Re: [gentoo-user] Opinions on DVR/PVR backend?

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 11:29 AM, Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> The main backend options seem to be MythTV, Plex, and TVHeadend.
>

You seem to understand the pros/cons fairly well.

I moved from MythTV to Plex about two years ago, but as a result of
moving from DVR to discrete media files, which MythTV was a poor fit
for.  The DVR service is new for Plex and I've never tried it, though
it would be free for me to use (I have a lifetime Plex pass).  I don't
have any tuners set up at all right now and no easy ability to watch
LiveTV of any kind.

One pain I always had with MythTV was any time where I wanted to run
different distros on front-ends vs servers, because the protocol
changes from time to time and upstream does not support anything other
than all clients and servers running on the exact same build.  (In
reality it is more flexible than that, but protocol version changes
are not generally announced or managed because upstream really does
want everything on one build.)  So, running a Gentoo server and a
MythBuntu front-end is a constant source of pain with the versions
never being in-sync.

The thing I like about Plex is that upstream basically tries to keep
everything painless and "just working."  They do QA testing on all
their platforms/etc, and I've never had a situation so far where my
server wouldn't talk to one of my clients.  I use a Roku client, an
android client, my android client casting to a chromecast, and the web
client.  I've messed with the windows desktop client as well.  They've
all always "just worked" with the auto-updates on all the various
platforms, and I just update my server about once a month (I think I
have that running in an Arch container on my main Gentoo box). Plex
also seems to handle media in whatever format I already have it in
fairly flexibly - I rarely have to rename files or anything like that.

Now, MythTV in general is going to be more flexible with DVR
capabilities, since it does have a database you can poke around in,
and more of an API/etc.  And of course it is open source so you really
can patch whatever you want into it.

In a pure DVR world I might still be running MythTV.  I'd certainly
evaluate Plex though.  I'm not sure how easy it is to evaluate Plex
DVR without paying something though.

-- 
Rich