Recently, my wife and I purchased a TIVO. We’ve been using MythTV for the past several years, but the computer we run MythTV on has become unstable, and since we just recently purchased a condo, we have no money to spend on building a new box.
I’ve written articles before on what it was like to build my own MythTV box, so I thought it might be good to write up an article on what I like and dislike about each system.
It’s been an interesting experience, playing with TIVO and learning how it compares with our beloved MythTV.
Now, one thing that has been frustrating to us about MythTV, is that it hasn’t been terribly easy to upgrade. We use KnoppMyth, and I never really took the time to learn the upgrade procedures. But, of course, that’s the problem. You shouldn’t have to learn a procedure. These are computers, they should just do the work for us.
NOTE: I just visited the KnoppMyth site, and discovered they now have auto upgrade for the current release. It will upgrade from release 3 or 4 to the latest software. Unfortunately, you still have to do the backup yourself. I’m puzzled as to why that should be the case, I think it would be a great enhancement of MythTV/KnoppMyth, if the whole automation procedure were automated. When KnoppMyth is installed, it could set up a separate partition on the hard drive and use that for backup, or allow you to specify a network drive, or USB hard drive.
One thing we dearly miss about the MythTV is the commercial skipping. We can fast forward through commercials with TIVO, but with MythTV, the commercial skipping was so accurate, we rarely ever had to mess with it. When there was a problem, it was fairly easy to go in and manually cut out the commercials.
Another thing we miss from MythTV, is the ability to do our scheduling using a web browser over the local network. MythWeb is one of the best features of MythTV, I believe. It seems very silly that TIVO makes you use the rather cumbersome, by comparison, on screen scheduling, when they could easily set up the same kind of thing that MythTV has.
TIVO itself uses open source software. They use Linux for their operating system. In fact, since the TIVO boxes are sold at such a low price, some people are using TIVO boxes to construct low-cost network appliances.
I will admit that TIVO has a pretty nice interface. The program suggestion feature is nice, too. If you want a DVR that isn’t any hassle, and you’re willing to pay a monthly fee for it, TIVO isn’t a bad deal.
If you like a bit more of a challenge, a lot more flexibility, and complete access to the source code, MythTV is your answer. They both have their places.
