Episode: 190 Title: HPR0190: Media Centers for Linux Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0190/hpr0190.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:20:20 --- Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. I'm monster B and on the phone today with me is Peter 64 from the Langs Cranks. Good idea, you're doing? And Clot 2 is going to join us later. He's having a coffee and a waffle at IHOP. So where are we going to talk about today? Well, we've got to come up with the availability of lineage media centers. And I think we've found about what's seven of them. So you want to start off with MythTV? Yeah, when you look at MythTV, it's purely a PDR to start it off with. And then once you get it installed in that, and you have your EPG up, OK, that's really is a brilliant PDR. But you start to try those plugins and all of a sudden the usability just skyrockets. The amount of plugins you can get from MythTV is just unbelievable. And of course everyone knows about MythVideo on that. You know, and you manage to trim this weather. Everyone seems to chuck it in weather. Paying down there in all of these applications. But some of them all are interesting ones. And one of the particular, I can't be interested in, if only just put it in, is MythZoneMorner. And what that does is if you actually do have ZoneMorner, which is the surveillance television, you know, CCD, for your home or your business or whatever. Myth now has a plug-in for that. So you can access all your surveillance cameras as well. And that's only just been put in last couple of months. I don't know what it actually came in. There's MythRost, which on page, you can do a party. It must be like a recipe or something. So yes, you just like to never ever play with MythTV, but still you don't necessarily. You did MythZone2, did you? Yeah, MythZone2, I just tried it out on the live CD. It seemed pretty nice. One thing I was, because I want to build an actual box, one of these days, just for MythTV. But is there any free program guides, or is it all like a paid service? Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that, because from my understanding in America, now they have to, what, you've got to pay $25 a euro something. In Australia, I've always used a thing called Shepard, which is just, I think it's written in Python, that I claim you on that. It goes to a couple of the websites for the Major TV companies, and it pulls down the data. Now, one of the sites that actually gets them for is, what do you call it, the citizen? Tell us what we're looking for first. It's a community-based thing where people continue to update it, and do it. And the other one is on one of the major television companies, and it pulls it down from there. And by using both sources, it makes a pretty good electronic programming guide. But it also in Australia now, all digital TV services broadcast the electronic programming guide over the air. Now, because I've had this set up running for so long, pulling the data off the internet, I haven't bothered switching it over now to pull it just purely from the digital TV stream, but I would imagine the stream that they send out of the airways is going to be actually better, because it will be more up to date. That's pretty nice. So you have, like, a, just a regular antenna for this. So you get your television from, like, a definition over the airways? Yeah, that's right. In Australia, the five major channels broadcast the standard definition and high definition. Yeah, pretty well, just a standard aerial. But we live in a fairway way from the actual, you know, transmitter. But one of the visuals too. Who's that? There's only the three of us. Yeah, there's only someone else. Oh! There's only you. Yeah. I don't want that. That's been my own accent, scared me. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, it's just over at the airways. And with Nick TV, what I also did was obviously with the Ostar, which is our satellite TV. We have a decoder box. And from the decoder box, I just put a signal in through one of the component or what do you, you know, SDAA actually used to pull it in. And I can record satellite TV as well. But one thing I found out about that is, you don't bother recording satellite television because it's repeated that many times. And you're like, there's no need to do it. But it certainly can be done if you want to. So yeah, that's virtually Nick TV. And like I said, it's the poster boy of the Linux Media Center. And so Nick, I mean, it kind of aggregates not only television, but I mean, as long as you've got the plug-ins, you can aggregate practically anything else, like whether your own media, your local media, right? Music and teachers and stuff like that? Yeah, yeah. With the Wi-Fi itself, and Nick, Apple trailers, you can do Apple trailers, you can do a Nick Braver. You can do a telephone, that's a zip phone call. I mean, they used to call it, I've never done. Because honestly, if I want to use Braver, I'm not going to sit and watch it on a bloody app. I'm going to, on a plasma screen, I'm going to go up into it from my monitor, if I want to read it. Nick Flix. I think Nick Flix is the one that will give you your local theater. What's playing all around it, your local theater? Once again, I don't use this, because I'd imagine it would be very good for American, or Americans. But yeah, not much point where I live on Fred. I didn't say, you know, you can get to YouTube, easy, just watch movies there, whatever you'd want to do. No, hundreds of plugins. They are, well, when I say hundreds, not quite hundreds, but there's also official and unofficial plugins as well. And I've never really looked at all the unofficial plugins. And so, let me ask you this, does NIS also aggregate, like Monster Bees last episode on the media center, did you know his interview with that guy from the NCE? Does NIS do that kind of thing as well? Like, can it control home automation kind of stuff? Yeah, not home automation. That's, yeah. It's purely media. Okay. Yeah. It's got myth news for RSS, so it's to pull it more, yeah. New strains, all that sort of stuff. But, no, that's purely, when you start to talk about Linux NCE, that guy is really beyond the media centers that the typical person thinks is a media center. Right. Yeah. I mean, listen to Monster Bees interviewer, if you want to know about Linux NCE, they've got machine use it again. But with, certainly, myth 202, but like you said, Monster Bees, you installed using myth Ubuntu. It's interesting now, fact, when I first started to play with myth, it was about at the point 1.8. Back then, I think the only thing around was not myth. And I actually tried to use not myth and didn't have much success with it. And I end up going using sister and installing it with that. Now they have all these things like Fedora has one as well, but too, you interviewed a float on the bad apples about it. So, I think it's a good idea to do it. But I really think myth is now at the stage where you don't need those dedicated distributions for it. It was really for me to set up, well, for me to set up myth TV in Zeus. Like, I can do really no problem. It's not just setting up of myth TV. It's to setting up of work. Like, to set up work, you've got to be able to get at working with the infrared receiver. And