Saturday, October 20, 2007

Mythtv Distro Evaluations

It is a tough time for Mythtv distros right now with Zap2it cancelling their services is August. There are 4 major mythtv distro communities right now, knoppmyth, mythdora, mythbuntn and linuxmce. Today I tried all but knoppmyth and here is what I have found. LinuxMCE I first tried LinuxMCE as the demo video they have on their site shows some amazing features. They do have an update for the new Schedules direct service but the link to the script was down. The thing that I found about LinuxMCE was that because it is a bunch of custom changes on top of Kubuntu Feisty, updating myth from the Kubuntu repository would break it. This is a cool system but is a bit behind when on changes. Mythdora Mythdora acutally looked good, they have some myth specific questions at install. The downside I found was the myth version was still the older one and there was no Schedules direct support, also the links for the update at the atrpms site was down as well. Mythbuntu Mythbuntu is a supported ubuntu distro and is kept almost as up to date as ubuntu is. Right now they have a 7.10 release candidate and the 7.10 version has only been released for a few days at this point. The good thing is it has the newest version of myth and the Schedules Direct is supported right out of the box, no updates needs. Ubuntu again comes through leading the pack with the most up to date distro in mythbuntu. If anyone has comments on these distros or any other I would love to hear them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Regarding LinuxMCE, I too have tried this. It is a very good concept, but because it is a bunch of different programs cobbled together (MythTV, Asterisk, etc.), the UI actually kinda sucks.

It is understandable, however, since it takes quite a bit of coding to "unify" these different programs together.

I understand there are some changes happening with the UI, but they are not the highest priority, and I suspect it will be a while. It's worth keeping an eye on as it matures and will likely be worth having another look in a year or so.