Re: [PLUG] Media Frontend Hardware

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Bill East <wm.east@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>
> wrote:
>>
>> I'm open to alternative suggestions as well.  (I took a quick look at
>> XBMC - not sure I'd use it as a substitute for a frontend, but I might
>> be talked into that.)
>>
> My impression of XBMC is that it is not really a substitute for MythTV
> although it could be a good adjunct to it. The two projects do very
> different things, with XBMC being a front end to your stored media and
> MythTV acting more as a DVR. But I could be wrong.

That is my concern.

My issue was actually caused by trying to upgrade to 0.24.1.  Rather
than try to rush the project I decided to roll-back (always make
backups!), and I'm running fine again on 0.22 (which is ancient).  I'm
still interested in suggestions and will research my options and take
my time about doing the upgrade.

I've contemplating whether it makes more sense to just ditch myth and
go with some other TV retrieval option.  I'm not sure that any of the
other options will give us 100% coverage on the shows we watch,
however.  Plus, relying on torrents/etc is probably going to be a bit
of pain - even setting aside the legal issues.  I'm also under
contract with my FIOS bill for a while longer...

Oh, one other requirement I didn't mention is SPDIF audio.

So far the kinds of options I'm seeing are:

1.  Get a newer ITX motherboard and upgrade my existing hardware.  The
options here don't seem great from a future-proofing standpoint as I'm
not sure any of those options use FOSS drivers.

2.  Get an Apple TV, figure out how to root it without a mac, and
install XBMC on it.  Life with having mythtv buried under three layers
of sub-menus (XBMC on Apple TV doesn't replace the stock interface,
and mythtv is a layer lower unless I figure out a better way of doing
it).

3.  Buy a really cheap desktop with the outputs I need - but that is
pricier and likely to take much more space/etc.  This will of course
give me the most long-term flexibility (I could even run Gentoo on it,
or a live-USB based solution of some kind which will simplify
upgrades).

4.  Buy some other media player that supports UPnP/etc - like Roku.
This is cheap and simple, but Roku at least is limited in codec
support, and it would be limited to playback only with no commercial
skip most likely.  Seems like a big step backwards...

Suggestions continue to be welcome...

Rich
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