I've been using MythTv for about two years. All in all, its an ok
system, but is a little rough around the edges where other (read
proprietary) systems aren't. It seems that nobody tries to put together
a stable myth distro: when I've played with any of the myth distros,
I've found them to be bleeding edge, but buggy. I've also had problems
with the distro-included "helper" apps messing with my ability to
actually customize the system (like set up additional frontends, etc). I
recently upgraded to Mythbuntu 8.10, and for the time being, it seems
that many issues I had (particularly random hangs while recording) have
been fixed, but some still exist (messed up log file rotation).
My Myth system has an Opteron 939-- whose model number escapes me at the
moment, an Asus A8N-SLI premium moboard, 2 gigs of ram, and a relatively
decent Nvidia video card. Opterons are supposed to be particularly good
for HD mpeg decoding. The Nvidia card is particularly important because
I was able to tweak the DVI output to get it to display correctly on my
TV, which reports incorrect EDID data such that computers plugged
directly into it (with no corrections) will have half the display
missing. I also have one of the Windows MCE remotes which, while it was
a pain to set up, works OK (although not great).
All in all, it should be a fun project to get running (if you're into
that kind of thing =). If you want to get your girlfriend or some
non-technical people to use the system, or if you want it to just work,
you might want to look at windows - there's an excellent open source
myth clone for Windows called Media Portal.
Alan Bromborsky wrote:
I am trying to find people with experience with mythtv, better yet
mythbuntu. I wish to assemble a system. I have been using linux
since slackware came on 50 HD floppies. I currently use unbuntu 8.10
on a dual Opteron system. My main interests are python and latex. I
have been using python (sympy) to do symbolic math.
