MythTV + Podcasting = The Future of Television?

MythTV

MythTV is an attempt to create the ultimate set-top box software, and lets users turn a PC into a powerful personal video recorder. The project was started in 2002 by developer Isaac Richards. It's free and open-source, and a community has developed around the project.

"I got tired of the rather low quality cable box that AT&T Broadband provides with their digital cable service," notes Richards. "It's slow to change channels, ridden with ads, and the program guide is a joke. So, I figured it'd be fun to try and build a replacement."

After several years of development, MythTV has a broad range of features:

• 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.
• Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.
• Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
• Grabs program information using xmltv.
• A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.

Podcasting Support

There is already substantial interest in adding podcasting support to MythTV. MythStream is an unofficial plug-in for MythTV that adds support for downloading podcasts. Torrentocracy adds BitTorrent support. And some users are combining iPodder with MythTV to do the job.

The ultimate MythTV/podcast setup has yet to be created, and setting up an open source personal video recorder on Linux poses significant challenges.

Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine a new world of Internet-based television, where you can subscribe to shows created by people around the world and watch them on-demand.

MythTV Resources:

• MythTV
• Building My MythTV Box
• MythStream
• Torrentocracy
• MythTV on Mac OS X
• Using MythTV with iPodder