then, to sit out and write all the work configuration files. And then, and the ones for myth TV, you've got to build for N-fire as well. Because N-fire is what I use to watch in this video. So, that takes a long time to set them up. And, like I said, the other day, it's painted. If that machine gets built up, it would take me a hell of a long time to get this set back up. And, like I said, it would take me a lot of time to get this set back up. And, like I said, it would take me a lot of time to get this configuration files. But, actually, get myth TV up and running. I did adhere to the other Slackware when I was just talking about the bikes and the RFC. And, I said, I'm going to try to get myth going in Slackware. And, I had a gown by the end of the day. So, the dedicated ones, the dedicated ones are great in the appliance when you're thinking about it. And, like, their own is the mechanics entirely. Yet, they still heard of this cool geeky thing called myths. You know, that's a good way for them to get their feet wet and, kind of, like, just pop into disk. And, you know, it's up and running really, really fast. Yeah. I tried that. Yeah. I tried. I tried it. Yeah. I tried a to my computer, and I couldn't try any of their television stuff because I don't have the card for it, but I used it as a media center for the evening while I was watching videos and stuff, and it was just so easy and so fast and it was nice, it was cool. Yeah, and it's cross-platform, too, runs on our way at 60 minutes, that is real us, how do we do it on freebo? I hadn't played around with freebo, back when I used to run Mandrake. It was probably the thing that started in Linux on Mandrake was that I saw freebo actually ran on it, it was part of the distribution, it was packaged with it, back on my back it was through the Mandrake for Mandrake, I think by then it might have been Mandrake the 10th, and I did have a pipe down with it, so I could be down. Yeah, now that you mentioned, I remember when I was booting at the Linux CD, seeing the I guess Drake, Jack, X, or whatever that little bootloader stuff is, I remember that. Yeah, it ran really well actually, I was impressed. And it uses what empliers are, the FFM peg 2, with the video playback and that, the VX. Yeah, I'm just wondering what's the difference between freebo and myth. Then back very similar, obviously a lot more developed in Gasey, myth PGO, I'd say, because it's recognised for a lot more people, isn't it? For the 7th, one of those ones of the work, look at that, if you don't set up the Linux Media Center. What is a freebo based on? Well, we think it's based on Mandrake. Well, the live CD was definitely, yeah, it was definitely Mandrake's live, but in terms of like just building it up from scratch, I don't remember, I didn't really, I didn't look at those content details for whatever reason, but they don't mention it. Yeah, I would install it on any distribution, whatever. I mean, that really, all these things are just the front-end to something. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Well, it's not very, go ahead, sorry. No, you go ahead. I was going to say it's not a terribly, how do I say it, attractive looking front-end, but it was certainly very, very functional, like it wasn't sleek looking, you know, at least the live thing that I was trying, but it was very, very functional, and very easy to get up and running, you know, I mean, I just popped it in and started using it right away, and I was pretty happy with it. Yeah, one thing about all those things, if people admit to be phoneable, I mean, there's that many themes out there, the worst things you saw in which one you want to use. Yeah. Every other day, yet there's just another one that's really good. I think freebo, I went to the phone section, it only looks like there's one. Yeah, that kind of impression I got, I didn't really, I didn't feel a whole lot on their side about being able to skin it that much. But in how do I look at the function, you know, the photo gallery and the video on the music, and then, like I said, a TV recording, which I couldn't try, but everything else was working really nicely. Yeah, so really out of, what, seven, I think the seven that we looked at, the freebo and the freebo are two that do digital TV, or two of the cards. Yeah, let me tell you, the user's myth as the PBR and then the other, what it is, left for. They're more or less, I suppose, media organizers, aren't they? Yeah, but the information people is better. Well, I try to, a lot of people want that these days, don't they? They're not interested in TV, they can download all the stuff they want off the Internet, or just watch movies, anything. I mean, I try to be, the other one that I try was the Xbox Media Center, XBNC, which I guess, obviously, probably started for the Xbox, but now it's available again for Linux. It's available for Mac and Windows. The only problem I had with it really was that the Linux version, they only have, like, really just one way of distributing it, and that is through Ubuntu, a personal package archive thing, the PTA thing, so I had to boot up into Ubuntu in order to install it easily. I mean, I could have gone and tried to do it from source, but that was too much to ask, I think. Just to try it out, but other than that, it's really attractive, and again, just very, very functional. I really liked it. I found it very intuitive. That was the first media center, or, I guess, what would it be called, media aggregator that I really tried ever, and it was really intuitive. Yeah, one thing I did like, it was needing to get to that deep out there to control just brightness and contrast and all that sort of stuff, where mid TV, you actually have to, for some reason, go into your settings and enable that that you want pitch and control. Well, I don't know why that is just enabled to begin with. I don't know about free, but I can't remember if you had that sort of control. I didn't stumble across it, I'm free though. Yeah, but to me, especially if you're going to watch these on a projector, and a lot of our viewing is done on the projector, and depending on the like, you want to be able to adjust your contrast in your picture, and even saturation a lot of times, and I like to have that here, so it's nice, you know, quick to find. And this Xbox media center, very easy to find all those sort of settings. Well, I think with that Xbox media center, everything was easy to find. Like I said, I've never really used anything like that before, but within one sitting, I found all the controls that I could have ever wanted. I was impressed with how attractive it was. It was something that I was looking at, and I was like, man, fire a friend over right now, I fired this up. They would be impressed enough to look at it and kind of enjoy it. It's a really nice looking and functional thing. They're not distributing it quite as easily as they think it could be distributed yet, but maybe that's for the coming. And the only problem I had about this with it was every time I went into watch a movie, well, when I exit it back out of the movie, the main menu had gone completely white. There's like a ticker along the bottom of the menu. I can't remember what that used to display across there, but all I could do was make that right and go across, and