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Well, I'm going to college this year, and torrents are blocked at WSU in washington.

Which means i'll have to get my TV shows the old fashioned way, using a PVR. Luckily, i have a TV tuner card on the way. Now, i'd like to record my shows using MythTV, but since the MythTV interface sucks compared to XBMC, i was wondering:

How good is the myth frontend in XBMC? Will I be able to forgo the frontend for MythTV altogether, or will I need to schedule recordings and whatnot from the MythTV frontend? I'm doing all this from an installation of Mythbuntu.

I am more or less doing the same thing you are asking about. I dislike the MythTV Frontend as it seems pretty buggy and slow and pretty outdated. Whereas XBMC plays almost everything, looks awesome and performs pretty well aside from the odd segfault here and there. So what I personally do is to use Mythbackend along with Mythweb(awesome web interface). I also use phpmysql for database editing but that's another thread. With mythweb and mythbackend I am able to schedule recordings, add new schedules, browse the EPG for things I may want to record, set up transcoding jobs, delete recordings, I can even stream recordings if I am local to the server. Mythweb handles all that and more. Mythbackend handles the actual recording and tuning and database stuff. Mythweb and Mythbackend are fabulous but as with anything there are some bugs but most are mainly due to my unique setup. I use DVB-S and ATSC(Over the Air HD) tuners. Also with Mythweb I can schedule recordings from anywhere with Web access(and using my VPN that is.)

Now for watching said recordings you have a few options, if like me your XBMC and MythTV are on the same box you can just add a source which points to your recording folder(s) and watch them like but you may want to use a program which is included with myth call mythrename.pl to rename your recordings to human readable format as myth names recordings based on channum, date, time etc so it is just a bunch of numbers. Secondly you can add a UPNP server as your source of which Myth has a built in UPNP server. This will list you recordings and such, seems to work pretty well mostly. Thirdly you can add a network source and name it as so:

Code:

myth://youreservername

I think that is the naming scheme, someone correct me if I am wrong, I am not in front of my box currently to check. Now with this one you can actually watch LiveTV and check a limited EPG(for current time only I believe) as well a watch your recordings. This method works pretty well as far as I can tell but I rarely watch LiveTV with Myth, I use it 99% for recording only. Lastly there used to be a Python script called xbmcmythtv that was a pretty full featured MythFrontend. I am not sure what the current status of it is and whether or not it is still functional.

All that said I really hope the GSOC project of a unified PVR comes to fruition as that would be pretty incredible.

Finally have you tried/thought of subscribing to a Newsgroup service for your TV needs? Maybe you Uni doesn't block newsgroup access yet?

Hope this helps,

Kevin