I disagree with your assessment of Dvorak's article. I sometimes disagree with him, but I really don't think he paints MythTV in a negative light whatsoever. This is posted for the purposes of academic discussion about the article and its implications.
------BEGIN ARTICLE------- While you have surely read about HP Media Centers and new DVRs from cable providers, the real action is underground: a slow and steady invasion of incredible products created by slick young coders who are sick of products designed not to make life easier but to appease a Hollywood preoccupied with digital rights management. The leader in this effort is MythTV, perhaps the most powerful DVR yet devised. MythTV is all the rage among high-level engineering types in Silicon Valley. It's the brainchild of 26-year-old Isaac Richards, who told me he started it two and a half years ago because he "was bored." MythTV is a free software system written in C++ that, when combined with various TV tuner, audio, and other cards, will turn a small computer into a slick, powerful, feature-rich DVR. Do you hate commercials? You can set it up so that it doesn't just skip commercials in playback but never records them in the first place, so there's nothing to skip. The software also incorporates MP3/Ogg features, along with slide shows and everything else you can imagine, including WebTV-like functionality for the TV set. While Richards has carefully avoided adding any illegal features, such as DeCSS for ripping DVDs, the architecture of the product works with plug-ins. In no time, someone anonymously threw a plug-in into the ether that allows a MythTV box to rip DVDs and strip out both CSS and Macrovision code so the material can be transcoded. This means that MPEG-2 DVDs can easily be turned into MPEG-4 files and watched on a laptop or even passed around trading networks. Worried about country codes? Forget it, they're gone. Richards is working on the 17th version of the software and has about 15 coders working with the source code, adding features, debugging, and tweaking. What do the MythTV folks get out of all this, besides praise? If you listen to them (and the users), they get TV the way they want it. This movement doesn't stop here. MythTV is just the tip of a multimedia iceberg that has managed to float under the radar so far. For example, at CES, as far as I could tell only Transmeta was showing a MythTV lash-up. Few showgoers had a clue as to what they were looking at. MythTV is a Linux-based system and requires some knowledge to set up. Windows users are seeing a similar effort called myHTPC (my Home Theater Personal Computer), a much looser initiative that first appeared in detail in 2002. myHTPC is not a wide-open architecture like MythTV, and it seems to emphasize quality imagery, especially by incorporating various line doublers and other tweaks that are out there if you look hard enough. Probably the most interesting of these is DScaler, found at http://www.dscaler.com www.dscaler.com . According to its Web site, the project has a simple goal: "The DScaler project is an ongoing attempt to get the best video quality possible from a Windows PC." Like the MythTV team, these folks are essentially using the open-source approach to public development. Headed by deinterlacing expert John Adcock, they're producing code that gives you the image-improvement power that was once the domain of Faroudja, whose line doublers used to cost thousands of dollars. All this activity within the video-image realm is a result of needing to find a purpose for the wasted power of today's processors. We've been waiting for a jazzy new direction in personal computing, and this appears to be it. This is the real convergence we've been told about. And what's interesting is, yet again, it's the small shops with the smart young coders doing all the heavy lifting. Everyone I know who has ever seen or played with MythTV wants it, but it's a do-it-yourself project and not for the timid. Eventually that will change as packagers appear and bundle prebuilt systems together. There are other implications of all this. In a changing universe, technologists will refuse to be hemmed in by artificial roadblocks created for the purpose of maintaining the status quo. Microsoft and Hollywood and whoever else can create all the DRM schemes they want; they can sue college kids for trading songs, block trading networks, shut down BitTorrent systems-but it won't do them any good. The forces of "We want it our way" will overpower them again and again, because that's the way technology works. And this will all be shared. In a networked, computer-based world, the sense of community breeds a socialistic desire to share, not covet. This mentality is at the root of all the open-source activity and cannot be ignored or denied. I want my MythTV. ------END ARTICLE------- On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 14:44:09 -0800 (PST), J. Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > John Dvorak's column in the most recent PC Magazine is devoted almost > entirely to MythTV. It has a pretty negative slant like the NYT article, > implying that MythTV developers and users are trying to break the law. > > > > I haven't been able to find a link for the article- it doesn't seem to be > available on the net yet. It is on Page 79 of the March 8 issue of PC > Magazine. > _______________________________________________ > mythtv-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users > > >
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