Re: Myth TV? MCE? What to choose...

[Kim Wall <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Coming at this from the MythTV angle (I'm sure someone else will be able
to provide an MCE perspective on this)...

Ian Lowe wrote:
> I'm thinking about MCE, or MythTV and running a DVB tuner and an
Analog
> tuner (the WinTV PVR 150 probably) with the thought that the Analog
bod will
> be used for Sky, and the DVB for freeview.

Myth will handle this with no problems - I'm basically doing the same
thing (PVR250 fed from freeview STB[1] and a DVB card).

> It would be great if I could also set up a streaming server allowing a
> regular PC client to display what's being put out on the TV without
needing
> it's own TV tuner...

Streaming video from MythTV to a windows/mac/whatever box is easy - you
can simply play the files over a network share or http with your media
player of choice, or use the MythStreamTV plugin for true streaming, but...


> We commonly have the Projector going in the living room, and would
love to
> have the Kitchen PC (a mini-itx with a 15" LCD panel mounted into
the wall)
> able to show what was on the big screen.

As far as I know, there's no way to stream what's currently being played
by an instance of mythfrontend, so synchronisation would be an issue.
Given an instance of mythfrontend on each device, it should be possible
to hack something together using lirc events or the mythwifi interface
to send synchronised 'button presses' to both, but that won't guarantee
that they stay in sync.  I suppose you could use VNC or something to get
two views of the same screen, but I'd be surprised if the performance
was good enough for video.

The proper solution would be to add code to mythfrontend to synchronise
playback properly.  No reason that couldn't be done, but it's not in
there currently.  It would also require your kitchen PC to be running
mythfrontend, which currently means Linux or OSX[2] (dual-boot, or just
linuxify the whole thing - I doubt there's much a kitchen PC needs that
isn't available for linux, with the possible exception of WAF).

The suboptimal but currently workable solution would be a cheap TV card
in the kitchen PC with a composite or S-Video feed from the living room
box.


> So, has anyone tried something like this? Suggest any good hardware?
Would
> the nebula DVB card which can do whole multiplex recording work with
Myth TV
> for instance?

I beleive the card works, but MythTV does not currently support
recording more than one channel at a time on one card, mainly because it
would require a major re-write of the scheduling logic which isn't a
priority to the developers at this time.  However here's no reason to
believe this won't get added in future.


> Is there an RGB capture card that could work well with the
> Digiboxes RGB output?

Pass.  The Hauppauge PVR series are great cards, but only have S-Video
(and coposite and RF) input.


> I'm interested to see what others have done here - it strikes me that
this
> stuff is getting quite mature!

I'm very impressed with MythTV generally - like most things in the linux
world, it can be a fiddly bastard to set it up the way you want it, but
once working it's pretty reliable if you don't muck about with anything
critical.  It's still a work-in progress, so some features are a bit
unfinished or buggy, but it's improving all the time, and I believe its
network-oriented architecture beats the pants off MCE if you care about
that sort of thing.


Kim.

[1] I had the PVR250 and STB first, and added the DVB card later, as
MythTV has only recently acquired the ability to decode DVB subtitles.

[2] There's WinMyth, but it's nowhere near a complete implimentation,
and gives you very little advantage over MythWeb, a decent media player
and a samba share.