The often-mentioned MythTV project actually has some progress. It's been a few weeks that I've had the box put together, complete with recording equipment, and it's mostly working. I can record TV shows from anywhere on the internet (or from the TV too). I can playback movies from the same box I recorded them from. The commercials are skipped automatically, which is way awesomer than even I thought it would be. One problem though, is that I can't watch HD TV from MythTV. On the list of things to do is figure out how to get HD from the cable box via Firewire. So it's standard definition only, which is pretty ugly on Pete's sweet 42inch LCD TV.I do have music sharing working though - my music library is shared from my desktop Mac to the MythTV box, so I can listen to music from my desktop anywhere that has a MythTV frontend. That's pretty cool....except the interface for streaming music to the TV is terrible. Oh well.
Other things to do yet...I've always planned on getting an AppleTV box, so that would be a MythTV frontend instead of having the server sitting behind the TV (which it is currently). So that would make it way easier to stream music to the living room, and enable me to share my extensive iPhoto library to the TV too. Plus, I want to have access to streaming internet sources, like Hulu and YouTube. The best way that I can think of for that to happen is using this also oft-mentioned Boxee software, which is awesome. I attempted to install Boxee on my server, but there's not a 64-bit version available yet (and I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu). Moral of the story, it's going to require some severe hackery and lots of shady forum posts to get it working, and I may just bail on that plan until I get an AppleTV. Which sucks, because I really want to watch Hulu from the TV.MythTV offers a lot of cool tiny options for tweaking your setup. Like having Apple's movie trailers on your TV. Simple thing, but it's awesome (and also, not working currently on my box). Or streaming video to an iPhone (also not currently working on my box). I'm going to start making an official MythTV to-do list, and it's going to be scary long. If only I could take a week off of work to work on my side projects....
2 comments:
Why don't you just get a Mac Mini and make that your media server? There was an article recently in Macworld or Mac Life that detailed how to do it. That would mean less hacking.
Yeah, definitely true. Unfortunately the Mac Mini is like 500 bucks. And as a server, it's not very extendable. It would make a great front-end, but a 500 dollar front end isn't really ideal.
Unless you want to donate one to me.... =)
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