
I settled on the Ubuntu platform, and luckily there were up to date packages I could install. Many people were active in support and development. I also really appreciated the MythTV community.
Distributed architecture – You can have multiple backends recording and looking up metadata and commercial flagging and all coordinating with each other. Good hardware support – I was able to use both analog and digital recording cards. Ability to export recordings – I could take my recordings with me if I wanted to. A web interface – I could view and schedule recordings easily from a web browser. MythTV can automatically detect and skip commercials – At the time, this was like a magical feature to me. Comprehensive multimedia management – It manages pictures, music, videos, and recordings and supports playback of all the formats I could think of. Powerful DVR – Extremely granular control of recording rules and as much storage space as I could buy. It had all the features I was looking for and more.
Although there were good things about all of them, none of them quite did what I wanted and were open source and ran on Linux. I had played with SageTV, MediaPortal, and even Windows Media Center. It was slow, had limited storage, and extremely cumbersome to use. I wanted all of this content to be easily streamed to computers throughout our home.Īdditionally, I was not at all happy with the DVR supplied by the cable company. I had compiled a large amount of digital music, videos, and pictures I wanted to be organized. I’ve always been a fan of Linux, and I’ve always wanted to provide a rich multimedia experience in my home.
The beginning of the end: cutting the cord.