The primary reason for my upgrade of Beyond TV to version 4 was the support for re-encoding the programs from MPEG2 to DivX. I thought this would allow me to do things like get my “Daily Show” fix while on the commuter train. Unfortunately it is fundamentally flawed. The DivX has the wrong aspect ratio. BeyondTV’s “Showsqueeze” is also very unpredictable. Shows weren’t being encoded on a regular basis.

My solution is, “TV Tranny”, a couple Perl scripts and other bits of glue I threw together, mostly while on the commuter train. I’ve decided to run this on my Mac Mini so that the transcoding doesn’t consume the processor on my PVR box. After running for 24 hours, it seems to actually be working. I’ve tried to use standard tools so that if I’d like to move it, it will run under Linux or Windows without too much hassle.

How it works:

• The directory holding the MPEG2 TV recordings is SMB mounted from the PVR on to the Mac Mini.
• A file watcher script checks this directory every couple minutes and updates an SQLite database with what files are present and their status. (still recording, done recording, transcoded)
• A transcoder script checks the database every few minutes to see if any shows have finished recording and are ready to transcode.
• When the transcoder script finds a show, it then re-encodes it to XviD using FFmpeg

It doesn’t yet clean up old recordings, and there is no auto-sync with my Laptop. I think simple cron entry that deletes files older than x days will take care of the first issue. And a script that creates a RSS feed with enclosures, or rsync will take care of the latter.

The only similar solution I found was AutoXvid, but will only run on Windows, and uses AutoGK which seems to have spyware in it. So in case anyone else is looking for a solution that allows you two tweak everything, you can use this kludge to get you started on your own solution: Download TV Tranny 0.1

You conveniently can’t cancel your Tivo subscription over the web even though they are more than happy to allow you to sign up that way. After going through the annoying voice recognition phone system (how is saying “cancel service” easier than just pressing the “1″ button?), a friendly woman asked why I would ever want to cancel Tivo. An obvious question to ask someone, but then she asked what I planned to do with the Tivo, which I couldn’t figure out.

Tivo had a funeral for the VCR in NYC this past weekend. If it had been in Boston, I would have shown up with my DirecTivo and 40 Hour Standalone Tivo and smashed them on the ground or something dramatic like that. Instead I’ll use them as space heaters around the house.

The Beyond TV setup is working quite nicely. I’m just hoping version 4 comes out soon with it’s promise of DivX support.

My Beyond TV, Beyond Media, and the Firefly Remote arrived yesterday. I was using the trial for a while, but the Remote control really has changed the experience for the better. It all just works and is much closer to a Tivo experience. Plus the remote is RF not IR, so it works without line-of-site. So I can in theory put the box in the other room. Unfortunately, it won’t control the IR based TV and stereo receiver.

So far, I’m not very impressed by the Harmony remote. The setup is this horrible mix of web based configuration with a locally running application that actually sends the config to the remote. The remote itself has plastic buttons instead of the nice rubber buttons like the Tivo and Firefly remote. Not sure which one I’ll end up using.

Beyond Media is surprising cool. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it in practice, but it provides easy access to DVD player, Weather, Live365 streams, Photos, Music, and whole bunch of other things. I thought the fact that it is a separate application from Beyond TV was really annoying. But the remote allows to go back and forth without really noticing it.

After a couple more tweaks, we should be able to do away with the Tivo.

Tired of all the tweaking required for MythTV, I decided to try Snapstream’s Beyond TV. A commercial application that runs on Windows. It has its own set of downsides, including requiring Windows, but if I could get it working quickly, it seemed worth it.

After I received my replacement Hauppauge PVR 500 card, Beyond TV was up and running in about 10 minutes. If you have never used a Tivo, it will likely make you happy. If you know the Tivo interface, you’ll be slightly disappointed. It is like the Windows vs. Mac OS X debate. Yeah the functionality is there, but it just doesn’t feel quite right. Despite my hesitation, I decided to buy it, along with Beyond Media which a separate application from Snapstream that is designed to play DVD’s, movies on your hard drive, play mp3’s, and show photos. It sounds like they have long term plans of integrating the two applications.

Another contender filling in the commercial PVR software market is SageTV. It seems like a slicker design and appears to have Beyond Media functionality built-in. Given more time, I would have demoed it.

One reason I got tired of MythTV was that a bunch of the Ubuntu Breezy packages were old. I checked today, and it appears that they have been updated which is excellent.

Still on the to-do list with Beyond TV is getting the remote control up and running, and getting TV display working correctly. I can’t figure out how to make windows refresh the monitor setup without rebooting. If I connect a monitor or tv to the video card, it doesn’t get recognized without restarting. Also, if I have a monitor and the tv connected, then make Beyond TV full screen, the computer suddenly becomes sluggish in a cyclical way. (e.g. every second it stutters.)

