With the recent release of MythTV version 0.22 I am considering upgrading my home PVR/MythTV/DVR system. After our Sky box became faulty several months ago we upgraded to Sky+, this upgrade was also partly due to the demise of analogue TV and thus our beloved Tivo system becoming redundant.
Sky+ does not live up to the hype though. The day to day use of the system does not compare to the Tivo’s.
- The Sky+ TV guide is next to useless. Several obvious actions are missing and navigating your way round it is frustrating.
- Try to search for a program beginning with a specific letter and you can say goodbye to several minutes of your life.
- Pauses, lockups and missed recordings seem common place, this is after we had the box replaced recently.
Sadly many of the geeky TV channels like Discovery are missing from Freeview, we don’t subscribe to the movies or sport so it’s only those which tie us in to Sky really.
Anyway, I digress. MythTV 0.22 brings about many new features, a complete rewrite of the interface and the incorporation of VDPAU. Basically speaking this off loads much of the video decoding process to the graphics chip. This is only supported by Nvidia hardware and only then on 8400 series and above (with the exception of some 8800’s).
My current MythTV box, a combined frontend/backend has an older 5200 AGP card in it, sadly an upgrade of the card is not an option!
One possible way round this is to move the current MythTV box in to the rack in the garage, upgrade it to 0.22 version and run a small/silent frontend only in the lounge.
There is currently a lot of talk of the Acer Revo ‘nettop’ boxes in the Myth community. They are small, practically silent, low power consumption (Atom processor) and best of all have the Nvidia ION video chipset, which doessupport VDPAU.
So, watch this space, I’ll write more soon, maybe!
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