MythBuntu vs MythDora vs KnoppMyth

Okay, so as all MythTV users probably know, zap2it stopped offering free channel listings on September 1st of this year. I didn't look too far into the details, but I think some jerkstores were using the listings for commercial purposes in violation of the ToS. The 9/1 cut off was known well in advance, and a non-profit company named Schedules Direct was created over the summer to provide listings. Currently, SD charges $20 a year which is a bargain compared to Tivo. Supposedly, an existing MythTV installation can be hax0red to work with Schedules Direct, but I figured I would just upgrade to the latest version (0.20.2) which includes SD support. I'd been putting off upgrading for a while since TV was in rerun land, but now fall is upon us, and so is Ken Burns' WWII documentary.

Due to its quick installation and painless setup, my distro of choice has been KnoppMyth. Typically, whenever I needed to upgrade MythTV, I would just pull down the latest KnoppMyth ISO and run the auto upgrader. However, I'd recently read an article comparing KnoppMyth, MythBuntu and MythDora and I was curious to see how the other two distros stacked up. Like the author of the article, I felt hamstrung by KnoppMyth's lack of upgradeability. A pseudo-troll commented on that article and said that KnoppMyth was intended to be installed as an appliance, and therefore the ungradeability of the non-MythTV components was not really a concern. I'll buy that, but it's nice to be able have an up-to-date Linux box available for experimentation. I live in a condo, so I don't have a lot of room to keep multiple boxes around, and my Myth machine is frequently idle. Also, I'm using a Mac mini as my frontend, so I don't really need an appliance. Another issue with Knoppmyth is that the ease of installation goes out the window if you want to install it anywhere but hda. I want to move back to an an ancient HP machine (100W power suppply!), so I have to use a PCI card to support my 250GB drive. Consequently, the drive shows up as hdg and KnoppMyth will not auto install to it.

I've used and enjoyed Ubuntu at work and at home over the last year, so I thought it would be nice to have a full-fledged Ubuntu box that could also run the MythTV backend. Therefore, I decided to try out MythBuntu first. I followed the directions on the Ubuntu page and installed 7.04 Alternate. I had a mess of problems related to grub, and I ended up blowing away my MBR and starting over. It should be noted that this was user error and no fault of Ubuntu. Once I got Ubuntu properly installed, I used apt-get to pull down the MythTV packages. The mythbackend binary identified itself as 0.20.2 when run with the -v option, but for some reason when I ran mythtv-setup, there was no option for Schedules Direct under Video Sources. I googled a bit, but no one else seemed to have this problem. Being a masochist, I then tried to install MythBuntu's latest 7.10 alpha. The CD booted to a menu, but the installer would not load. Frustrated and tired, I decided to try MythDora which the author of the aforementioned article picked as his winner.

MythDora is a two-CD distro, and it took quite a while to install. Once the files were copied over, I ran yum upgrade \*myth\*, and updated MythTV to 0.20.2. Thankfully, when I ran mythtv-setup, there was an option for Schedules Direct. I put in my account information, and everything worked like a charm. Then, I pulled down the 0.20.2 Universal build for MacOS X (I have a PPC mini), and pointed it at my backend. It connected to the backend with no hiccups. Theoretically, the next time I need to upgrade MythTV, I can just use Yum. One optimization I could make is to have the box boot into single user mode by default. Since I'm only running a backend, I really don't need X running all the time. It's not really a pressing issue since I'm using the PVR-350's onboard encoder, and I've never seen resource contention.