After getting basic MythTV functionality running, I wasn’t particularly astounded with the interface. One really annoying thing is that show descriptions, titles, etc., regularly are cut off because they aren’t given enough room on the screen. So I decided to look at what else was out there. I read some good reviews about Beyond TV. I installed XP on a spare hard drive and then installed the demo. It is a commercial app which is unfortunate, but still no monthly fees for guide data. Seems fairly straight forward and easy to set up. However, whenever I tried to watch live TV it kept crashing.

Turns out my PVR 500 tuner card is bad. It is showing up as 32 devices, which I thought could possibly be normal but turns out it is definitely not. I’m RMA’ing it to Newegg and a new one is on the way. Unfortunately NewEgg refuses to cross-ship so I ended up just ordering a new one and have to send the bad one back for a refund.

I’m also curious about trying Windows Media Center Edition, but Microsoft still refuses to sell unattached to a PC.

All the tinkering is starting to get old… but with Tivo becoming stupider by the day (now charging subscribers a $150 early termination fee.) the pain still seems worth it.

So I quickly realized that the state of MythTV in the, yet to officially be released, Ubuntu 5.10 (breezy) is screwed up. The main MythTV application is version 0.18 (the latest available)… however, the packages for the rest of the plugins are all at version 0.17. And because the packages are all in multiverse, I have no idea how much attention they are going to get from maintainers. So plan B is to reinstall all Myth related items from source on Ubuntu, which I don’t really want to do because it will likely be a pain to set up and maintain. Plan C is to use Gentoo.

It is 1:00 AM, Corin and Ketzel have gone to bed long ago, but after fighting on and off for much of the day, trying to get the ivtv modules/drivers installed, I finally have MythTV running. Video and Audio come from the tuner. The biggest problem is that the documentation is horrendous. There are so many suggested ways of setting it up, which include so many unknown variables (hardware, tuners, os, software versions) that trying to get a clear answer is tricky.

I’m currently running Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) with MythTV 0.18.1 and ivtv 0.3.9. I haven’t played around much with it, but there are already a ton of things that are broken or still need to be set up.

I decided enough was enough, and ordered a pre-built IR receiver hand made by Thomas Schmid-Lindner in Germany. The site claims it will arrive in about a week. Including shipping, the total comes to about $26 USD. According to the site’s broken English, it seems like it should work. The fact that it is RS232 does have the upside that I can connect it to a long cable and have the computer in another room. USB has a pretty short maximum cable length. In theory, I shouldn’t have to buy another thing.

I’ve been looking around for a remote to control the MythTV box. There seems to be surprisingly little documentation. There are three pieces, the remote itself, an infrared reciever, and software called LIRC that ties them together.

On the remote control side, I wanted something similar to a Tivo remote. I even considered just using my Tivo remote, but I think I want a little more flexibility. Logitech Harmony remotes seem to get decent reviews, they are shaped like the Tivo peanut remote, and they are fairly configurable. They are however a bit expensive… although there are much more expensive remotes out there.

However, the Harmony 680 showed up on TigerDirect.com today for $70. Usually it is around $120. So I snapped it up.

Finding an infrared receiver is proving a little trickier. There are plans for building your own, but that is just ridiculous. There are a few people selling them, but they all seem to be in Europe. Most also seem to use the RS232 port. People, it is time to move on. USB is not exactly new. There seem to be a few other products out there, but it is very unclear if they will work.

Yet another reason I’m moving to MythTV. A reader reported that an episode was inadvertantly flagged so that it only be saved to a specific date and couldn’t be used with TivoToGo. May have been a mistake, but it showed nasty functionality that Tivo has added to make content producers happy at the expense of customers.

The rest of my MythTV hardware has shipped, should be here on Thursday.

Fed up with Tivo’s recent waning interest in providing useful features to Mac users and customers in general, I’ve decided to take the plunge and build a MythTV PVR. I’ve been doing research here and there for weeks and things are a mess. I’m still baffled that someone hasn’t made a business from selling a box with everything you need that guarantees compatibility.

I’ve ended up doing research on tv tuners, cpu’s, motherboards, infared recievers, remote controls, and on and on. And I haven’t even gotten to the point of making the dozen software components working together.

Deciding enough is enough, this morning I ordered the last of the main hardware that I’ll need to get the system up and running. I still need to figure out the whole remote control aspect. But here is what I ended up going with, fingers crossed it will all work.

Definitely more expensive than a simple Tivo with a lifetime subscription, but with the extra functionality and control it is worth it… as long as it works… All the above links go the Newegg.com product page which is where I bought it all from.

Product notes:

More updates to follow.