Mythbuntu busted as last two devs working on media centre distro quit The developers behind Mythbuntu, a Linux distribution dedicated to melding the open source digital video recorder MythTV with Ubuntu Linux, have called it quits. The project's death notice offers a simple reason for the distro's demise: the team working on it has shrunk from ten to just two, the remaining maintainers want to …
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I wish people would stop perpetuating the lie that MythTV and Kodi are the same - and in particular that Kodi is a replacement for MythTV. MythTV is so much more than what Kodi does - and the "lounge TV" part is just a tiny bit.
In fact, you can (AIUI) use Kodi to watch recordings made ona MythTV system - but using an inferior experience that loses several key (and very useful) features in the native MythTV frontend.
And for good measure, there are people running the native MythTV frontend on the Pi - though I gather there are still some wrinkles to iron out.
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> there are people running the native MythTV frontend on the Pi - though I gather there are still some wrinkles to iron out.
You have to increase the memory for the GPU in setup, but I think that's it. A week or so ago I Pi-ed up the TVs on my network, and it's pretty seamless. (Easier on the Pi3 than the Pi2, because wifi.) An improvement on the Kodi I used to run on the Pi, because IIRC it saves bookmarks across the network, besides the usual MythTV frontend stuff.
"An improvement on the Kodi I used to run on the Pi, because IIRC it saves bookmarks across the network, besides the usual MythTV frontend stuff."
FWIW, Kodi will work with a backend MySQL database keeping your library/watched/bookmark status consistent across clients.
Of course as you and others have said, MythTV is not Kodi. Certainly not on a Pi. The recording features on MythTV outstrip what Kodi can do for a start.
As someone who used and loved mythtv for >5 years, Kodi is simply much better.
I am running OpenELEC, with TVheadend managing the TV tuners as a "backend".
(OpenELEC is a minimal standalone distribution of KODI
It is much easier to setup and maintain, and has been running reliably.
I can watch TV from my phone, program recordings and use my phone as a remote control.
I did try running on a raspberry pi, but the cheap DVB-T2 dongle was unreliable, hence I use a desktop machine with a PCI tuner card (dual DVB-S2).
If I was starting again, I would maybe try LibreELEC, not OpenELEC, as it seems to have more devs at the moment.
If you want to try on a raspberry pi2 or 3, get a decent USB tuner, like the 292e nanostick.
Kodi and Mythtv aren't really equivalents though, myth was always focussed on capturing tv, providing recording functions and tv-guide and programming, what you've come to expect from tivos and dvrs/pvrs etc, whereas kodi is more about playing back an existing library of local/remote files. There is overlap between the two, but at least in my opinion they are each individually defined, and both have their place in different use-cases.
indeed. Have been using mythtv and mythbuntu for years. As good as Kodi is, mythtv is a better back end. Up until 2 months ago I was lucky to get 1mb internet at home, so buying a fully (legally questionable) loaded box with Kodi or setting up my own mythtv server with multiple dvb-s and dvb-t cards was a no brainer.
AFAICS, all you now have to do is install a regular Ubuntu derivative, then type:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mythbuntu/0.28
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mythtv
If these people have been maintaining their own separate distro spin just to save people typing those three lines, I can understand why they decided to call it a day.
"It also seemed to have a 50% chance of dying completely during updates."
Is that in Windows by any chance? I've got Kodi running on Android, FreeBSD, Linux and couple of Pis (versions 1 and 2) and I don't recall any update going bad. I've never used Kodi on Windows, so this is a real question, not a nix/windows snark.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the developers of Mythbuntu. I have used the distro on multiple computers since 2010, and I still use it on daily bases. The distribution has made the installation of MythTV a far smaller hassle than it would be without the distro, and the included control center software has helped me countless times. Mythbuntu has also provided an excellent set of tools for managing my PVRs, which are far more than just MythTV-based media centers, like the article suggests. I dare you to set up a multi-tuner PVR + media center with low IO and CPU loads and acceptable WAF using Windows or Linux without Mythbuntu, and you start to appreciate what these people have done.
Thank you for your work, it truly is sincerely appreciated.
MediaPortal is a nice piece of software, too. I'd love to see some stats and comparisons about the features and resource usage of different multi-tuner MythTV and MediaPortal setups. Maybe they could put ChromeCast, XBMC and Kodi in there too, just to show how different the feature sets are.
MediaPortal is only win7 and later.
MediaPortal is no use for Linux. The MythTV is.
Kodi is primarily for streaming.
MythTV is primarly for Satellite cards and DVB-TV Sticks etc and can work VERY well on Linux. (ProgDVB on Windows is superior to any MS MediaCentre version for Broadcast and even does MHEG5 Interactive), but no use for Linux, and not free. However I'd pay something for decent Linux TV reception software that just works, like ProgDVB or other packages on Windows.
The problem with Linux is setting up the PCI satellite cards and USB TV sticks in the first place.
Is there a future for Windows with OEM sales of Win7 now ended?
Sad to see it go, I have upgraded without problems since the first Mythbuntu release.
I run Mythbuntu as a backend server with Kodi on a Pi and various Android clients.
My mythbuntu server also runs PHPmyadmin, Nextcloud, Motioneye, and a couple of other database apps, plus doubling as a general use pc and a digital photoframe.
MythTV is awesome, and I will probably move to Ubuntu with XFCE and Mythtv.
Mythbuntu just made it all a lot easier.
Sad to see it go to. I'm not great on Ubuntu, and my first attempt to set up MythTV on top of Ubuntu took days and a couple of bits, like the web interface, never worked.
After a drive failure I used the Mythbuntu ISO and it was up and working in a couple of hours - it just made life a lot easier. I then used it to create a second front-end which was up and connected in about 30 minutes.
If Ubuntu and similar ever want to be mainstream, they need to do the kinds of things the MythBuntu team did, and move more of the stuff you need to an actual GUI that works. Typing in long strings of commands from dodgy forums with no indication of how up to date the information is is a lot less user friendly than going into a control panel and updating some options.
I don't have the skills to contribute, but I hope some who do pick up on it and continue development. It's a great, legal way to build a video library from over the air broadcasts in a way than an average computer user can get up and working.
I'm guessing the loss in popularity of Mythbuntu maybe simply a result of people using broadcast TV less frequently.
I for example planned to build a Myth box at one point, but pretty much survive now with a Kodi for local video content and a Roku for streaming services (iPlayer, 4oD, Amazon, Google etc etc).
It's now rare that we record anything on our Satellite box, we tend to just use the catch up services. So I no longer feel the Myth box would be used or necessary for us.
There is absolutely a use case for a full Myth/Media Centre system, but less people may need this type of solution than before.
Emby is another great alternative. A true client server model that means the server does the heavy lifting so the client can be lightweight. Native TV recording without using a plugin to another backend (using my HDHomeRun) is one of the reasons that I was finally able to ditch Windows Media Center. It is still a little rough around the edges, Live TV especially is still a little rough and ready but for all the bits that are still a little bit v1.0 there are a ton of features that WMC and Kodi never did.
Finally it's also pretty OS agnostic (front and backend). I've run the server on both Windows and Linux (I used CentOS) and the experience was very comparable.
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