Manlug meeting March 2006

18^th March 2006

Myth TV

Mike Richardson

Summary

Fed up of setting the video wrongly or forgetting to set it at all?

(Mike has put his presentation online at http://kira.mcc.ac.uk/MythTV/)

The latest consumer VCRs are now PVRs - Personal Video Recorders such as Sky Plus and the "Toppy". These are devices capable of recording TV onto hard drives or DVD Rs.

However these devices have limitations

• access to Electronic Program Guides is either not free (gasp!) or not possible.
• you can't record in the lounge and watch the recording in the bedroom.
• Terrestrial DVB recorders won't let you record external data sources such as Sky or cable.
• Programming them to record Stargate whilst flying across the Atlantic is tricky as few have any sort of remote access.
• You have no say in the available functionality.

MythTV solves these problems and many more. MythTV is a client/server networked PVR which combines inputs from multiple data sources, online EPGs and makes it available to frontend playback systems. You can pause, rewind, fast forward 'live' TV. A clever scheduling system resolves multiple input, multiple channel programming conflicts. It isn't perfect but it is the closest thing to a truly elegant solution that I'm aware of.

I hope to present a summary of what MythTV can do and give a demonstration of it in action.