As a long-term MythTV user, I read all the discussion about Plex vs Jellyfin, but I’m still here… recording Live TV, watching films, listening to “me choonz” all on free, open-source software. What am I missing? Any other MythTV users out there?
oh wow, not in a long time…well over a decade…almost 2! i gave up on live tv around then
im usin kodi/jellyfin (plex is proprietary) mostly for the ‘pseudotv’ plugin… so i can have a cable-like system from my local storage
Right?
That’s me… Jedi Advert Avoider
Nice. I think we simultaneously wrote very similar comments. But I don’t use my Jellifin to mimick live TV. Either I choose some movie or the next episode of my new favorite TV show, or I just waste my time on YouTube. I also used to watch Netflix, but I think they removed most of the interesting content.
i remember when you could get disks from netflix… 7 at a time! i would turn them around same day. it really helped fill out my movie collection
Yeah, now it’s charity shops… walk in, pay almost nothing for some DVDs, rip the disk, return them to another charity shop…
Better business model than Blockbuster 😉
pseudotv is great i loved that software on xbmc. now i run dizquetv with plex. pretty similar functionality.
I used to use MythTV back in the analog TV days. It’s much easier to use when you have proper cable channels. I couldn’t be bothered to pay >$140/mo for Cable TV any longer.
So now I just pay $60 for internet, and pirate everything I wanna watch with Sonarr/Radarr/Jellyfin/Jackett/Qbittorrent and a $2/mo VPN from Windscribe.
Honestly, with YouTube experimenting with ‘inline’ commercials, I think MythTV is going to make a comeback; because the big thing MythTV had going for it, was detecting commercials and removing them from the recordings.
It’s even easier with digital broadcast. I finally had to give up my PCI tuner, because who puts PCI slots on a modern mobo? $25 will get you a USB TV tuner capable of getting all the OTA and cable channels. I used to get, like, 7 analog OTA channels - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and a regional independent - but I get 30 digital. All the majors have added 3-5 channels of SD reruns or other filler. I mean, it’s mostly shit, and the only thing I actually watch is local news, but for a one-time $25 cost, it’s a great supplement to streaming.
My biggest problem with MythTV is it doesn’t interface with streaming, so I use Kodi on the frontend to source from mythtv, netflix, hbo, or whatever.
Yeah, Myth’s built-in internet browser is pretty dire - I have a 2nd virtual desktop to open a browser if I want to watch something via the internet, but I don’t bother with Netflix, etc…
Wow, MythTV is still around? I used that like 12 years ago. I’ve stopped watching live TV since. Except for some of the regional program and news that’s part of public broadcasting.
Yep, still alive 🙂
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers Plex Brand of media server package SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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I’m confused. Isn’t mythtv just TV tuner software or something? Which would still require a cable subscription? Plex and jellyfin do not operate on the same playing field. Jellyfin is also FOSS FWIW.
MythTV has movie/TV and music libraries, so it’s not too different than the other two. Also, you can use a tv tuner like TVheadend with jellyfin.
I used MythTV for years and eventually switched to Kodi to get more modern UIs. I eventually separated the server part with jellyfin to get more flexibility, keeping Kodi on little raspberry pi boxes as clients
You can just watch over the air channels
Oh right, aren’t those all basically trash though? Like a few news channels and some talk shows?
No. Maybe it is where you’re located, but for me it’s fine.
Movies come from the high seas, so I’m not too worried about them, but there’s some good stuff on terestrial TV definitely
It depends I guess. There is a bunch of different content. Not all of it is stuff I watch but there is a good selection.
I used MythTV for decades. I really loved the “raw” digital output of the music player. It would casually hop from 44/16/2.0 to 96/24/5.1 between songs and my amp would decode it. I even contributed a small patch to make the visualizer work with 24bit audio.
The live TV hardware accelerated deinterlacing was really good too. TV recording was super reliable.
The TVDb lookup was a tad glitchy. It turns out that it didn’t include the year in the lookup. I wrote a patch that did it (and improved my metadata lookups heaps) but never made a PR.
I jumped to Plex around 2020. Mostly for things like streaming to my phone so I can have my music on the train. I believe Myth was better for HTPC, but Plex isn’t too far off.
I’m not a fan of Plex audio. Every time I try to make it do AC3 passthrough or skip the OS mixers, the whole thing breaks.
Ah, ok, you’re a bit of a contributor… I helped with a couple of patches and loads of wiki edits (that needed much love a few years ago)
TVDb is still hit & miss, but much better than it used to be.
