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Mythbuntu Beats Vista Media Center in PVR Usefulness
23 October 2007 in Digital Television | Comments enabled

What do you get when you combine open source MythTV personal video recorder software and open source Ubuntu? Why, it’s Mythbuntu! While it sounds like a potential next episode of Mythbusters, it is in reality the new pre-packaged, free operating system that includes MythTV for that TV viewing, recording, and time-shifting goodness that only open-source can bring you.

Sure, the graphical user interface isn’t as pretty as Windows Vista’s own Media Center has. But, Vista Media Center can’t record any broadcast copy-protected flagged TV shows (see “The Broadcast Flag Says “No Recording For You”” from Digital Media Thoughts) and it only supports a limited amount of TV tuners. Of the TV tuners, Europeans cannot use a digital cable or satellite TV tuner but only a terrestrial TV tuner with Vista.

On the other hand, with Mythbuntu all the rules Vista follows are thrown out the window. You can record and stream any TV show you like, also remove commercials automagically if that’s wanted by you. All you have to do is download the ISO disc image from Mythbuntu’s website, burn it onto a CD and install it on your TV tuning PC. (Yes, you should have a TV tuner for you PC from before.)

You might also want to make sure that the tuner is supported, but that is a bit hard since they are talking about which tuning chips are supported and not (understandibly) listing the branded tuners (as Hauppauge, Terratec, ATI) that are supported. There are supposedly lots to configure on the MythTV software side, so that is a big potential tarpit for any novice users to try (meaning, if your a newbie, take it easy with MythTV).

I haven’t tried Mythbuntu just yet, but I will try to get it running on my old, craptastic PC and see if it can do something better than Windows… like work with cable TV…