Open Source Society

A Media Center for the Masses
Posted on December 4, 2007 at 12:00 pm by Josh

Picture this:

You come home from a hard day’s work and all you want to do is relax and watch a movie or listen to your favorite music. Now where did you put that DVD? It’s not in its case, and the huge box of movies in the corner looks daunting. Do you really want to sift through all those? Forget it, you’ll just watch your favorite TV show. So you put on the tube, only to find your show has been pre-empted by the football game in overtime. Just can’t catch a break, can ya?

Everyone has heard of TiVo, and the DVR services that cable and satellite companies have been pushing. Who wants to shell out hundreds of dollars for these things though? The DVR services even have the gall to charge you a monthly fee for what amounts to a computerized VCR! Your other option is to purchase a ready-made home theater computer with Microsoft’s Media Center loaded on, but this is an extremely expensive proposition.

Until now. There have been leaps and bounds in the development of open-source media servers, and we finally have two that are very close to being polished end products. I’m talking of course about Freevo and MythTV. I’ve got a clear favorite among these too so far, but we’ll go over the pros and cons of both.

Freevo

Of the two, I think Freevo has the slicker interface and hides the guts better from the user. The last thing I want to see when I boot up my HTPC is an ugly black boot screen or a grub menu. Freevo Live has a pleasant bootsplash and loads directly to an interface that would be right at home on any TV. Unfortunately, this is where my love affair with Freevo ends.

Try as I might, I cannot find any options to watch live TV, or rip CDs and DVDs, or listen to the radio, since my tuner card also supports FM radio. There is an option in the Listen to Music and Watch Movie sections for browsing the local filesystem, but how exactly is one supposed to get files onto the local filesystem? I cannot find any references to a Samba server running in the background, or any other network connectivity beyond the Headlines section of the menu. I guess as to be expected the live CD is light on features, and I imagine a fully-installed system would be far more functional than this on the backend.

That being said, the front-end is still lacking in a few features. So without further ado here’s my wish list for Freevo:

• Ability to burn and transcode CDs and DVDs directly from the interface. Let’s face it, if we’re talking about a serous home theater system, it’s somewhat gimpy to have to escape out to a full GUI to do such a common task as this.
• Ability to watch live TV. I bought four tuner cards for a reason folks, I want to be able to use my television while recording shows. I already have a VCR thanks.
• More configuration options. My options for changing settings consisted entirely of one choice between full X or framebuffer mode.
• Better file management and transfer options. A media server is useless if there’s no way to put files on it. Network sharing would be a big plus.

I cannot stress enough however, that the interface looks absolutely wonderful, for what that’s worth. Despite that, with this one I have to say where’s the beef?

MythTV

I tested the KnoppMyth incarnation of MythTV live distros, and right away MythTV’s backend delivered what Freevo’s left to be desired. If these two projects would get together, we’d have something incredible. There is a huge list of features, and while the interface is not quite as polished as Freevo’s, there is definitely plenty to keep you busy enough that you may not notice. The backend is built with what appears to be a version of icevwm or some other very lightweight window manager, so it lacks a bit in elegance during bootup and initial startup. Once you are loaded into the interface the magic begins.

It’s hard to know where to start. You can watch live TV, view programming guides, rip audio CDs and DVDs, view weather conditions and news for your area, record shows and schedule future or regular recordings, browse the web, play movies or music from the local drives, and there’s even an emulator for SNES and NES games! With all this, who needs to leave the house? As if these features weren’t enough, the master server has an ssh server, so I was able to use SCP and copy my music collection to the hard drive.

It gets better. Once you have a master backend server established, you can use the live CD anywhere else that has network connectivity to the master server, and it becomes an instant clone of your master server with access to all of its media and features. Imagine going to your friend’s house and bringing your entire movie and audio collection on one CD! The implications of this are staggering.

There wasn’t much I didn’t like about KnoppMyth, but there are a few things I thought needed improvement:

• Polish the interface. Kudos to the person who spent their time to create the wallpaper and bootsplashes for this, but they’re a bit cheesy for a polished system.
• Add a Samba daemon. I’m not sure why media center developers wouldn’t consider that not all of my music and videos are already stored magically on this brand new machine. I have over 50 gigs of music on my laptop that I’m aching to offload, but it isn’t going to be easy so far.
• More configuration and administration. I’d like to be able to view and modify things like network settings from the main interface. It took pulling an arp table from my firewall to determine the IP address to access the secure shell, but it appears that remote access is somewhat of an afterthought on this system.
• Improve web interface. Streaming music, ’nuff said.

Ultimately KnoppMyth and MythTV alone were my clear favorites based purely on feature sets. Both systems worked well with my somewhat obscure hardware, which we’ll discuss momentarily. Installation was relatively easy with MythTV, and configuration was easy enough once I bothered to read the user guide. I also didn’t notice any drastic difference in performance between the two systems, and resource usage seemed to be quite moderate in both cases.

The system I tested with is something I cobbled together out of donated hardware and a tuner card I got on the cheap from eBay. It was a Pentium 3 1Ghz with a 40 GB hard drive, 512 MB of RAM, a Creative Ensoniq sound card, and a Hauppage Win-TV 62471 tuner card. A little ways off from an ideal media server, but for $30 all told it’s not bad.

Ideally you’ll want something a bit more robust for your media center. I’d recommend at least a Pentium 4 with 2 GB of RAM, the biggest hard drive you can afford (no less than 160GB), any of the Hauppage PVR series cards (two or more if you can swing it), a video card with component or S-video out, and a sound card with RCA or optical input and output. These might sound like pretty high standards to meet, but all of these components can be had for less than $200. The most expensive part of a home theater PC is the case. If you’re willing to forgo the fancy slim case you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks. Either way, this will set you up with a far better system than TiVo or the direct media companies ever dreamed of, and all with no pointless monthly fees!