So the worst has finally happened the Tivo in our house had died. We received this Tivo as a gift for our wedding. It had been used but that didn’t bother us and best of all it had a lifetime subscription with it. So needless to say we were living large with our free Tivo until one day it wouldn’t power on. It would start to go through the motions but after a while it would just give up. Needless to say we were quite distraught over the loss. My wife who while being fairly technical in nature is typically more reserved dove into it like it was the last bit of food on earth. So we were stuck watching TV like normal people I mean really is there anything more middle class than watching commercials (that’s my best Daniel Tosh impression on a blog). I’ll be honest I had not quite been so aware of my addiction to it at this point. My friend that gave me the Tivo was relating a similar feeling. His kids have used Tivo all of their natural lives. They know nothing outside the world of Tivo. So when they go on vacation or to visit someone’s house my friend has to explain to his kids why not all TVs rewind and fast forward. It’s tough using the TV when you’ve had Tivo. You get used to having TV available when you want it and you get used to having your shows ready when you get home. It’s tough to go back to that kind of slavery.
So I endeavored to find a way to fix the Tivo or build me something new. After taking a look at the dead Tivo I opted for the second option. So after investigating building your own Tivo-like system I came across the Mythtv software system. This piece of software lets me have all of the basic functionality of Tivo and much much more. Being the geek that I am I had a free computer just laying around so I decided to repurpose it for my Tivo resurrection. Mythtv lets me do all of the tv function that Tivo does but I can also schedule from my computer over a website the shows I want, stream live and recorded shows to any computer in my house as well as watch and listen to CDs and DVDs.
To say that it was an easy task would make me out to be a liar but it wasn’t too terrible. You might be wondering why everyone doesn’t do something like this if it’s so great and that can be summed up with one word….Linux. That’s right it runs in a Linux environment. I think of Linux as a way for people to commit suicide that are scared of real weapons. Linux is a wonderfully feature rich operating system that was written by people that dream in code and see women in the same way that those fellows looked at the Matrix. Some projects have made the effort to make it easier and one of those is the Ubuntu project. The fine people at Ubuntu have gotten together to make a special distribution just for Mythtv called Mythbuntu. It’s by far the best rolled package I’ve seen but it still took many several angry hours and one reinstall to get it tweaked properly. But things are working well now. Mythtv not only allows me to skip commercials but it automatically detects them and removes them completely. It has also been nice being able to watch recorded TV from bed or wherever I might have a free laptop handy. I’ll continue to update you as I play with it more. Hopefully the code will continue to get tighter and the system will end up being as smooth as Tivo.