A small note about a usability test of MythTV showing that "on a scale ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 signifies not at all user-friendly and 5 very user-friendly. The results 3.79 points out of 5 shows that the vast majority feels that MythTV is quite user-friendly." Oh dear. No, no, that doesn't show that at all. First, the sample size was all of seven people. I think that's just a wee bit on the low side. From an artical at Linux-Watch I've tried a few times to get MythTV set up with my Hauppauge Nova-T DVB Device. And although I came close to cracking it once, I ultimately failed. I'd give MythTV a 1 out of 5 for easy of use in that respect. And besides, from what I have seen of it, it doesn't look that good anyway. I think I'll stick with Kaffeine until something better comes along
One thing leads to another, and after clicking on a few links I've just stumbled across another home media centre program called Freevo
What OS did you try to set up mythTV on? I know that installing binaries is futile. Something that advanced needs to be compiled for your machine. I know that gentoo has this down really well.
I've tried it on SuSE and Kubuntu with no real success. It's just too complicated and I don't have the time to sit down and go over it. Likewise, Freevo has not turned out to be as easy as I'd have hoped. Actually, it's just as complicated to set up as MythTV is. Nevermind, Kaffeine is good enough for now
MythTV isn't a replacement for your media player so much as a replacement for Media Center. It's not easy to setup, true. But it's not really a desktop app either, it's meant to run on a multimedia computer which would likely be hooked up to your entertainment center. A "set it up once and forget about it" kind of arrangement. Besides, unlike Microsoft Media Center, MythTV is fully extensible, configurable, and free. Perhaps most importantly, it can play and record in non-MS, non-proprietary, non B.S. formats such as DivX, XviD, x264, MPG4, and others. Media Center is awful, so if I wanted an entertainment center PC I'd either go with MythTV (hard setup, good payoff, free) or Apple's Front Row.
Been reading about another home media centre project which is just taking off. Elisa is a project to create an open source cross platform media center solution. While our primary development and deployment platform is GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems we also currently support Microsoft Windows and also hope to support MacOSX in the future. Elisa runs on top of the GStreamer multimedia framework. In addition to personal video recorder functionality (PVR) and Music Jukebox support, Elisa will also interoperate with devices following the DLNA standard like Intel's ViiV systems. Sounds good apart from the fact it runs over Gstreamer (which doesn't work well with my Hauppauge card). It's still in early beta, so i think i'll wait a while till a more stable release
Looks like a great project megamaced, very much like Front Row. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll keep an eye on this one.
Yeah, from the screenshots the eye candy looks great I just hope the end product is a lot easier to install them MythTV
