Any good htpc software out there?

[Czar]

Would be best if it would be able to record and support pal tv tuners.
So what are people using?

 

[Staver]

You mean something like Beyond-TV, SageTV or MyHTPC?

 

[Czar]

yeah... maybe like that, which one do you recomend?

 

[Staver]

I use Beyond-TV but Sage-Tv is good too. You can try them both for trial periods then decide. The other one I hear only runs via Linux, yet it is free

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Staver
I use Beyond-TV but Sage-Tv is good too. You can try them both for trial periods then decide. The other one I hear only runs via Linux, yet it is free

Your thinking of mythtv. It's pretty nice, it does the PVR thing. Record, pause, fast forward, rewind "live" TV.

Its' like having a VCR tape on a loop, you record as you go.

There are other ones that do HTPC type stuff for linux, like Freevo. It doesn't do the full time shifter thing that MythTV can do. It provides the same functionality as, say, a cable top box. TV listings and all that.

But the requirements for it aren't nearly as heafty. For MythTV you need a pretty powerfull box, not ones as powerfull as needed to play Doom at high res, but respectable. You couldn't do it with one of those Mini-ITX boards. But Freevo would work fine, plus it's a lot easier to deal with.

MythTV is full-featured though.

 

[Staver]

Thanks, for the clarification. My brain was jumbled.

 

[sumrtym]

SageTV appears to be the best from what I hear. It's all java, interestingly enough, and just works well. Supports multiple tuners....and the tuners don't even have to be in the computer it's installed on, just on the network!

 

[coolred]

Yeah sage TV is awesome, I am currently using it with one tuner, will add more later.

 

[Czar]

how do those handle running on a 800mhz computer?
and do you need a special tv tuner for them or can you just use any tuner?

 

[Alternex]

In all the articles they never mention how these apps compare in terms of channel skipping capabilities.. Do any auto-skip? Do any at least function like TIVO where you can fast foward at three different speeds and when you press play again it backtracks a little (to compensate for pressing play too late)?

 

[Daaavo]

I picked up a Hauppauge PVR-350 and SageTV a couple weeks ago, and have been thoroughly satisfied with both. I am tempted to give BeyondTV a look, though, after reading this review.

 

[Staver]

Whatever tuner you get. I'd advise that it has hardware decoding, then the 800mhz will not be an issue.

 

[sumrtym]

Originally posted by: Staver
Whatever tuner you get. I'd advise that it has hardware decoding, then the 800mhz will not be an issue.

You mean hardware encoding, and that's a requirement of either Beyond TV (they say otherwise, but it is) or SageTV.

 

[Czar]

what good cards do hardware encoding?

 

[Staver]

Beyond works via software, but Sage does not. It is decoding the cable signal. The card of choice seems to be the Hauppauge PVR-250. The PVR-350 has hardware mpg encoding for your camcorder,vcr or etc... media.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Alternex
In all the articles they never mention how these apps compare in terms of channel skipping capabilities.. Do any auto-skip? Do any at least function like TIVO where you can fast foward at three different speeds and when you press play again it backtracks a little (to compensate for pressing play too late)?

I don't know about the backtracking, but I've installed Mythtv on my Home theater system I have going.

My computer has displaced my TV as the main box, but I wanted to use my TV for watching TV so this is what I do:

My main computer runs Debian Linux (Sid). 2.0ghz AMD cpu, 800+megs of ram, Gforce 5900 xt vid card.

I have 2 video capture cards in it. WinPVR-250, this is a hardware mpeg2 encoder with TV tuner and a ATI Wonder VE tv capture card. (NOT THE ALL-IN-WONDER video card!)

This computer runs as the backend.

The front end I use a old 800mhz celeron box I got for free. 128 megs, gforce2 mx with TV out.

While whatching normal TV my main box (the backend) runs at about 0.7% cpu usage. It's not doing much work because I am using the Mpeg2 TV card and that's hardware encoding. If I was to use the main tv capture card everything would have to be encoded into Mpeg4 using Divx-type codec. that would take much more cpu power, probably not anywere near 100% though for TV quality. Recordings would all be encoded in mpeg4 (avi files I believe) at higher quality and that would take more umph.

The backend does the work, the front end does the video watching. The both can be the same box, but it's more conveint for me to have it on seperate machines. Many people use hacked Xboxs for the frontend.

Basicly how it works is that you have your TV card. If it's just a normal cheapo capture card this is how it works:

You switch to the TV channel, your computer encodes the stream into mpeg4 files on your harddrive in a buffer. The frontend reads the buffer using a player and that is what you watch on TV. Since your viewing recordings off of the disk then you can pause fastforward and rewind like everything else.

Of course this is how the Tivo works, too. The thing is that the Tivo is special built for this, and PC is for general use. The Tivo has built-in hardware encoders that do most of the hardwork so that the slower CPU in the TiV0 doens't have to work that hard. The PC has do this in software.

Of course with my WinPVR-250, that encodes mpeg2 files on the fly so that my CPU doesn't have to do that so watching normal TV doesn't impact my gaming much. Mpeg2 encoding stuff isn't cheap.

Tivo is definately cheaper and easier then do it yourself, but i had that computer laying around so the only realy expense was the mpeg2 card. Plus with the computer you have much more freedom. All my recordings are sitting on my harddrive so that I can do what I want with them with little effort and their are other nice programs like VideoLan server were I can do stuff like stream them. Also editors and stuff like that.

Not cheap, and Mythtv is about a 6 on a range of Linux dificulty were 1 is easy and 10 is very very hard.

Something like SageTV would be much easier.

Mythtv features:

Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.
Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.
Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
Grabs program information using xmltv.
A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.
Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
Basic video editing abilities. Optional transcoding to remove the commercials from the video file to save space.
Picture in picture support, if you have more than one tuner card.
Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
Program Finder to quickly and easily find the shows you want to record.
Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of those programs, all through a themeable UI. (The first two screenshots are the default theme, the third is iulius.4)
Browse and resolve recording conflicts.
A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely.
Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.
An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
An image viewer/slideshow application.
A weather module.
A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups
A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes.
An RSS news feed reader module.

Transcoding is when you take something like the WinTV PVR-250 or a DVD's mpeg2 and re-encode it to something a mpeg4.

Mpeg2 is what is used for digital media, like digital cable/satalite and dvds. A movie can run something like 6 gigs easily depending on quality. A mpeg4 of the same movie at similar quality would be 1-2gigs.

It's fun stuff to play around with.

I haven't had much time to mess around with it, i just installed it this sunday and got it working properly this monday. But I had one program paused for almost 3 hours and it was still sitting in the buffer waiting for me. I have 15 gig buffer alocated, and that sits in a 40gig partition on my desktop. (2 disks, one 120gig and the second 80 gig.) So I got room to grow, but If I starting recording stuff I'll use up that disk space pretty quick and would have to alocate some space from my bigger drive and sacrifice some stuff from my home partition.

Then maybe I'd get one of those 250gig drives.