Some progress with MythTV
I finally (technically) installed KnoppMyth (a Debian based Linux distribution designed just to run MythTV) today. I say technically since I installed it somewhere where I couldn’t connect any sort of TV signal up to it. So, although it works fine, I haven’t actually managed to test any of the important features.
The only part of the installation that was a problem was that the hard drive KnoppMyth uses must be the master device on the primary IDE channel. I had it on the secondary and it was not happy…
Web Television
My interest in MythTV has also sparked my interest in TV over the Internet. Many companies offer it “secretly”, for example movies on demand from cable operators in the UK are actually streamed over the Internet and loads offer small chunks of it. But are there any companies actually transmitting top content “live” over the Internet (free or subscription)? If it’s transmitted live (i.e. everyone receives the same thing at the same time), bandwidth some of the possible bandwidth problems can be mitigated with things like IP multicasting. And if you do have something like MythTV recording it for you the problem of people not wanting to see things at the same time go away too.
Well to answer the question (there was one 
), yes. Unfortunately for the most part they aren’t the big channels, but there are quite a few for niche areas and some countries even make their government subsidised national station available.
The first site I found for this was wwITV. They list quite a few live channels and loads of sites that offer clips. But unfortunately many of them are out of date and just return 404s. An alternative for sources of web television is tVadio. They’re newer and don’t have as much (and seem far less international) but at least the stuff they list actually exists and is of a reasonable quality (well whether you like the actual transmitted content of the channels is up to you ).
The sites listed though still only represent baby steps on the path towards true Internet television.
The future of television
I just found an interesting document released by the European Broadcasting Union (their most prominent activity is the Eurovision Song Contest) regarding the future of television, specifically relating to PVR systems.
Free-to-air Television and other PVR Challenges in Europe.
It’s quite long but definitely good. Suggests revolutionary ideas like broadcasters making EPG and programme meta-data publicly available and that they should embrace “new business models” relating to content viewed through a PVR since traditional advertising is far less effective.
At no point by the way does it endorse DRM or content protection and even speaks of “the offensive use of patents” in rather negative terms…
MythTV better than Media Center?
I’ve been reading about MythTV and considering it as a replacement for Windows Media Center. Overall it has more features, has better support for multiple computers and is completely free. Unfortunately it’s only available for Linux. Which also means you have to be picky with hardware because of the lack of drivers.
I’ll write more about it shortly…