you read the link with all the different options for Windows frontends?

What files in particular? Myth is not really designed for its recordings to
be shared at file system level. I don't think it saves recordings with
human-readable names. And do you /really/ want to set up Samba? Hence the
varied methods of viewing, in the link above. Also, check out the excellent
Mythweb. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Mythweb and
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Play_Recordings_On_Windows_From_MythWeb.

--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

You get out what you put in - mythweb is generally a Good Thing - I wouldn't
want to have a Myth box without it.

--
TD
1991 VFR400R NC30 (black and red)
2001 ZX-9R (red and black)
1999 M5 (neither black nor red)
Missing: SOB, Unreliable Italian exotica, Lardy tourer

 

I've got the TopupTV/Thomson box. If all you want is a plug-and-play box
with twin tuners, EPG, series link, etc. then it'll do what you want. It
works fine and is very convenient.

 

I meant "streaming" in the sense that you're not doing the following
steps

1. Copy file to local hard drive
2. Wait about 10 minutes for this to complete because TV is about 1GB
per hour
4. Watch show[/QUOTE]

No, not that.

Yes, that.