I had to exit the application and restart it for some reasons. You know, I'm really interested in that. Yeah, and you said, well, you should file a bug report, and I said, yeah, I probably should. Anyway, I went over to the... That's something we haven't discussed to about documentation for all these sort of things, and I did use to get help. But I went over to the IRC at Linux Media Center, whatever it was, and talked to a couple of bikes in there, and certainly the problem had been reported. I was using...it was an alpha version anyway. And they certainly knew about the problem that didn't know of any fix at the time. And they were working about all these things, sorry. I was just going to ask what you were using it on. I forget what version it was going to. It's the lightest one, whatever that is. What is the lightest? Yeah, like hearty. And I was using it on gutsy, so I wonder if that was a difference. Yeah, well, yeah, it could be, because I was using the very lightest alpha, whatever was in the rate pass. Okay, yeah, I was not. I must have been the first time when I went over there and asked the question. The first question they asked me was what version it was, and I said, I hold on a second, because I did work when I stored it. And she goes, the bike said to me, well, who did you get to install it? So I felt like, hey, well, I did make it, but I'm going to try to read all this. But anyway. But yeah, just on documentation, so we want to discuss that deal. We can come back and discuss it. Well, the Xbox Media Center is not a PVR, though. It's just to play the media that you have on your hard drive or CDs or DVDs. You can't actually capture anything from your television. Correct. Yeah, that's right. It's just a media aggregator. That's what they are. I mean, they all do exactly the same thing. And it's got the obligatory bloody weather plugin, like all of them. Is obligatory the right word? Yeah, I actually liked it. That impressed me, too, actually. It was that cool weather. Not that I ever cared about the weather, but it's nice to have. No, I use a lot of it, and it seems that all of them have it. Now, the other one I looked at was Alisa or Liza. And this one, but I've actually used this one for quite some time. This is the one where people come over to my house and they walk in, and I put this up on the projector, and this is the one that they go well. Now, quite so. I know I discussed this with you, and you, Dave, particularly liked it, because you think that it screams a battle. Yeah, the theme, I really don't like that theme at all. And they don't find it intuitive either. Now, that was the other thing. Functionality is actually a bit of a thing, but when you look at it, there's absolutely no picture control in it. The theme-wise, there's only real extreme themes, and they're all exactly the same. I just changed the couple of your icons. What does look impressive though, is when you bring up a movie, you start watching a movie, and you can get back into the menu, and the movie will continue to play behind the menu. Now, that's one of those things where people go, well, look at that, but really, what's the good thought? I suppose you asked yourself. Good to wow your friends. Obviously. They're going for the eye candy and they're like, look what I can do, kind of thing. What I couldn't do with that is install it. I don't get it either to install and launch properly, and I traded on a couple of systems. I was really surprised. Yeah, actually, it's funny. I ran a bunch on the laptop, and I had no trouble. And really, I really think some reason that had a lot to do with having the name installed, and I seem to go on that map rather at all. There, I've had my back inversion three-point something on my Zeus box. I upgraded that three-point five. I think I didn't know this. Couldn't get it to run. I installed the latest version, which is about five-ten, and it actually got out of this now run under Zeus. I managed to get it running under Zeus 10.3. Yeah, eye candy wise, at all the things that were reviewed, I really think that it's got the biggest wow factor. But that's a personal preference, isn't it really? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just what people are after. You know, like when they sit down and say, okay, now I want a media center sort of application. Are you doing it for yourself? Or are you doing it to wow people? For me, honestly, it would be more for the wow factor, because when I watch videos, I play it from in-player in the command line, and that's how I use all my media, whether it's music or videos or whatever. So the only reason I would have, for instance, X, B, and C, on my computer is for the rare occasion with some of them sitting over my shoulder, and I want to show them that Linux is, you know, cool, just like everything else, and I would probably just fire that up so that they could see it. I would only can use it myself. Yeah, well that's, yeah, a rise of interesting question. All these things really, when you look at them, you can look at a two different ways. You're using... You don't have the big widescreen panel telly-ed and sort of home theater set up with a projector and everything. Correct. And yeah, so typically M-player, BLC, you want to look at the pictures, you'll be up, Q-View or whatever it's called, and certainly, there's nothing for anything like this, except it makes it convenient. That's the really early thing that they got down for if it's a convenient. But if you have a mini-lantroom, you want to be able to operate them with a remote control, and you want to be able to flip the each section really quick, then all of a sudden, doing that with the keyboard, it's not that cool. Correct. Coolness is it. It's convenient. I think I finally were back and struggled, put the button, it took it up from back, it took it up from running. So this is... I've just taken a lot of feedback. This is almost self. It's from a time and hour. Well, you know what? When you are hearing feedback, I hear you breaking up a lot. That's what it sounds like on my hand. Yeah, that's what I'm up here and too. Oh. For the boy. I thought it was because I was loading up webpages, but I stopped, and then kept going. Yeah, no, because I'm not doing anything on my hand. I think it's just because you're in Australia, Peter. I mean, it's... Oh, it might be. Like, it's just the bits or the packets. They're not getting you as soon enough. The other thing that we didn't mention was that, unless you use the tree streamer plugins, will it... Oh, yeah. The ones we've talked about previously, have it used? You know how favorite of that input is, wouldn't you? What's that still a bit? Well, you know, I mean, the G-streamer plugins have the advantage of, you know, understanding certain proprietary codecs a lot better than, you know, the other plugins, like, Inflare, supposedly. I mean, honestly, I get by really well with Inflare, but there have been occasions where I can't play something, and then if I install G-streamer, it'll play. So it's the usual story of the more plugins, or the more codecs you've got, you know, the more you are covered and the better luck you have. But I guess there's an advantage to G-streamer just on the... There's the whole infrastructure of G-streamer, and you can have other programs talking to G-streamer, and stuff like that. