Setting up a Myth box can be a major hassle and is not for the faint of heart. Though I'm a developer and have a tech background and experience with Linux, I was not able to get my Myth box running. I ran into one major glitch and though the folks on the mail lists were very helpful, after three months, no one was able to find a solution.

This is a major problem when going with something like Myth--a HW discrepency or some other "glitch" can turn this into a multi-week project.

How can you post a comparison between Tivo and MythTV without discussing the superb and widely-used feature in MythTV of automatic commercial detection and skipping? Without touching a button, commercials are bypassed during playback.  It's been in MythTV for a long time, and it works very well.

Tivo will probably never have a feature like this because the media industry would be all over them.

I've been a MythTV user for a couple years now and have quite an elaborate system running one main server, a slave backend and four frontends [mythtv.org/wiki].  There are a number of things the article missed or glossed over.

• (+) Plugins - MythTV has lots of plugins that let you do everything from surf the web, view local weather information, play old style ROM arcade games, view a slide show of pictures, to watching XviD encoded videos, all of which we use.  The video collection has been of great utility with kids.  The usefulness of the plugins was a big reason I chose MythTV and have stayed with it.  (Actually TIVO was never considered because of the subscription costs)
  
• (-) Setup and Maintenance -  It should not be underestimated how much time it can take getting MythTV to work and then maintaining it.  As a MythTV user you will have to know the Linux command line, how to download and install drivers and fix things when they inevitably don't work.  If you haven't installed a PCI card before, and don't like googling stuff to figure out why it doesn't work, then MythTV is not for you.  MythTV will probably not save you money either because I've found that the money I would have spent on a subscription went into hardware upgrades.
  
  (+) The flip side to the cost and time commitment is that MythTV has immense flexibilty, for example, in the size and redudancy of storage capability, the type of peripherals and the split arrangement between backend, slave backend and frontends.  Take our ever growing video collection (most ripped from DVDs, fyi), where any new videos are backed up onto a seperate machine each night (rsync'd). Try doing that with a TIVO.
  
  (+) The machines are also full blown general purpose computers that can do other things.  For example, once you have sunk the money into the MythTV hardware, you can use the same machines for VoIP (via Asterisk) which really saves us money, about $100CND a month.  The pay back period for the extra hardware to do VoIP was less then a year, and gets cheaper as time goes on.  We use dedicated Digium TDM-400 cards that cost ~$500CND about a year ago.  Again, our long distance costs are pennies per minute, each phone is a seperate extension, we can make multiple outgoing or incoming calls, late-night callers are prompted by a menu first before the phones ring, we can control our own caller-ID, etc.
• (-) DRM can still be a problem with MythTV, for example, some of our HD channels, which we get from the tuner over a firewire cable, have the "5C" flag set.  The end result is that those channels and some HD broadcasts are not transmitted over the firewire and MythTV records nothing.  For HD tuners using firewire and 5C flagged channels, there is no current work around (as of Feb. 21st, 2007).  But I'm sure that will change.

 Cheers, Tug.

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