How well does MythTV handle recordings and Live?
#1
Currently I use WMC to record to a NAS drive from my HDHomerun Extend with Kodi as a Front end. All OTA channels. Several things I don't like about WMC, Reliability of the guide info, pain to upgrade to 10 (If I ever wish to), and such. But 2 of the biggest are the lack of a usable web interface and the handling of recordings/Live playback on WMC sucks. If I am not mistaken With Mythtv first thing seems to be taken care of with Mythweb.

How well does MythTV handle recordings, Conflicts and LiveTV? Does it do a better job than WMC?
Reply
#2
Never used WMC. But have been using MythTV for about 10 years.
The first few years there were some problems with LiveTV since no developer used it and didn't want to spend time to fix all the bugs. But now for the last year I have never had any problems with LiveTV, and I use it several hours every day.

Recordings and scheduling is the area where MythTV has always been very good. And I never had any problems with that. But I live in Sweden and only have about 30 channels and maybe record 10-15 shows every week. But I have never had a conflict where I missed a recording. If there was a conflict it was solved by recording at a later time.

But as always, to avoid conflicts, and to be able to record f.ex. only new episodes you need good and reliable EPG data.

But I'm very happy with MythTV. Have been looking at TVH, since setting up MythTV can be a pain. But TVH has some time left before it is a good replacement for MythTV. When MythTV works it is very reliable, at least it has been for me.

When the MythTV pvr plugin for Kodi works perfect, and some more PVR functionality finds it's way into Kodi I will throw away MythTV Frontend also and only use it as a recording backend and use the webinterface to schedule recordings.
Reply
#3
I recently switched from satellite (DirecTV), and instead switched to cable. After a month of experimenting with different backends, I settled on MythTV. I have 2 HDHomeRun Prime tuners, each with 3 tuners, and the only times I ever had a problem with LiveTV was because of my cable company's provided tuning adapters needing to be reset; MythTV has been pretty damn solid.

My only complaints are that it's a beast to setup, some recording management must be handled through MythTV because the add-on does not offer access to all of MythTV's options (and the interface is even more of a beast than the setup process). However, even with its downsides, I've been quite happy, and can't recall a problem with LiveTV or a recording that was because of MythTV itself.
Reply
#4
I switched from WMC to Mythtv several years ago.

The current Mythtv version 0.27/fixes works very well for both Live TV and recordings, using either Mythtv frontend or Kodi with pvr.mythtv plugin. Note I use Kodi master from git, which has more PVR functionality than Kodi Isengard (the current release)

As has been previously stated, good EPG data is the key to reliable recordings. Over the Air (OTA) data provided by the broadcasters varies greatly around the world. In the UK OTA data is pretty good but is only for 7 days, Mythtv allows use of external data providers who may provide more detailed and more days worth of guide data e.g. Atlas which is 14 days. In USA I believe Schedules Direct is the best source, albeit for a small annual charge.

I have two DVB-T/T2 (OTA) and two DVB-S/S2 (Satellite) tuners and often have 4 simulaneous HD recordings in progress at a time, never had any problems.
Reply
#5
(2016-01-04, 18:13)rpcameron Wrote: My only complaints are that it's a beast to setup, some recording management must be handled through MythTV because the add-on does not offer access to all of MythTV's options (and the interface is even more of a beast than the setup process). However, even with its downsides, I've been quite happy, and can't recall a problem with LiveTV or a recording that was because of MythTV itself.

The difficult setup doesn't scare me away, Could you elaborate a little on what options I don't have access to w/o the front end? The problem I have and the reason this concerns me a little is I am Visually impaired and Kodi with the TTS addon allows me to navigate most everything I need with my current setup.

I did expect to have to pay the fee for schedules direct, It is worth it to rid my dependence on WMC. Also, for what its worth, Currently I have OTA with about 34 usable channels. I am thinking of sticking Myth on a Pi2 to use it, I understand Myth is capable of trans coding, Currently I use the HDHR and it transcodes for WMC, Which is nice. Is the Pi2 capable of trans coding the recordings?
Reply
#6
I have only played briefly with wmc, but it didn't impress me as a long time mythtv user. Myth will do much better.

