ExtremeTech has an abbreviated roundup of “TiVo Killers”, which means they’ve installed three PVR apps under Windows XP and looked at them. They only mention Mythtv to say
People familiar with PVR applications for the PC are probably aware of Myth TV, and are wondering why the free homebrew project isn’t included. The answer is simple: It requires Linux. There’s nothing wrong with Linux at all, but our roundup focuses on competing Windows applications. Besides, if you want to turn your PC into a PVR with Linux, Myth TV is pretty much your only good option.
In not doing the truly interesting work of investigating free, open products like mythtv, they’re just being mainstream, and hey, who can blame them? But if you’re not going to include the gamut of available options, then it’s beyond the scope of your article to make statements like “Myth TV is pretty much your only good option”; there’s a big difference between “best option” and “only good option” but they don’t even make the effort to get that far.
Their testbed setup includes a P4 3.2Ghz and 1G of RAM, but they say “We’re going more for quiet and reliable than for blistering speed.” Uh huh. Of course you’ll need the RAM simply because you’re running under XP, but I don’t see why (if you’ve chosen a tuner card with any hardware encoding / decoding capability at all) you need to run one of the hottest CPUs ever made just to watch and record TV. I’m doing it under linux with an old Athlon 1400 with plenty of CPU cycles to spare.
It boggles the mind that people think building their own PVR using Windows is going to throw off the yoke of the TiVo’s and other DRM-rich services. They’re really just trading one master for another. Meet the new boss, indeed.
One Comment
I agree. I also read that article and was suprised that they didn’t cover mythTV or freevo. Methinks we’ve got far too many M$ minions in our midst ;)