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't really use... I mean, obviously I haven't used the Elisa, so I'm not really too sure what kind of advantage it has. Tell me, when I install Elisa, I install the G-streamer plugins. What's the difference between those ones and the ones? Because you can go to G-streamer and purchase plugins, can't you? Yeah, so I mean, for us Americans, that's a big advantage, because if you are worried about like the CIA, or the ATF knocking on your door, because you're stealing codec information, if you've bought it from them, then you know, they've licensed it from the InPEG Society and all that other stuff. Well, okay, so the ones I'm pulling off are the retires for Ubuntu, and they're exactly the same as the ones I would down purchase. There's no difference. No, I don't think that's right. But by a different... I think so. I could be wrong, honestly. That's a good question. I didn't really look into that. You might be right. You might literally just be purchasing the... No, you know what? Because when you purchase... Yeah, but no, when you purchase it, I'm pretty sure you're purchasing, you know, specifically like the DVD decoding and stuff, but I could be wrong. I haven't looked into that sort of thing in a while. Yeah, it was just not always wanted. Well, interesting. I mean, from what I understand, it's not even a concern for anyone out of the USA, and that's what I've always heard. Another one of those things that I did look at just quickly was in the TINA, which is similar with this, in that you have to, you know, start the back end, and then you go to the front end and all that. I actually can get it to work, but I couldn't find out how to add media to it. It kept on telling me to go to a certain tab. Did I have no video in that particular folder or whatever I had down at it? And it told me way to go on that. It went all the way to where I said to go. It wasn't there. It's an entertainer, another just a media aggregator, or is it a proper media? It doesn't do the TV. It says, it's in very early stages of being developed. That said it was a high priority that it wanted to get visual TV in there. But the only thing that really stood out with this one was that it automatically went to the Internet and downloaded like the, what do you call it, the metadata, for CDs and movies and everything like that. But I didn't get that to work. That's what it says in the feature list. Sure, but it's like, I'm sure the others do that though. No, I was going to say, Myth TV, when you're on, like, Myth Video, on Myth Movie, what it was called, then it actually goes to the Internet database and will pull down the information on that particular movie. Now, you have to manually go and do that. Whereas this thing says that automatically will go and fetch the data for you. So now, I don't know about Myth TV with music because the sort of music I listen to is all country mess and I'm sure there's no minute data on it, even that sort of stuff. And if I want to listen to the music, I just want to listen to it. I don't want to read about it. But yeah, I'd imagine these all do it. Actually, Alisa, that doesn't do it from what I can tell. I couldn't find anywhere where you, and tell it to go to the Internet and pull down stuff. It's called metadata. That's what you call it, then. Yeah, you're talking about the ID3 tags from CBBB or something like that. Like a database of all the song listings and the year and the author of the song, and stuff like that, right? Yeah, all that sort of stuff, yeah. And then for movies, all that sort of tell you, what Myth TV will pull down, you know, and the spiel that they give you, which is typically the same as on the back of the DVD box, and it tells you the years made and the producer and all that sort of stuff. And interesting with, because it's pulling in from the Internet movie database, it also gives you the user rating, which I like in Myth TV as well. Yeah, so this edit panel, is one that you may want to take an eye on. Documentation is virtually nil. I went to the frequently asked questions and there was only three of them, or they were, well, why did you create it? It doesn't support Digital TV, and that's where they said, no, not yet, but that's a high priority. And this, like a Lisa, is using the two-streamer for playback. So, you know, but how many do we really need us? So that's a question. So this is a good thing. Oh, yeah, sorry, I can't get in top. Yeah, and I think, I think G-streamer has a advantage too. I mean, it's got a lot of different, like, APIs that you can call. And I guess, in theory, you could just, you can do a lot of stuff with G-streamer. It's a very flexible system, I guess. So it sounds like G-streamer's trying to be more of a myth, sort of, contender. Yeah, I think what they might be trying to do, and this is only speculation on my part, is take the looks of, say, a Lisa or whatever, and the functionality, they may be combined, but we'll have to wait and see, or the features, nothing stands out, with the features that's got the same RSS, the newsreader, weather, and things that this, just that seems, available for it at the moment. Yeah, I found it. 0.1 beta. So that will probably give you an understanding of, yeah, what size it's at at the moment. Pretty early. Yeah. So that would obviously not be for someone looking for a needy center right now, it's more for, like, people who are interested in it, maybe want to help develop it or something. Yeah, I was just going to say that, maybe, yeah, for developers to go over and if they want to apply their skills, I don't know what they used to write it, but I don't imagine it's a certain pre-use of the formula, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it would say, on their Wiki or something, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. And then met TVA, the one beta, right? Yeah, well, it's only at 0.21. And what is? Well, it's at 0.21. That's something that I don't understand that. Like, what does it have to do before it gets to the 0.1 release? I think it's just up to the developers when they think that it's, you know, stable, where they really wanted to be. But like I said, bit TV in itself is really just the PDR. And then there's all the plugins, but plugins that get with it, but they're not interested in the plugins, are they? The developers are interested in getting the PDR functionality to stable, what do I mean? You know, they're stable, it will work, it runs, whatever. Yeah. And that would be a point. Yeah. Then I just wondered what, sorry, I'm so glad that's all at 0.21, because it just works. I mean, it's been working for ages. That's right. If you end right there, I'll call the documentation. I'll tell you what's on your 0.21, wouldn't it? Yeah. I mean, it would tell you what they want to have in there that isn't there yet, or, you know, problems that they feel that they have. Call the bugs in there. Yeah. Well, when it comes down to it, MetTV is like the real winner here. Yeah. I mean, if you want a fully featured, very functional Linux media center, then, yeah. You know, and I know you could get that. A bit of a bunny at the pub over this, but that's not the MetTV's yet. And the others have a hell of a long way to go to catch up. If