Anything you miss out on using kodi instead of mythfrontend is available from mythweb I think. Stuff like the more advanced schedule settings.

You are lucky to have access to schedules direct. I'd gladly pay double what they charge for quality data.

Best resource is mythtv-users mailing list. Best distro is mythbuntu.
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
Reply
#7
PS mythtweb's interface is quite busy, if I was unkind I'd say cluttered Wink. That doesn't worry me, but I am not visually impaired (well no more than other guys in their 50s) . Of course you can enlarge it like any other web interface.
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
Reply
#8
Ok cool. I will be ordering yet another Pi 2 (lol) and setting it up, Make my 3rd Smile, These darn Pis are maybe little to handy if, that's possible Smile . Ill go ahead and sign up for that mailing list. Back before I was using Kodi, I was using another project called SageTV and they had a web interface addon as well. At first it wasn't accessible, However I was able to edit it, remove much of the stuff I didn't find useful and and make it accessible for us, It's my hope that if for some reason I have problems with Mythweb I'll be able to do the same. However, I have read some post from others around the web that seem to lead me to think it might be usable for me w/o me doing anything.

Thank you folks, I really appreciate your help.
Reply
#9
I used to use Win7 WMC with ServerWMC backend and Kodi frontend. Worked, but then Win10 killed WMC. So now I'm using Mythbuntu 14.04.03 backend with Kodi frontend. Works good and the EPG from Schedules Direct seems good. I'm working on getting commercial skip now. So for me it's a good solution particularly for HDHomeRun. I have the Connect version for OTA.

I did test NextPVR on Win10, but if you crash the Win10 machine doing something, you loose your TV recording. So I like having a separate box running Mythtv. You can leave it alone for months without any maintenance.

It took me a while to complete understand creating a Mybuntu PC, so I documented it last time and keep the document so when I have to build a new one, I don't make the same mistakes again
Reply
#10
(2016-01-04, 12:05)Traker1001 Wrote: Currently I use WMC to record to a NAS drive from my HDHomerun Extend with Kodi as a Front end. All OTA channels. Several things I don't like about WMC, Reliability of the guide info, pain to upgrade to 10 (If I ever wish to), and such. But 2 of the biggest are the lack of a usable web interface and the handling of recordings/Live playback on WMC sucks. If I am not mistaken With Mythtv first thing seems to be taken care of with Mythweb.

How well does MythTV handle recordings, Conflicts and LiveTV? Does it do a better job than WMC?

Ive been using WMC for years then Last year started with HDhomeRun prime 3 tuners with Comcast with WMC and also have MCEbuddy converting and removing commercials then my Kodi/Raspberry's see them. LOL its my puppy mill of recording TV getting close to 8 terabytes !
The only bug I had and actually still have and it just started a few weeks ago WMC is recording a couple of TV shows that are not on the record list !
And the Microsoft fix does not work : go to this directory and rename the mcepg2-0.db file to something else, C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome
3-restart MC services"

So I am interested in MythTV if it can do what I am doing now.
One HTPC Windows 7 pro 64x running WMC with 2 HDhomeRun on Comcast 6 tuners with MCEbuddy
WD MyCloud 24TB over Netgear network | 6500 movies and 40,000+ TV Show episodes
Reply
#11
I switched to MythTV recently, I have the backend running in a hyper-v container and it is running well. I use HDHomeRun Prime as the source.

Configuration took a bit as the UI was interesting, I miss config files Smile

The VM has 4Gb of ram allocated and 4 virtual processors and it has not skipped a beat recording and playing at the same time as well as playing to two kodi boxes at once. More stable than the HDHomeRun app with the added bonus of recording. I'm using MythBuntu in the VM.
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
How well does MythTV handle recordings and Live?0