Absolutely, it's a personal, subjective thing. I love Myth and think
it's a great thing, especially for everything non-TV related, but in my
household I think DTivo handles the TV duties better and with less headache.
In my situation, I have 4 independant TV's that may be watched by 4 or 5
people simulataneously. Only two of those currently have DTivo's
(series 2, which are much improved over series 1, especially with the
new update that DTV just pushed down that dramatically improved
performance). Assuming I upgrade my two remaining standard receivers to
DTivo's, I will have EIGHT tuners running, two in each Tivo. To get
this much capacity on Myth, I'd have to run eight tuner cards with eight
DTivo receivers, doubling my monthly receiver fees and requiring one
helluva backend (or more realistically, multiple backends). With DTivo
it's all seamless and uber-reliable. I've never had a DTivo crash, the
uptime is 24/7 on these things.
I do give Myth props over DTivo in a couple of areas. Drive space is
one -- upgrading DTivo drives is possible but it's a PITA and you can
only have two drives at most. I have two drives in an LVM group in my
Myth box, to hold our entire audio collection and DVD rips, so adding
additional space is trivial. Also, DirecTV refuses to enable the USB
ports and streaming ability that the stand-alone Tivo Home Networking
option gives you. It can be hacked into DTivo but I have no real
interest in doing that with my legitimately subscribed boxes, for fear
that DirecTV could detect it and potentially shut them down or get me in
trouble for some license/policy violation (another prop to MythTV there).
If I had only one or two TV's, Myth + DirecTV would make more sense for
me. But with everybody in the house now used to watching one show on
the DTivo while recording another, plus the fact that it works seamless
and everybody understands it (as opposed to Myth), I just couldn't get
away with it.
As to remotes, I tend to prefer to use the Tivo remote for Tivo
watching, but I have centralized all HT remotes into one
JP1-programmable O4A 8810uw learning remote. All of my equpment
profiles are stored on the PC and downloaded to the remote, including
the LiteOn IR keyboard that controls my Myth box, so no lirc is needed.
With this one remote I can control my TV, HT teceiver, Tivo, VCR, and
Myth box (including Xine for DVD playback). This remote cost $18 at
Wal-Mart, the JP1 cable kit I ordered for like $20, and the software to
program the remote is free. So it CAN all be done from single remote,
and inexpensively too. :)
David
Gavin Haslett wrote:
On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 14:17 -0400, David Morris wrote:
DirecTivo works so well that I don't use Myth's TV functionality at all
-- the Myth box is strictly a video/DVD/audio convergence appliance for
me, which it does very well. Our DirectTivo's (I have two, and am
looking at maybe 2 more to replace my other two DTV receivers) handles
all the timeshifting and scheduled recordings on our house, because
frankly Tivo is hard to beat for what it does.
This really comes down to a personal feeling. I have a DirecTivo as
well, series 1. I must admit that I agree, it worked damned well, but to
me the Myth box made more sense. There was more I wanted to do with my
entertainment center (including a very nice audio setup) than just watch
TV, so the convergence made sense. Add to that the fact that I wanted to
reduce the number of remotes in my setup rather than increase and the
Myth box made a lot more sense. As it was before, my DirecTivo had
problems with volume control, so I used three remotes; one for the
receiver, one for the DirecTivo and one for the TV (for picture
adjustment that my DTivo didn't like doing either). As it is I now have
one remote that does everything... well except turning the TV on and
off, but I can always hit the button when I walk past the TV.
It comes down to what you NEED out of these kind of systems. Sure,
DirecTivo did the job perfectly adequately, but adequate wasn't enough
for my tastes. My DirecTivo is now gathering dust in my basement.
Considered putting it in my master bedroom, but decided I'd probably
rather install a frontend up there. Cat 5 is cheap (and I have a 1000
foot spool here with 600 feet left!)
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