you're purely interested in looks, then I would say go with the loser, but that's a personal thing. As you know, I think would certainly disagree with that. You know, it's not a hard little mistake. He's choice. Yeah. I mean, I think both of you guys are kind of wrong. I don't, I mean, yeah, knit is cool, but this is great and stuff, and I'm intrigued as anyone by it, but I think there's probably a segment of people out there, or just me, that doesn't need, you know, all that knit functionality. They just want something to play to media in, and kind of a nice interface to access all of the media that they have on their hard drive. Like in terms of ease of installation, intrudedness, and looks, I'm going with XBNC. Well, what do you have? I would, sorry to go. That was just going to say, a boxy, when it comes out, it's based on the Xbox Media Center. It has all the same features, except for it's a social networking, where you can share your idea with other people. That's cool. Yeah, I forgot about that one. Yeah, I signed up, like two weeks ago, to download it, because it's invites only, and I still haven't heard nothing from them. Summer? Yeah. But that's actually you just stated, where it's got the social networking aspect. That's the one thing that may set this apart from all the others. It's something that the others don't offer. Yeah, I really like that idea. That sounds pretty neat to be able to share a media, you know, I guess it could be used in the wrong way, but, yeah, but it's not, not really to share media, it's, it's, so, yeah, that's right, I watch this movie, and say, me, you must be, we often talk, you know, I see, and we say, how have you seen this movie? Well, we seem to have similar tastes. So, I would have you as one of my friends, and that way, I could look, and I might want to watch a movie today, and I'd got a while to watch. I can bring up this boxy with its social network, anything, and say, okay, monster beast, just watch this movie, and he said, it's really good, so I'll sit and watch that. And that's the way I understand this works. Okay. It's not actually sharing the movie, it's just, yeah. It's like Twitter, but cool. For media. Yeah, that's something. Yeah, really. Yeah, and I think it's not great. I would definitely use that, I think, honestly. Oh, yeah, it is, because I know a couple of them, they took a cab, half the emails, we send each other up, you know, what, well, it's what we pulled down off the internet, and you know, telling each other, it's worth getting. And this is just the sort of automated thing of that is, but, yeah, that way, you don't have to actually talk to your friends as much. No, that's right. No, I don't want to, I didn't move you, so I could talk to people. Right. I live in, I live in the middle of nowhere, because I hate people. Now, I admit to you, though, you can actually share this stuff, though, right? Do the web interviews, or, well, yeah, that's one thing that we did, actually, do we? Yeah. That you were able to log onto my myth machine, and for those who don't know that I live in Australia, and must have been, lives all the way over in America, but he was able to get on to my myth box for a myth web, and go through and have a look at all my recordings. I think you could look at all the movies I had, and start watching a recording. I think you could convert it to flash, didn't it? So you could watch it in the myth web, wherever? Yep. It worked really nice, too. It took like, yeah, it's great, because we're so far away, it took like seven minutes to actually buffer the video, but it worked good. That's incredible. Yeah, well, it's probably got a lot to do with my app. AppString, too, is pretty slow. I mean, not certainly that at the space that you like to get, and if I did, it would have been a hell of a lot better than that. Yeah, well, I mean, seven minutes wasn't bad either, because a- Seven minutes did not bad at all. Yeah, I played the show for like, you know, just to test it out, like 15 minutes, and there wasn't one heck up. I mean, it just, nice and smooth. Yeah. It's pretty good. I actually don't use it enough. But I suppose I don't have a lot of need to use this. So, you've got this, and this web plugin, you basically, you're your own YouTube, or whoo.com or something, right? I mean, because you've been served media through the web to any place. Yeah, that's right. Anyone you want, the only new setup that's going to sit up with, with the password, or for all you died, like I didn't pass with them on. Yeah. But the other thing with this web too, is, well, I did do a lot of that. What password, man? You just aren't going to put a password on anything, are you? No, I couldn't do this stuff. But also with this web, so you go away, you can log into your v-box and set up a recording, two, just out of the internet, just in case you forgot to record something. So, really that's the main reason for that plug-in. If you're at work, or away from the house, and you want to fire up the laptop, to make sure you set the recording for something, that's the main purpose for it, right? Yeah, well, I think that was the original. I don't recall the, when I first installed this web, that you could do much else, then just, you know, have a look at the EPG data, and then set up recording. But now it seems to do a hell of a lot of stuff. You can change all, well, I hope you set it. You can really stuff in your v-box up too, to sort of set in through any of them. I don't recall that, but they used to be in there, right? Yeah, that's the selling point for me, that the web interface, all the plug-ins, and the themes, because I'm looking at the theme space right now, and there's probably like 50 themes on there. Yeah, and for everyone on there, there's another two or three out on the internet if you went looking at the good font. Now you said you installed it on Slackware, what did you download, just like one, is it just one tarball, or is it a bunch of applications you got to put together? No, actually, that was the other thing, with doing it on Slack. But I do it on Zoom, or Ubuntu or whatever, so you've got it back in, already running, like I do in the Lancer, then on my other, because all I want to do is install front-ends. Now, what's that Slackware sort of, Slackware sort of cool, Slacknot builds. Yeah, okay, so, yeah, with Zuzer or Ubuntu, you can just download and store front-end on any machine. With Slackware, you don't have the choice. You have the choice of installing mid-TV, which install the back-end, as well as your front-end, then instead of just doing individual plug-ins, there was just another package that you pulled down, and that gave you, you know, like, miss video and all, and miss weather, you couldn't pull them down individually. It was the main plug-ins all pulled into one package. Yeah, and that was the Slack builds. Yeah, but, I mean, you could have done it, I guess, yourself, from source or whatever, and been more picky. Yeah, I actually just went and looked for the source code just for mid-front-end. And I couldn't find it yet. You know, they get the whole source, you know, package, and that's the complete thing, and that's what SBA issues, and not SBAs. Slack builds or whatever it is. I take it in there. So anyway, I end up installing the whole thing. But I mean, when