[mythtv-users] My Tivo just died. Beyond or Myth?

Jack Trout witmore1 at gmail.com
Sat Jun 25 06:14:48 UTC 2005


<ramble on>
I love myth and currently use it, but BeyondTV had some positives over
myth as it stands.

Input card tuner support. I tried Beyond TV before I had a PVR card,
and I could get mpeg2 encoded shows at 1gig per hour from my wintv-go
card that rival the quality of that with my pvr-250 cards. and the
windows drivers are much easier to configure and choose as they are
provided from manufacturer. With myth, I have had an IVTV module
update almost bi-weekly if I check, and at some point in those upgrade
I have went from having a crystal clear image to have a faint negative
ghost somehow, but I am now too busy to troubleshoot

BeyondTV has a remote admin features that isnt available. first you
can add and remove shows from thier webservers, and it will propogate
to your client, without firewall or security adjustments, or knowing
your home ip address. but if you want to open your box to the outside
world, it has userlevel access support for its webconsole (I believe I
have seen someone comment that this may soon be incorporated into
mythweb, but isnt currently available as of my last upgrade) and it
comes stock with the ability to transcode existing programs and stream
them via wmp and will also allow you to watch live tv. (nothing like
sitting in a meeting or staying late at work and dialing up a show
while you run compilations or something like that) while there is a
plugin that if configured right does most of this, but its just not as
flexible as thier finished product

but there are serveral reasons why I dont currently use BeyondTV
first being, its not free, yes I am a cheapskate, but I hate paying
for software that has the ability to track my viewing habits, and make
money, mind you they pay alot of developers to make those features I
described above work great and little headache for me, but it doesnt
make me think outside the box,

MythTV is a growing suite, and being that it is on a platform that is
growing, people are coming up with new ideas for how to use them and
what can add value, like networking the boxes together and using
combined power of all the tuners in a concerted effort, I believe
beyondtv offers something of this nature, but its a 1 recorder and
many client nature, and it costs more. it also costs more to have more
than 2 tuners in a beyond tv server, so some people I have seen have
described as many as 4 tuners in 1 machine, and with PVR-500's
stablizing on the horizon (may already be stable) I can see it easily
being 6 or 8 tuners in one machine (PVR-500s if you didnt know have 2
tuners per card).

The ability to share movies, Mp3s and via the menu and lock them out
with parental controlls. it allows you to rip your dvds or cds then
share them to all the networked frontends, or just have one massive
media server, but its so nice not to have to plug dvds, and can pick
from a menu, and it even goes to IMDB and pulls the movie poster and
synopsis out for me, so I dont have to tell my wife what the movie is
about before we watch it

And I guess one of my main reasons why I like MythTV, is that I love
to TINKER, although as I stated earlier, I have very little time for
tinkering at the moment, I like the controll mythtv gives me over my
viewing experience, if I dont like a part of the program I can remove
only that part, if I wanna add on to it, I am not voiding my
techsupport contract my making 3rd party addons, (I guess in some ways
I am, if I make it too odd, and ask for help from this mailing list, I
might get laughed at, but at least it only cost me the time to write
the email)

I also find oddly enough, that the mailing list for MythTV a tad bit
more active than the users forums at snapstream, and although some
people get grumpy with the same questions being asked over and over,
they still answer your question with professional and expert insight,
in a very timely manner. so the choice is yours form someone who has
tried both.

</ramble off>

On 6/24/05, Cecil Watson <cwatson at linkline.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Todd Bailey wrote:
> > Just my 2 cents here.
> >
> Just my 2 cents.
> > I think 2 more items that need to be considered is system stability, and
> > ease of installation.
> > None of the replies I read so far mention how stable myth is when
> > compared to beyond.
> What do you expect?  You are on the MythTV mailing list...  I for one
> have never used BeyondTV or any Windows based PVR.
> > And I think it's probably safe to say that installation of beyond tv is
> > plug and play while myth needs careful installation and attention to
> > detail.
> >
> I bet I could install KnoppMyth on a bare system faster than you can
> install BeyondTV (and Windows) on a bare system.
> > I've been evaluating it for about a week and so far my experiences have
> > been, for lack of better terms, interesting.
> I've been using MythTV for over 2 years.  First on Mandrake then on
> KnoppMyth.  It has been very stable.  For the most part, I leave my
> master backend running 24x7.  Last month I went out of town for a
> business trip that was suppose to last 1 week, it ended up being three.
>  When I returned, my master backend had filled up, yet the it was still
> up and running!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Cecil
> 
> PS:  While one can watch and record HDTV w/ MythTV, currently one cannot
> w/ BeyondTV.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> 
> 
> 


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