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May 09

Mythbuntu: The Open-Source Media Center Awaits You

Posted in: Linux, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili, ubuntu

This article was written on June 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Have you been itching to get your hands on a Media Center computer that lets you record all of your shows? Both Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate include these capabilities, but you can download Mythbuntu if you’re looking for an open source alternative to put an extra PC to work.

As the name implies, Mythbuntu is based on the ever-popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. It makes it extremely easy to setup MythTV so that you can quickly begin recording your favorite shows. Here are some of the features you’ll get with Mythbuntu/MythTV:

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.
Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
Grabs program information using xmltv.
Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of those programs, all through a themeable UI.
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.

MythTV is also well known for the selection of plugins that are available, as well as some themes. With nearly 300,000 downloads it’s looking like the MythTV project is doing pretty well for itself.

Even though MythTV is stable for you to use, Mythbuntu is still in the Alpha stage so you have to be willing to cope with some bugs and known issues. I’m sure it will continue to get better as future versions are released, and I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful thing!

Although lazy people will probably buy a pre-configured MythTV computer.