Review of MythTV
For those of you with some technical know-how and that are looking for a product that not only does it all, but does it all and then some, you should think about MythTV. MythTV is an open source software package that can do just about anything with your home media. It can act as a PVR, video viewer, photo viewer, mp3 player, game emulator, RSS feed reader, weather viewer, and a dvd player. And if it can't do something you want, odds are someone has already written a plug in to do it.
The reason we say that you need some technical know-how is that this is a Linux based software package, and the installation, depending on which flavor of Linux you install on, can be challenging. We played around with this about 3 years ago and then again just a few weeks ago and the improvements blew us away. First off the install is fairly simple now following a pretty standard install script that most computer users have seen before. The interface is very smooth and responsive and the themes that come bundled are gorgeous.
So the developers of MythTV realized that people weren't going to want a loud computer sitting right next to their TV messing up their viewing experience so they have architected in a very cool solution. They have set it up so that you can use any number of computers to run MythTV. If you wanted you could have one run the backend database while another one is purely for recording and a third is for displaying the front-end. Of course you could do all of this with just one computer, but the fact that they have created it so that you can add to it and offload some of the more intensive CPU aspects to other machines is a huge benefit. Plus if you happen to own or are willing to buy/build a small low power, no noise mini computer, you can use that as the device that sits next to your TV while the big, loud, beefy machine is in the basement doing all the real work.
If you browse through the screenshots they provide you can see that it is a very slick program that is fully capable of being your everyday media center. We have reviewed a lot of products and none of them can come close to MythTV's list of features. Of course, none of them require you to do so much work either, but that is the trade off.
We will have more articles in the future on how MythTV can change the way you think about digital media. It can be for many the last media player they ever buy. If you are at all curious you can download a liveCD that will allow you to play around with the software without having to install it and without the need of a Linux machine.
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Posted by David Ficocello at April 2, 2007 12:00 PM
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