MythTV is dead, long live Dreambox!

This week I was fed up with the recurring issues I have with my MythTV setup. We got used to the long channel changes and accepted that the remote control (actually LircD) acted up on a frequent basis. Yet after having had a lot of issues with my ATI card, I switched to nvidia. This week I did an upgrade to get Lirc more stable, which caused my video to lag… I suppose that some MythTV internal changed as updating/downgrading my nvidia drivers didn’t work.

As the WAF was completely ruined and each “downtime” caused my lifetime to shorten with a few years, I decided to go with my initial hunch to buy a dreambox. Two days later the box arrived and after a bit of googling I flashed the device with the PLI image and I was AMAZED!!! I repeat myself: AMAZED!!!

• Fast channel changes… WOW
• Very good remote control… WOW
• Easy plugin/update system… WOW
• TV & Radio channesl seperated… NICE
• Low Power Usage… YEAH
• And so SMALL!!! The remote is about the same size as the device.

It’s a linux device underneath the hood, so I can simply manage connectivity to other devices. So it instantly became a small nas server for my other media devices too… Which brings me to another point; what will I do with my old MythTV hardware? 😉

Running back to the right mediacenter for my needs (part two)

After thrashing MythTV in an earlier post of mine, I came to fall back to it… One of the main requirements I had was to be able to stream TV to multiple clients across my home, yet the TV-Server component of Team Mediaportal proved unstable as hell to me. I was unable to view channels I was capable of viewing in the standalone version. I switched to SageTV for a few days, where I must say that this software proved that installing a media center can be “easy”. Yet it lacked some smaller features, required licenses for the base & every extender… which became a big “turnoff”. 😉

So I switched back to MythTV, and…

Finding the right mediacenter for my needs

Introduction
Combine all the media one

has (television, pictures, movies, sound fragments,…), and think about the number of devices one needs to have. A computer for viewing those foto’s, where some media fragments and pictures are located. Then we have our hifi set for our cd’s & dvd’s, maybe even a tuner for the satellite connection. In the old days there was even a VCR involved… In my mind WAY TOO MANY devices! So I went looking.

The first move I made in this area was to transform my old XBOX to a media center. The software I used for this was XBMC (Xbox Media Center). But this setup turned out to have two disadvantages:

• Legal : Microsoft isn’t too fond of the project, and it balances on the line between legal & illegal. Therefor the software isn’t easy to obtain, as one needs (read: should) to compile it theirselves.
• TV : There is no direct TV option in XBMC. One would be able to create an integration using uPNP, but then again… it wouldn’t be “native”.

So I had my tv tuner & my xbox for all my media needs… But being human, I still wasn’t fully satisfied. 😉