More Myth

I watched some videos with MythTV last night and tested the commercial skip feature. It was flawless! I’d been disabling this feature because the mythcommflag process puts a load on my measly 1 GHz backend server: enough to make the server unsuitable acting both as a backend and a frontend. As long as I’m using a separate frontend, though, things work just fine. The commercial skipping is definitely worth the extra CPU cycles.

I’m still wowed by this tool. What’s really unique about MythTV is the way it slices up what we used to know as television. Tivo, the trailblazing PVR, gave us the ability to treat a television program like a book: you can walk away from the program and “pick it up” the next time you had time to watch.

MythTV can do that, but it takes it a step further by introducing a client-server model. A Myth server called a “backend” records the programs and stores them for one or more “frontends” to view. If your TV program is a book, MythTV’s backend is a library – where many people can read books at once. Myth can serve the same program to practically any number of viewers, really only limited by the network bandwidth or server I/O. Suddenly the scenario of a fully-digital, neighborhood cable TV headend is now within reach.

This is what I mean when I say that Myth can really change things the way Tivo could only dream about. When it comes to delivering content, Myth could potentially cut out many middlemen: the television network and the satellite or cable companies, for starters. With the right interface, say – a good BitTorrent plug-in – television producers could make their programs directly downloadable to viewers over the Internet (or directly off a satellite transponder). All that’s missing is the right revenue model, really – and only for the producers: everything else would be free (with the exception of the viewer’s Internet connection).

Check out the MythPVR blog for MythTV news. Also check out a remarkable Myth web interface included with Mythbuntu called MythWeb.