Less mythical every day
There's no shortage of Linux PVRs. Technically, TiVo is a Linux PVR. So are lots of other set-top boxes and home entertainment servers from vendors large and small. You can hack one together yourself if you like. Russ Pavlicek, my old Linux Show colleague, put one together last summer. Look up "Linux PVR" on Google and Russ' project often comes out on top.
Recently, however, I was a guest on The Linux Link Tech show, where I learned from Patrick Davila that MythTV, Isaac Richards' project (last covered here by Marcel Gagné in the August 2003"Cooking with Linux") "has evolved into a major project with many contributors".
The project is at version 0.17 at this writing. Meanwhile, Freevo, another familiar Linux PVR project is at 1.5.3, with a 2.0 release in the works.
Patrick says, "Install can be a bear"; but the upside for DIY PVR builders is a limitless variety of actual and potential services. Start perusing those thousands of posts and threads about MythTV and it's clear we're starting to see what motivated Isaac Richards in the first place: a "mythical convergence box".
The "myth" in this case is the convergence promise that the cable and other large commercial players have never delivered in an uncompromised form. Apple, Microsoft and other usual suspects (including the cable and satellite TV set top box makers) all want to move your "digital lifestyle" onto their "platform", rather than provide you with ways to build whatever you want. The potential capabilities are limitless.
So far, in addition to pausing and time-shifting live TV, MythTV features commercial skipping, multiple codec support, growing HDTV support, and a variety of open source applications. These include MythWeather (local forecasts), MythDVD (copy and play DVDs with mplayer or Xine,) MythGallery (photo slide shows) MythNews (RSS aggregator), MythMusic (rip, store and play back in mp3, ogg, FLAC, wav), MythGame (emulate gameware with xmame, fceultra, zsnes) and MythPhone (voice and video using SIP).
In fact, MythTV is so promising that the EFF featured the project in a call for independent builders to flesh out solutions that the "broadcast flag" would outlaw if they aren't built before July 1, 2005:
We want to keep the right to time- and space-shift that the VCR has given us (against Hollywood's protest). We want to keep the fair use rights that let us excerpt clips from press conferences or make our own "Daily Show" from the evening news. That's why we're encouraging people to buy HDTV tuner cards now and build multi-function receivers and recorders around them.
Here's where you can help. The folks at www.pcHDTV.com make an HD-capable (ATSC) tuner card with Linux drivers. The MythTV project has built a terrific personal video recorder (PVR) platform that gives a GNU/Linux PC features like TiVo's pause live TV and "season pass" recording. These are great for geeks, and we're looking for volunteers to help make the combination more accessible to the general public.
Of course, the rest is up to you. Which is why projects like MythTV exist in the first place.
- Doc Searls
Links:
http://mythtv.org
http://freevo.sourceforge.net
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6942
http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/
http://www.pchdtv.com/
MythTV - Linux PVR
Patrick Davila
LVLUG - 03/08/2005
Overview