I thought it might be fun to document my progress in my quest for being completely off of the pay TV "grid" as described in my previous entry.
The experiment of keeping track of what we watch from the satellite is going well so far - in 7 days it's all been shows from the main networks, and all the shows are available online either on the network's own website or on Hulu. A few shows (FOX ones) are available online 8 days after they're released, but I don't know if that's a big deal given that right now we frequently watch shows weeks after they actually get broadcast.
On the hardware side, I have been researching capture cards that support ATSC (digital over-the-air) and clear QAM (unencrypted digital cable) signals. I've found there are only a couple of major brands, and will probably go with a Hauppague brand - they seem to have the best reviews, and support their products well. I was surprised to find that all cards still have NTSC analog tuners on them as well - I suppose many people still have analog cable signals. I don't really need that, and wish there were cards that just had dual-tuner ATSC so I could capture two shows at once, but the cards aren't that expensive, if I decide I need two I will just get another one.
On the software side, I spent some time after work today reading about MythTV to see if it is a viable option. It's often hard to read documentation and really get a feel for what a program does, and documentation for open source stuff is frequently out of date with the updated software, so I just installed dual-boot Ubuntu on my backup Windows machine and installed the MythTV package that comes with Ubuntu. All I can say is WOW. With a little help from the Ubuntu section of Myth's startup documentation, I was up and running in minutes. I don't actually have a capture card yet, but I was able to configure everything else and try out the user interface. Myth comes in two parts - the front end that you actually use to navigate and watch shows, and the backend which does all the heavy lifting of databasing, organizing, recording, etc. You can have one backend and as many frontends as you want that connect to it, or you can even have multiple backends to distribute the load of recording to multiple machines (in my case this won't be a heavy load of recording so one will be plenty).
But the features I was most impressed with weren't in the documentation, or were vaguely mentioned. I was worried that it would be hard to watch stuff on my Windows machines, since at best they have a partially functioning Windows front-end. As it turns out, some of the backend plugins work seamlessly with Windows Media Center software, which now comes with Windows 7. I was also concerned that my media "play-only" devices like the PS3 and the DLink media player would have no way out of the box to get to the recorded videos and that I'd have to somehow set up another UPnP server to accomplish this and have scripts to rename the files, etc. Wrong and wrong - right out of the box MythTV installs and runs its own UPnP server and has mappings for "by show", "by date", "by genre" and like 3 others. I went up and fired up the PS3 and it was all there. Awesome.
I'm having a hard time not just calling DirecTV and canceling right now :) But I will get this all working and make sure it does what I need for at least a month before I do that.
More to come...
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We've been using MythTV for over a year and love, love, love it. It's very easy to burn shows onto DVD, or transfer them to my phone to watch at the gym. We've got two homegrown set-top boxes (one for each TV) and the remotes for them were purchased off ThinkGeek. Let me know if you want details on how we built anything.
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