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mthy
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 Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2005 1:38 pm |
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Joined: Sat Nov 26, 2005 1:31 pm
Posts: 1
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Hello guys,
I was wondering if there was any commercial options for buying prebuilt boxes. Or anyone really selling prebuilt ones. I came across the "Dragon" that I think is somehow associated with knoppmyth, but that was too pricey.
Any links are appriciated.
Thanks
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gr8nash
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Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 2:07 am |
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Joined: Thu Apr 01, 2004 10:44 am
Posts: 677
Location:
WA
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assuming your not fishing to setup your own link.. ill bite and say.. .WHY?? install knoppmyth yourself.. tiny bit of reading will save you money.. plus if you cant figure out howto install knoppmyth.. you will NEVER be able to keep myth up and 100% running.. like any fine woman.. myth needs alittle bit of a soft touch 
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mr
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Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 12:10 am |
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Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2005 12:00 am
Posts: 2
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>any commercial options for buying prebuilt boxes
Yeah, this is a good question. Yes, there is Dragon and it's a bit expensive. I haven't heard of any others except local computer stores where they know a bit about Myth.
I'm presently exploring the business viability of engineering/selling prebuilt Myth boxes. I find the idea of notebook or tablet Myth boxes intriguing, but less expensive small form factor systems would be pretty cool too...
I can imagine coming up with a range of systems from cheap value boxes to honking multi-HDTV monsters...
Anyway, I'd be very interested to know if anyone else besides the Dragon people are doing this now. I'm considering becoming a competitor in some way, shape or form... 
Mike.
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Girkers
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Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 10:39 pm |
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Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2005 9:18 pm
Posts: 1422
Location:
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
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I don't think you people consider the time and effort people like Human put into the "Dragon" system, it is not just a matter of slapping a computer together and putting the install disk in and hey presto it works.
KnoppMyth is in Alpha stages and is developed by the main man Cesman/Cecil and Dale (I believe he is still involved somehow). Windows is developed by over 100 developers and includes many phases of testing.
Now here is some maths for you. When you buy a PC does it come with an Operating System, yes but you have to pay for it. IN Aussie land XP home costs over $200 and XP Pro even more. Ok take that off the price of your new PC what are you left with, the price of the components and there assembly.
How much testing do you do on a Windows XP machine before releasing it to a customer, stuff all really because you know that the software that comes from M$ is stringently tested by many different sections and processes.
Human with the help of Cesman has developed a PC that he has tested, customised and made certain will work with a software product that is great, but does not have the resources behind it like M$. If you purchase a cheaper PC from someone else that has simply slapped it together and installed an interation of Linux with MythTV good luck to you. I don't think that the support and knowledge of the person supporting it will be much help if something goes wrong.
Don't get me wrong I am all for free trade it just shits me to see people say I can do that cheaper or a person saying all I am interested in is the bottom line.
Look beyond the price tag and look at the things that are not readily tangable such as support, testing and product knowledge!
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mr
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Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 12:22 am |
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Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2005 12:00 am
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>any commercial options for buying prebuilt boxes
Yeah, this is a good question. Yes, there is Dragon and it's a bit expensive. I haven't heard of any others except local computer stores where they know a bit about Myth.
I'm presently exploring the business viability of engineering/selling prebuilt Myth boxes. I find the idea of notebook or tablet Myth boxes intriguing, but less expensive small form factor systems would be pretty cool too...
I can imagine coming up with a range of systems from cheap value boxes to honking multi-HDTV monsters...
Anyway, I'd be very interested to know if anyone else besides the Dragon people are doing this now. I'm considering becoming a competitor in some way, shape or form...
Mike.
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Girkers
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Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 4:40 pm |
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Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2005 9:18 pm
Posts: 1422
Location:
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
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nermander
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Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 2:46 am |
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Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2005 12:32 pm
Posts: 104
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Girkers wrote: Human with the help of Cesman has developed a PC that he has tested, customised and made certain will work with a software product that is great, but does not have the resources behind it like M$.
BUT, the point is that they used "pricey" components.
Since the specification for the Dragon is public, anyone can put together a Dragon by buying the components from another source. It will still be as pricey.
What most people want is something competative to an STB with built in hard drive.
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Girkers
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Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 3:37 pm |
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Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2005 9:18 pm
Posts: 1422
Location:
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
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nermander, I get your point, but Quote: What most people want is something competative to an STB with built in hard drive. if this is all they want, I personally believe they should steer away from MythTV. What does a STB do, you can watch TV and if you have something like a TiVo you can record a program here and there. What does MythTV do, here is some of the list from the MythTV website: Quote: Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.
Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.
Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
Grabs program information using xmltv.
A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.
Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
Basic video editing abilities. Optional transcoding to remove the commercials from the video file to save space.
Picture in picture support, if you have more than one tuner card.
Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
Program Finder to quickly and easily find the shows you want to record.
Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of those programs, all through a themeable UI. (The first two screenshots are the default theme, the third is iulius.4)
Browse and resolve recording conflicts.
A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely.
Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.
An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
An image viewer/slideshow application.
A weather module.
A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups
A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes.
An RSS news feed reader module.
and some...
If you want to do that on a budget, I am all for it, go for it.
One important thing to remember is that if you buy just entry level parts, what overhead do you have when extra functions are added to MythTV that require more grunt?
_________________
Girkers
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Human
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Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 3:52 pm |
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Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2004 11:29 am
Posts: 2419
Location:
Mechanicsburg, PA
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nermander wrote: BUT, the point is that they used "pricey" components.
And it works great, too
Seriously, we didn't go out of our way to buy the most expensive components. We settled on the requirements of the system and then iterated up to the spec hardware in terms of cost. Search around for my posts about how we tested and rejected several cheap motherboards that all had the same specs before we arrived at the MSI board.
It's really not hard to slap together a system based on price, and many people do this. And then they do it again when it fails. We didn't want people to have that happen with Dragon.
Also, please keep in mind that Dragon is capable of playing back 1080i content flawlessly, one of the reasons for its cost. Our next KRP system will only do standard-def video, but it will cost less. _________________ KnoppMyth R5.5
MythiC Dragon v2.0
Join the KnoppMyth Frappr!
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Girkers
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Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005 9:21 pm |
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Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2005 9:18 pm
Posts: 1422
Location:
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
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Human wrote: Also, please keep in mind that Dragon is capable of playing back 1080i content flawlessly, one of the reasons for its cost. Our next KRP system will only do standard-def video, but it will cost less.
This is one of the points I was trying to make in that people only look at the bottom line, not how good the system is and how it relates to the project itself.
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nermander
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Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2005 12:46 am |
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Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2005 12:32 pm
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Girkers wrote: if this is all they want, I personally believe they should steer away from MythTV.
So, what other projects have a frontend/backend solution and capability of using several disks (LVM) to store recorded shows?
Because the only part of MyhtTV I use is the TV and recording part. I do not use MythMusic (I'm deaf), MythVideo, MythGame (we have a PS2 we use to watch DVDs and play games), MythWeather (is it even available for Sweden?), MythBrowser or anything like that (my MythTV-machine is not even connected to the internet yet, and will only be for me to be able to schedule recordings remotely).
Just because MythTV can do a lot of things, everybody is not intrested in it. For example I don't care for HD content. It's probably at least 5 years into the future here in Sweden. I don't have a TV that can handle it.
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Girkers
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Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 10:18 pm |
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Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2005 9:18 pm
Posts: 1422
Location:
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
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nermander wrote:
So, what other projects have a frontend/backend solution and capability of using several disks (LVM) to store recorded shows?
Window MCE does this as you can simply span disks and you can use cheaper dumb media extenders as the frontends.
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WantPvr
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Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2006 1:00 pm |
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:25 am
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First, Hi Human, I'm in Scranton. I didn't know anyone else here in "'da sticks" knew about Myth, much less built a commercial version. Well done, looks mighty impressive.
Also, who said Dragon was expensive? 
Go check the some of the prices for Windows Media Center Pc, on "their" website , $1700 last I checked. $2500 for a good one. Probably not all of the functionality of Dragon either!
Also, everyone makes a big deal about LVM, multiple disks etc. I may be a total noob (which I am) but can't you just create a synlink for the videos directory ? i.e. mnt a new disk, and symlink that subdir over to it ?
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Human
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Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2006 1:37 pm |
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Joined: Thu Sep 30, 2004 11:29 am
Posts: 2419
Location:
Mechanicsburg, PA
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WantPvr wrote: First, Hi Human, I'm in Scranton. I didn't know anyone else here in "'da sticks" knew about Myth, much less built a commercial version. Well done, looks mighty impressive. Thanks! You should join the Frappr so we can make sure PA is properly represented WantPvr wrote: Also, who said Dragon was expensive? Go check the some of the prices for Windows Media Center Pc, on "their" website , $1700 last I checked. $2500 for a good one. Probably not all of the functionality of Dragon either! I agree, but of course I'm biased WantPvr wrote: Also, everyone makes a big deal about LVM, multiple disks etc. I may be a total noob (which I am) but can't you just create a synlink for the videos directory ? i.e. mnt a new disk, and symlink that subdir over to it ?
You sure can, but the issue is that if you want to be certain you have, say, 1TB of total storage for all your content, no matter how it's allocated, you need LVM to do this currently. Otherwise, you can do things like allocate /myth/video to one HDD, and /myth/tv to another, but then you can't use extra space in /myth/video to record shows when /myth/tv is full. With LVM, you just have a big chunk of storage available under /myth. _________________ KnoppMyth R5.5
MythiC Dragon v2.0
Join the KnoppMyth Frappr!
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