Smart Home Blog

Last week MythTV team released a new version of its software for HTPC – 0.24. There is a lot of new features and major changes like new MythUI OSD, Blu-ray disc/folder parsing and playback, Embedded text subtitle support in MKV and others, Experimental Broadcom Crystal HD hardware decoding support, large audio, OSD, captioning/subtitle and video playback refactoring etc.

The MythTV 0.24 supports HD video and audio as well as various TV tuners and DVB cards. It makes that software unique solution to build power HTPC. I like XBMC. But it’s needed integration with VDR to provide PVR functionality. While MythTV has that feature out of the box. Sure XBMC offers rich integration with online services and simple way to develop plugins. But still. Also don’t forget about possibility to control X10 or Z-Wave devices from the MythTV box.

You can install the MythTV 0.24 from tarballs or using special MythTV distribution or packages for your Linux distribution. Also we expect to see that version in the LnuxMCE soon.

yaVDR team who develops Linux based distribution for HTPC combined the best open source HTPC software XBMC and the best open source satellite receiver software VDR, announced a new plugin yavdr-addon-pip. That plugin brings feature Picture in Picture to your media center. It works very well. Even if both channels are HD. It should be clear in case of one DVB card both channels should be from one transponder. If you have more cards you may see the channels from different transponders.

If you’d like to add a possibility to watch and record satellite TV to your Linux-based compact HTPC (ASRock HTPC with XBMC, for example) the Qbox S2 USB DVB-S2 card can be an option for that. It’s supported by both VDR and MythTV and have a reasonable price – €68.68. TBS also is planning to release a version with CI if you’re interesting to watch encoded channels.

Recently a MythTV development team released a bugfix for the version 0.23. There are no many changes in that release but still. The segfault when resolution or aspect ration is changing is fixed. Also the building from the source procedure was improved to allow to do that under different distributions and with various hardware combination.

You can download the MythTV 0.23.1 with plugins and themes here or wait till your distribution maintainers build the binaries fro you.

Last Sanday Klaus Schmidinger has announced the release of VDR developer version 1.7.15. AS usual there is a lot of bugfixes and improvements such support of a non-standard mode used by North American providers, fixing of a problem with external Dolby Digital processing and adding of full handling of the stream types of Dolby Digital pids, adding new and updating existing OSD texts.

yaVDR which mixes XBMC and VDR in its media distribution will stay with version 1.7.14 for a while. But the package for the 1.7.15 should appear in its PPA soon.