A few weeks ago, I upgraded to MythTV 0.19. For the most part, the upgrade is worthwhile, though I've had a few problems. On the plus side:
- My favorite addition is the signal strength meter. Adjusting the antenna with previous versions involved setting the antenna in a trial position, watching for half an hour, and counting the number of picture dropouts. Now, you can just hit F7 and see what the signal strength is, so antenna adjustment is much easier.
- The LCD display is handled much better. There is now a progress bar for recording and playback, so you do not need to use the on-screen display to find out how far through playing back a recording you are. The LCD is also used to display what is recording, so it is possible to see what is being recorded without turning on the TV. (To get the best-looking progress bar, though, I needed to spend some time with the data sheet for the chip that powers my display.)
- Recordings are now stored in an MPEG format, rather than the MythTV-specific NuppelVideo (.nuv) format. They will play in most players without modification, so it's easier to take video with you. The change to the video storage format also has fixed the audio track selection problem with one channel. In previous versions, I needed to switch audio tracks to get sound, but that is no longer necessary in 0.19.
- Many recordings seem to be smaller. In 0.18, I always used 6-8 GB per hour as a baseline rule-of-thumb for disk space consumption. In 0.19, it seems like 5-7 GB is a better estimate. It also seems, from an unscientific "eyeball" opinion, that 720p recordings are now noticeably smaller than 1080i recordings.
- The setup program, mythtv-setup, now allows deletion of individual channels, rather than clearing the entire channel map and rescanning. I had a problem with my channel table and found it much easier to rebuild from scratch than in previous instances of the same problem.
- The commercial flagging program, mythcommflag, seems to work faster. For me, it seems to always complete faster than program time (a one-hour program will commercial scan in less than one hour), even if other recordings are tying up I/O capacity.
- The new "MythCenter" theme looks much better than any of the other themes I've seen.
- XvMC is broken in the AMD64 build in my Gentoo installation. To be honest, this doesn't bother me that much. It's always been a tricky feature to get working correctly at run-time. (If I could build the machine again, the biggest change I'd make would be that I'd use an Intel CPU.) I have enough CPU power to play back any HD recording without overloading the machine. Offloading some video playback is a "nice to have," but it's not a "must have."
- Although the sound on KQED programs is back during playback, it's broken for video export. When I export stored programs from KQED to MPEG4, they have no sound. Obviously, sound is there on disk, since it's fine in playback. I expect this is a reasonably simple fix to nuvexport, but I haven't checked recently.
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After reading your articles about MythTV, I thought I would give it a go myself. From what I had read, I didn't expect it would be easy, and not wanting to fall into the trap of buying unsupported hardware I first did a search on the PVR database (http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-pvrhwdb.php).
Unfortunately, somewhere during the transition between 0.18.1 and 0.19 my Hauppauge DVB-T card no longer works under MythTV (although it works fine with xine and mplayer and 0.18.1).
Upgraders beware.
I also recently finished the upgrade, and have noticed that mythtranscode now works on HD files *extremely* well. mythtranscode is at least 3x faster than my old method of using ProjectX and command line 'transcode'. Nice to finally be able to record a show in HD *and* watch it in MythTV ;). I have a few more notes on my upgrade here: http://www.myhdbox.com/2006/02/upgrade-to-mythtv-019-smooth.php
Nice to see another MythTV High Definition user blogging!
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John Sturgeon >