Mythbuntu?

Hi. I'm wondering if I can use the One as a digital video recorder? I understand Mythbuntu is supposed to be able to work sort of like a Tevo, but I've never used it before. I see in another thread that you can use a USB tuner with the One. I have an 8GB SSD One with 1.5GB ram and I want to use a Dell widescreen monitor at 1680x1050 and use an external HD to store the videos. My questions are:

Has anybody used Mythbuntu on their One? I would expect it to work since it's based on Ubuntu, but I'm not sure if I would need to do anything different than what the Ubuntu guides say to set it up.

Will the video quality be acceptable on a 20-inch monitor? The TV source is analog cable, if that makes a difference.

Anything else I need to be aware of?

 

Recording is certainly possible. However, the AA1 does not really have the power to record and watch another prerecorded video at the same time (doing something else at the some time will also be slow). Things might also be jerky if you set it to flag commercials (mythcommflag) while watching the show currently recording. Also, due to the low spec cpu, if you set it to transcode to another codec to save space, the machine will be slow if you want to do something else at the same time (also the transcoding process will take a long time).

No, I always compile my own MythTV from the developmental tree.

Video quality is quite good. Of course this depends on the capture device being used and the settings of the device if the device is transcoding in hardware.

That being said, the AA1 is quite nice as a mythfrontend around the house.

 

Thanks for the reply, cpchan. While I don't understand some of the technical stuff you said like transcoding, I think I get the gist of your answer. You're saying it will do a decent job if I don't push it too hard or expect too much out of it?

I was looking at some mythbuntu guides, and it seems a lot of people use different machines for front end and back end. Is there any problem with using the same machine? Is the One powerful enough to do both functions?

 

Transcoding is the process of converting from one codec to another:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcode

Yes, the general rule is 1GHz per encoder (software):

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1

You can use more than one machine as frontends. The point is that you have a centralized Myth server and be able utilize it simultaneously from different machines on your network as long as there is a frontend installed.

No.

It can do both, but it does not have the power to do it at the same time (ie. Record and watch a prerecorded program simultaneously)

Here is a list of usb devices that works with MythTV:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Video_capture_card#USB_Capture_Cards

 

Thanks so much for the links and for answering all my questions, cpchan. I think I'll give it a shot.

Now, to find the right USB thingie.

 

I forgot to add, you should choose a device with a hardware based encoder to lessen the stress on the AA1. For analog cable, a good, cheap and widely available device is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-PVR-USB2

With this, you will not need to transcode, but the mpeg2 file size will be bigger than if you transcode it to mpeg4.

 

Again, thanks for the link. I wouldn't have thought to look for hardware encoding.

 

Haven't tried it with my AA1 for recording, but my capture device is the HDHomeRun from SiliconDust.

It is a network capture device. MythTV compatible (also Windows, Mac OS, and works with VLC with any platform).

You can put it anywhere in your house and connect two antenna lines to it and connect it to your network. It has two tuners so you can record two shows at once. It is digital only and supports HD also. It can do basic cable but no encrypted channels. You can plug an OTA antenna to both ports, your cable line to both, or one of each.

Nice thing about it is you don't need to plug it into your laptop or PC. It is accessed over your network. Obviously wireless isn't as good as wired, but many people use them wirelessly fine.

It really lightens the load CPU wise when it comes to recording. Since it literally just streams the MPEG2 stream from the channel you are on right to your hard drive. No encoding needed on the fly. It just goes right to hard disk.

I would bet you have a good chance of recording and watching with this since it is more bandwidth limited. If you have a strong wireless signal or are using the wired port it should be fine.

I have watched HD streams with my AA1 that have been recorded on my server, but haven't tried to record and play with it since I have my server all setup to capture things already. I did play a HD stream stored on my server over wireless and it worked fine. I had about 65% signal strength at the time.

 

Same with the device that I have mentioned.

It might be possible with both of these devices if mythcommflag (commercials flagging) is not running. Mythcommflag is quite cpu intensive. However, since I don't have a usb device, I can't test it out.

 

Yeah I saw your post Hauppauge makes nice stuff. The only reason I figured I would mention the HDHomeRun as it doesn't require anything to be plugged into your AA1. So no USB tuner plugged into the AA1, no antenna cable plugged into the tuner, etc. Also the device you linked to is standard def (analog) from what I remember? Although I may be wrong on that. The HDHomeRun is digital only which is pretty much what we are switching to exclusively here in the states in a few months.

I just think the HDHomeRun suits the netbook craze well. You can roam your house and watch TV with just your netbook. No USB adaptors, no cables.

I should also note if you don't want the overhead of MythTV you can use VLC and just watch live TV with the HDHomeRun. If your so inclined also you can use the HDHomeRun command line tools and script your own recordings straight to disk with no extra software.

 

Yes, I know about the dtv change over.

Or any number of other apps such as mplayer, kdetv, gnome tv, etc.

True, however you will lose the nice features of MythTV such as scheduling, commercials flagging (and ease of editing them out) + auto-skipping, auto-transcoding, advanced database with auto-expire and the extras with the Myth plugins.