I say it's stored, it's not hard. And setting up now, back when I used to run it, to mid-TV wouldn't even scan for channels. You'd have to go and get the DVB utilities. And I think it's called ZAP. And it pulls all your frequencies out and makes a channel configuration file. And then you had to take that over and put it in mid-TV and use that for your channels. Now, mid-TV actually is one of the very few applications on Linux that can actually get through a scan for channels as well. Like Catherine and that, you have to go and put it in all the transponder details before you can scan for a particular channel. And you have to know all the frequencies and all that sort of stuff. You can't just click scan and off it goes. So in that respect, Linux in general has a little bit of catching up to do with Windows. I don't like to hear that. Yeah, you can cut that video. That's the truth. Well, one good thing is, MythTV is not available on Windows. No, that's not entirely true. You can get, but there was just a Linux and Mac. No, you can get a Windows client. Now, that's a look pretty. But what it does, because MythTV, and I don't know what Nub is, I tell you, you'd know more about Nub. But when you record, it's a Nub. Nub. What's Nub staying for? I don't even know what you're saying. In any of these, I don't know. No, no. In Nub, I think it is. When you record MythTV, it uses a Nub coil, I think it is. Like no other application can sort of read it. You can never share an MPE. MPEG 4.2. But anyway, for the Windows team, you can get a client, so you can put this on Windows Box, and then you can log on to your, this back-end box and watch the recorded programs and that, but I don't think you can record, you know, you can set up recordings and all that, you can only just watch the recorded programs, but I haven't looked at that in about two years. Yeah, but anyway, that's just, that's not the back end anyway, right? That's just the... Yeah, it's running on Linux. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I was only able to watch, see, but there are quite a lot of things. Just a little bit more detail on the front ends of the back end. So you're saying a back end would be like a core system, and then the front ends would be like at each TV? Yeah, okay, with the back end. The back end is running the moisture database. It's probably going... It's going to have all your tunic arts, et cetera. Now that can be a standalone box. It doesn't have to have a monitor on it or anything. And yeah, it's what I suppose you want to call your media server. Then on separate boxes you can put around, you just put the front end on, and that's the pretty duet and all that sort of stuff. Now, you could argue whether you should keep your front end separate from your back end. But for me, that's pointless, right? Because the mid box is sitting there doing nothing for most of its time anyway. Yeah, it's not like you're recorded on TV 24 hours a day. So I have a dedicated machine sitting in my entertainment system. I just bought a nice case to gas with the plasma. Tell you how they look too bad. And that sits there, and that runs the front end and the back end. But if you wanted to just see, okay, I'm just trying to picture how to do this. Like, say I take a back end and put it out in the garage. Yeah. Now, the front ends, okay, say I have two TVs, one in the bedroom, one in the living room, and I have a front end at each one. Now, these front ends are pulling the media off the one in the garage. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So the front end won't have like a disc. They'll be discless. Well, I can't, you probably have to go and read that, because mine don't. Mine have all this in it, obviously. Okay. But you probably can set up. I can't see. No, well, you know, that couldn't be, as far as I know, because you have to install me front end on them. Okay. You might be able to get away with doing it on a, well, there's no reason you couldn't do it on a, what do you call it, the sticks? You spoke smart enough all the time? Yeah. USB sticks, you could just install it at a really minimal, or maybe you could even do like a live CD or something, if you wanted to. Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure you can. You should be able to ship on the, you should just spawn it from there without a problem. I'm looking at one right now. It's called Mini-Meth. It's, it's made just to be a front end on a USB, perfect drive. Yeah, it's called Mini-Meth. That's cool. Mini-Meth.org. Yeah, that would have been a guy. Yeah, that way you can have an A's Quaid system, sitting by the TV. Yeah, I mean, you can argue. At these days, you can build decent systems with, you know, by the mine, I just bought the quiet, the silent, pretty cool of power supply. I have my graphics card, I think, and that one is just the N4 6200. I think it is. It doesn't need a fan to keep it cool because it's only a, you know, it's, it's, it's turned to Mythbox. It does everything Myth2V is ever going to need it to do more. So it's fabulous. So you don't have to worry about heat there. And mine's only AMD on 3,500 at the moment. When I first built the Mythbox, it was a math 1,800. And I had actually no trouble with 1,800. I used to be able to record a couple of programs and stream a recorded program to one of the other front ins and the house. And then, from what I can recall, I never had a trouble doing it. And the only reason I've upgraded it, I've gone from 1,800 to a 2,5 to a 3,5, is because, as I've updated out of the machines in the house, those funds go out into the entrance. So you really don't need, you know, a really fast hardware to run a Myth2V with several front ins, operating at the same time. That's pretty cool. So the only fan you have in there is the power supply. And that's a quiet one, that you have one on the CPU. Yeah, that's right. And these days too, with what power savings, the thing kicks over, you know, about one gigahertz, most of the time anyway, they're doing nothing. Right. And the fan just slows down to nothing as well. So, yeah, it's pretty quiet. You wouldn't hear it. Use our box for other things too, right? Well, that's the other thing too. And it comes back to the argument that should just have a dedicated back end. Well, because of sitting there all the time and it's the machine that's on most in this house, it runs my home automation software as well. And the home security, which is that Zane Monda. And I figured, I'm most will utilize this at $1,500. They're sitting there with premier grant, not actually being used that often. And run the things that I want on most of the time anyway. So, yeah, sure you could build a machine and put it in the basement, but a lot of the time would be doing nothing if it's purely a back end, unless you've watched your home one or two years, I suppose. Yeah, if I was going to build one, it would probably be, you know, because I have a TVO now. So, I would want to replace it. So, it would probably be a dedicated box just for that. You know, especially as much as my daughter records stuff on now on the TV, it would probably be recording nonstop. No, I'd be lost without them if they were great. And the beauty, one of the couple things that we haven't talked about, pulling the ads out of television, myth TV must