Mythbuntu busted as last two devs working on media centre distro quit

When you can

buy a "fully loaded" KODI box, for 30 quid, with a remote, why the hell would you even consider this option. Or a chromecast or fire stick........ All of which require no twatting about with repositories or setting up (beyond basics).

it was dead long before this.

Kodi and Mythtv aren't really equivalents though, myth was always focussed on capturing tv, providing recording functions and tv-guide and programming, what you've come to expect from tivos and dvrs/pvrs etc, whereas kodi is more about playing back an existing library of local/remote files. There is overlap between the two, but at least in my opinion they are each individually defined, and both have their place in different use-cases.

Kodi Problems

I tried to set up Kodi a couple of times to replace my aing Win7 Media centre, but I stalled each time getting kodi to recognise and use a Hauppage DTV card - I gave up in despair/disgust in the end. All I wanted was a decent PVR.

Notion of Gratitude

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the developers of Mythbuntu. I have used the distro on multiple computers since 2010, and I still use it on daily bases. The distribution has made the installation of MythTV a far smaller hassle than it would be without the distro, and the included control center software has helped me countless times. Mythbuntu has also provided an excellent set of tools for managing my PVRs, which are far more than just MythTV-based media centers, like the article suggests. I dare you to set up a multi-tuner PVR + media center with low IO and CPU loads and acceptable WAF using Windows or Linux without Mythbuntu, and you start to appreciate what these people have done.

Thank you for your work, it truly is sincerely appreciated.

LinHES? Anyone used it?

Looks like it may be a replacement for Mythbuntu. I've liked Arch-based distros before (E.G. Manjaro). LinHES looks like a fairly mature distro (8 years) and the last major release was May of this year.

Just noted in passing.

Less Broadcast TV Use

I'm guessing the loss in popularity of Mythbuntu maybe simply a result of people using broadcast TV less frequently.

I for example planned to build a Myth box at one point, but pretty much survive now with a Kodi for local video content and a Roku for streaming services (iPlayer, 4oD, Amazon, Google etc etc).

It's now rare that we record anything on our Satellite box, we tend to just use the catch up services. So I no longer feel the Myth box would be used or necessary for us.

There is absolutely a use case for a full Myth/Media Centre system, but less people may need this type of solution than before.

Emby

Emby is another great alternative. A true client server model that means the server does the heavy lifting so the client can be lightweight. Native TV recording without using a plugin to another backend (using my HDHomeRun) is one of the reasons that I was finally able to ditch Windows Media Center. It is still a little rough around the edges, Live TV especially is still a little rough and ready but for all the bits that are still a little bit v1.0 there are a ton of features that WMC and Kodi never did.

Finally it's also pretty OS agnostic (front and backend). I've run the server on both Windows and Linux (I used CentOS) and the experience was very comparable.