And yeah, Myth’s not ideal for external streaming…
There are 2 versions of plex. One is just called plex and you can use your mouse. The other is called plexHTPC and it uses arrow keys and spacebar to select content. It took me a while to figure out that there are 2 different versions out there. The htpc one does ac3 pass through just fine.
I’m on the new HTPC version installed as a snap. I can see that it’s meant to work with passthrough, but I find that it… doesn’t.
I haven’t tried in a few versions. Maybe I should give it another crack.
Hey looking back through my setup I realized I have something a little different. I have my htpc with hdmi going to my tv and then toslink (optical) audio feeding my surround sound.
It looks like to get my setup work had to install a custom audio driver. It’s called “aaf Optimus” which allows me to select Dolby digital as an option under “default format” in the audio properties menu.
Not sure this applies to you as my setup is kind of convoluted. Anyways when I watch YouTube the sound is just plain 2 channel audio and when I play something from Netflix it does pass through surround. Games are also in surround sound.
Just wanted to double check everything and give you a heads up. Good luck.
Thanks! I’m going through a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter because it was the only way to get 4K video. Pipewire is a bit flaky and applies filters that I don’t want. It’s a 3.1 channel setup. The goal is for the AV receiver to do all the decoding.
I still have a virtualized back end in the basement and a NUC frontend on the TV, but mostly use Netflix and jellyfin these days.
How well doea the NUC perform as a Frontend? I have a small TV in a spare room which could benefit from a separate Frontend…
It works fine. It’s probably overkill because I had intended to use it for some light gaming at one point but never actually did. It has an i5 and 16G of RAM and has never any issues with playback. I upgraded to it because the Atom/Ion one it replaced had issues with some blu-rays that I had ripped.
Does anyone know if there is a way to use mythtv as a TV backend for jellyfin?
I used it back in the day when I still had analog Cable TV and a digital capture card. MythTV was a pain in the ass to setup. The UI was horrible and if you were trying to setup satellite, it could get really complicated if you didn’t know what you were doing.
That being said, MythTV is probably hands down the best digital recorder I’ve ever used. Like for LiveTV it sucks, because channel switching takes ages until it’s built a recording buffer. This might be less of an issue on SSDs now, like I said I haven’t used in ages. But MythTV had some of the best features in terms of scheduling recordings, avoiding conflicts and skipping commercials.
Once I started using MythTV, I stopped watching live TV entirely. Since I simply just recorded stuff I was interested in.
I’ve used MythTV, TVheadend and NextPVR. MythTV has the best recording features. TVheadend in combination with Kodi has the fastest channel switching, which is great if you just want to channel hop. NextPVR is decent and IMHO the easiest to setup out of the three. But is lacking in certain areas.
Yeah, good summary - I’m not using the latest version, but LiveTV channel changing still takes a second (on a dual tuner machine), but, like you said, we rarely watch LiveTV now and if we do, we’re not really channel hopping either.
I replaced mythtv with tvheadend on the backend and kodi on the frontend like 5 or 6 years ago.
The setup and configuration at the time on mythtv was slanted towards old ( obsolete ) analog tuners and static setup and tvheadend was like a breath of fresh air in comparison where you could point it at a DVB mux or two and it would mostly do what you want without having to fight it.
I’m not sure how much longer I’ll want something that can tune DVB-S2 and DVB-T though. Jellyfin and friends handle everything other than legacy TV better than kodi these days.
Jellyfin is working pretty well for TV too, with the Schedules Direct feed. Just doesn’t get the naming right.
I moved over to TabloTV about 8 or 9 years ago. I got tied of fixing stuff when I would update something and Tablo just worked on the Roku without much fuss.
I’m still happy with and love the Tablo, but it’s no better than MythTV was, just easier to maintain.
Not heard of Tablo… I’ll take a look
Yes! It is great.
Any more I reencode for local streaming to my TV.
Oh, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for
Glad we helped you :)
Using mythtv for 15 years at least. At the beginning with its own frontend, now with a Kodi frontend on an Androidtv box.
I am reading about jellyfin here frequently, but have not tried it so far. Can it even handle SAT receivers?
Jellyfin is basically a storage/streaming server. You still have to get the files, which is where Sonarr/Radarr/QBT come in.
So, which one of these handles the SAT receiver card(s)?
Yeah, I was kinda thinking about a combined Myth Backend / *arr box and then see whether Myth Frontend or Jellyfin worked “better” (for my use case)… just need a spare weekend to try it all out.
Looks like it’s mostly for live TV? I haven’t had cable in a long time, don’t really need to record things.