get it right about 95% of the time now. I have not seen a commercial in the last 12 months. Very rare that I ever get to see it commercial, because after myth TV finishes recording, it's set up then to go through and transcoded, I suppose, what do you call it, to take out all the commercials? It actually doesn't take them out. It goes through marks for them. And then I have it set up to skip commercials. But then if you want to archive the recording, you can go into an edit. And you can actually, it's already, when you bring up the edit line, it's got them already marked in there as red. Then you can just check them quickly if you want to. Then you can transcoded and cut those sections out. So, your archive becomes a lot smaller. And then you can also, depending on the quality, you want the amount of options in there. When you archive it, you know, you can reduce it from the, I'm recorded the high stream, because I've got enough space. I figured, well, why not? There's no reason not to. But if I did want to archive something, then you can reduce it resolution and all that sort of stuff too. To get as many shows as you want on a DVD. You know, these are all the things you can play around with, if you can tell. Oh, yeah, that's cool. And I don't know. Oh, it is. But you're sitting right, and documentation for myth also, I would have to guess the first to say second to none. Like, looking at the other documentation on these other web pages, well, I was hearing that, really didn't have anything I didn't think, for not much at all. Yeah, the myth documentation, like, you know how the, like, the gen2 documentation you can a lot of times use for other Linux distributions, because it's so good. This is like the same thing. Like, if you want to find out information about, like, video compatibility and graphic card compatibility and stuff like that, first place I hit is the myth documentation, because they're just so informative. Yeah, and then the wiki, the wiki is exactly the sign. You have to look at the myth wiki. And there's so much information on that. Elisa doesn't have a bad forum. I don't know how active it is, but the wiki on Elisa just says, it's nothing, gave me no information. I didn't look at the XboxMedia Center documentation, actually. I didn't add it, because I didn't have to. It was so intuitive. I was about to say exactly the same thing. I didn't need to go and look up anything, except for that one problem I was having, which I think I'm spread away, and answer over in the EOSC. Yeah. I found this one yesterday. It's called Geekbox. I guess that's how you say a GEX, B-O-X. Did you post it? Yeah, I never see. Yeah. What it is, it's a media center on a live CD or a DVD that you create yourself. Geekbox is only 16 megabytes, but it has an ISO generator, so you could take a movie, any type of movie you want, even if it's a full-featured film, or your home videos, and put them on this live CD, and you can give it to anyone, and they can pop it in their computer, even if it's a Windows machine, or any type of computer that can boot up into a live CD, and the movie will start playing using M-Player. Wow. That is really cool. Yeah, I mean, this is that kind of, that's a really cool idea for like, independent filmmakers actually. You know, you're always looking for some kind of unique way to distribute your movie that's a totally unique and cool way, and you could put, you can make it really, like, stand out. I think if you did that, that's really cool. And see, hit a list of the different formats. Of course, DiveX, XVID, H.264, MPEG. I mean, anything you can think of any, any type of format. Yeah, it said something about it. With that 32x, that's no way to use the name. Let's see that. And what's cool is it only uses 16 megabytes on the disk. So, on a DVD, you got what? Is it 4.6 gigs, or 4.7 gigabyte? Yeah, it's a single liar. Yeah, so I mean, the average XVID or DiveX movies only 750 megabytes. Yeah, that's wrong. Yeah, so you won't have to worry about room on that disk. Yeah, I just thought I would throw that one out there. I thought it was pretty neat. Yeah, it wasn't that long, everyone, look at it, you want to play around with this, isn't it? And it looks like it's in the, I'm not 100% sure, but I think I've seen it in the Ubuntu repo. So, you should be able just to app get it, the ISO generator. So, what's that thing most of the way? What are you writing about this? What's the thing? Well, the ISO generator is a software program to create the ISO that you, you know, whatever movie that you want to put on it. Let me, let me, let me get to you. Oh, yeah, right, I see it now. Yeah, yeah, I found it. Sorry, I was talking with my daughter. Yeah, too late. Yeah. Like you said, if you want to distribute movies. Yeah, like Clot 2, you know, for like somebody that made an independent film and they want to get it out there for people to see. Yeah, it's just a cool unique way to do that. I mean, it's, I guess it's not that much different than just giving someone a DVD with the movie on it. But I mean, you know, I mean, it would be really unique and stuff if you did it this way. Yeah, it does, it does a lot more than just that, but I haven't, I just found it last night, so I haven't read too much into it. Plus, you can put a splash screen, you know, a custom one. I mean, you can really deck this thing out. Yeah, it does. They're using everything. Yeah, it looks pretty cool. Yeah, that sounds really... I'm going to probably look into that a little bit further. That sounds really cool. You know what this is all kind of showing me is that, you know, Linux is fine with multimedia. It's like doing really, really well with multimedia. It's a proprietary stuff out there that don't want to play with Linux that are kind of missing out. But Linux can totally, as long as you're using like, you know, either open or cracked codecs, you know, like whether it's... I don't know, I don't mean Divex isn't really open, but I guess Linux doesn't seem to have any problem playing it, for instance. But, you know, as long as you're using a codec that plays with Linux, okay, Linux will totally play that stuff and then present it really, really well. That's really cool. Yeah, that's a good point. When I first started using Linux, it was hard to watch any media. But especially if you didn't know where to go and get the loyal codecs and then later on and all that sort of stuff. Now with JSON and all that and all that, you don't even have to get a legal one so you can go and get legal. The only thing I reckon still is the video editing. It's the only place it's got to improve. Because a lot of palm people use their computers to edit their home movies. Yeah. You know, and Linux just doesn't do that AC enough on the slide. Not yet, it's getting there, it'll get there. But yeah, you're right, totally. I agree. So, I have a DVD and I don't see how I can put this. Say, okay, I went to a video store and rented a DVD. And I just found out I don't have time to watch it. Now, can I put it in there and rip it to the hard drive? Yeah, yeah, one of the plug-ins is Smith Archive. So, it's a pulled archive. I'm not sure. But yeah, certainly you can put any DVD in there or VCD, whatever you want. And go and click on a button and you just trans-cave. You get a few options whether you want to rip the whole DVDs as an ISO onto the hard drive. And that way you'll get exactly when you get to watch it all the special features and everything. You can do, I think, a perfect copy, which is it'll just go and grab that actual movie file and nothing else. But the movie file will end up, you know, whatever the size of the movie is on the disk as well. You know, about four years or three years or whatever the actual movie is. Or you can use Vivek and compress it. And I think they call that a good copy. And you'll end up with about a 1.2-gig file that's on your hard drive. And that's all done with Smith Archive. It's that user's trans-cave to do that. And men's hard drive, I think, is it? Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty neat. Because sometimes you go to the video store and you end up with two, three DVDs. You know, you can't decide on which one to get, so you get three of them. And then you get home and you don't have time to watch them. So I think there'd be a neat idea. Yeah. Well, it's even good just for, well, again, the use, how many DVDs have you collected? And you don't want to go to the carbon and get it out. So we've done here is all the DVDs. But I think about it, I don't check them in. Hit a button and off it goes and rips it to the hard drive. And then it goes back to the carbon I never have to suit again. It's also really good to just steal your movies straight up, you know. You don't want to buy them, you know. You just get them in rhythm and keep them illegally. No, we're not doing that. Oh, okay. Just for convenience. Right, right. Well, here's another convenience, too. I have direct TV. And when I buy a pay-per-view movie, I have to watch... Okay, I buy a pay-per-view movie and record it with a TV phone. 24 hours to watch it. Only if I start to watch it. Now if, okay, say I record it and I don't watch it for a week, that's fine. It's a sit on the hard drive. But as soon as I play it, even for 10 seconds, now I have to finish it in 24 hours. And if I don't, I automatically delete it and I still get charged for it. Now with the myth TV, that would fix that problem, right? How are you getting... Yeah, so I don't understand any of that stuff because we don't have it. Well, there's a decoder. You have a decoder box, is it? Yeah. How do you get that signal in your house? Is it cable, satellite? Well, it's a satellite and it's got the coax. It runs to the decoder box. To the decoder box. To the decoder box. Yeah, and from the decoder box. I case. It goes with the s cable. To the decoder box. Well, I think that would be no different to me with my satellite TV, having it the decoder box. I have that going, obviously, to the tele. But also, I have through a composite out. It goes into the back of the myth box. And I just can record anything on the satellite tele as well. So it would be exactly the same for you. Okay, so that would be fun. You can say that. Move it to the... Yeah, as long as... What depends on the outputs on the fact that that TV, I suppose, have you just got your normal SVIDIO and component and whatever? Yeah, it's just got the normal... Just the normal... Yeah, as long as you've got a way to get it into your what's on it. As long as you've got a way to get it into your myth box. Right, you need a special capture card. Yeah, well, so my digital TV tunicads have got SVIDIO and your typical ones are composite in. And then I just have another one going into the sound card into the line in to get the sound in there. But also what you'd have to set up. If you really want to record, which I don't, you'd have to set up an infrared blaster. Say, I've got my satellite TV on Discovery Channel. And then I want to record something here at 2 o'clock tomorrow morning on National Geographic Channel. Well, then you could... You'd need myth TV to be able to use an infrared blaster to change the channel on your satellite box at 3 o'clock in the morning to put on National Geographic Channel. So it can start recording that program you want to do. You know what I'm doing? Yeah. You have to be able to change the satellite or your TVA channel if you want to record your TVA. Well, obviously your TVA records. You know what I mean? It's satellite or whatever TV you need. One of those infrared blasters, which I've never bothered setting up. But it's certainly easy enough to do. Well, I think we covered a lot of them. Do you have any more? The only ones that I can think of, which is really not a media center, but what kind of is that? Myro? That's more just for your computer. Yeah, myro. Myro. Yeah. Democracy player that used to be cold. I always did like that really I did, because it shows... I mean, I think... And this could just be me. Well, it's not just me, but you know, there's a theory that a lot of entertainment is just going to be completely delivered and centered around the computer. And so, myro kind of helps shift the mindset to that, where instead of watching TV shows, you're watching, like, videocats, you know, attack five and pure, pure only, pure, pure, you know, that show, about gaming. So, I mean, it's kind of cool, but I don't know how practical it is, because I don't know how many people really, really watch that much online content, but I did like it. Well, I found out, because I had started just to mess around with it, and they had some like, you know, stuff that was already in there, and I had no idea that... Lemme external had a video cast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of video casts out there that, yeah, you're right, you don't even know about until you... until someone might collect it into a little channel for you, and then you've got them all right there. That's why I like it. Yeah, it's pretty neat. And you know what another good thing that kind of players before is just like, if you're telling friends to watch something that you've gotten, and maybe it's an Aug-File, or something that they're using PC or Mac, and they can't play it easily, you can refer to them, like, to Mirror or something like that, and that not only gets into independent media and stuff like that, it also enables them to play like a lot of different formats that they may not have even known existed. Right. Yeah, I liked it. I mean, it all depends on where you're getting the videos from, but like the YouTube videos, I mean, they really didn't look that great, because they were stretched out, and they were all grainy, but some of the content was pretty good, and stuff that's like, you know, from Hack 5, and it was at Cranky Geeks, and Lennox Journal, all those looked really nice. Plus, you can go full screen. Yeah. Look, you could play something like this on your TV, with Myth TV, couldn't you? I'm sure you could. I mean, I don't see why not. Whatever that web, something like a web plug-in, I'm sure it would totally play on your television. Well, we've been talking for over an hour, what do you think? You want to end it here? Yeah, I think we're pretty well covered at all, and if anyone wants more information, they can refer to the links, and that we'll see you next time. All righty. Thanks for listening. Good night. Bye. Thank you for listening to Hack 5 Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Carol.net. She'll head on over to see our O.J. TV and all other TV. Thank you very much.