Mythtv, the most mature open source media application available. Boasting
features that put Windows Media Centre to shame and a zero price tag, Mythtv
is just the sort of application that could change peoples perceptions on
what Linux is and what it is capable of.
Here is a list of some of the features of Mythtv from the website, many of
which can never be seen in Windows Media Centre due to legal issues:
* Basic 'live-TV' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
* Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
* Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and
multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to
the user.
* Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4
(from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge
PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV
tuner card.
* Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
* Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select
programs to record.
* Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of
those programs, all through a theme able UI.
* A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely.
* Rip, categorise, play, and visualise MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files.
(FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists
containing playlists) through a simple UI.
* An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
* An image viewer/slideshow application.
* A weather module
* DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to
smaller file sizes.
* An RSS news feed reader module
All this and more for free, sounds unbelievable but its true and it
can only happen because its free. A company selling software that allowed
consumers to record television, cut out the ads and compress it to divx
automatically via a scheduled task, might run in to some legal trouble
pretty quickly. But due to to the open community nature of a project like
Mythtv it resides somewhere in the grey area.
Detailed installation guide of MythTV can be found here
http://www.linuxforums.org/multimedia/linux_as_a_media_centre.html
--
Sharjeel
http://www.sharjeel.net
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