As a long-term MythTV user, I read all the discussion about Plex vs Jellyfin, but I’m still here… recording Live TV, watching films, listening to “me choonz” all on free, open-source software. What am I missing? Any other MythTV users out there?
I used MythTV for decades. I really loved the “raw” digital output of the music player. It would casually hop from 44/16/2.0 to 96/24/5.1 between songs and my amp would decode it. I even contributed a small patch to make the visualizer work with 24bit audio.
The live TV hardware accelerated deinterlacing was really good too. TV recording was super reliable.
The TVDb lookup was a tad glitchy. It turns out that it didn’t include the year in the lookup. I wrote a patch that did it (and improved my metadata lookups heaps) but never made a PR.
I jumped to Plex around 2020. Mostly for things like streaming to my phone so I can have my music on the train. I believe Myth was better for HTPC, but Plex isn’t too far off.
I’m not a fan of Plex audio. Every time I try to make it do AC3 passthrough or skip the OS mixers, the whole thing breaks.
Ah, ok, you’re a bit of a contributor… I helped with a couple of patches and loads of wiki edits (that needed much love a few years ago)
TVDb is still hit & miss, but much better than it used to be.
And yeah, Myth’s not ideal for external streaming…
There are 2 versions of plex. One is just called plex and you can use your mouse. The other is called plexHTPC and it uses arrow keys and spacebar to select content. It took me a while to figure out that there are 2 different versions out there. The htpc one does ac3 pass through just fine.
I’m on the new HTPC version installed as a snap. I can see that it’s meant to work with passthrough, but I find that it… doesn’t.
I haven’t tried in a few versions. Maybe I should give it another crack.
Hey looking back through my setup I realized I have something a little different. I have my htpc with hdmi going to my tv and then toslink (optical) audio feeding my surround sound.
It looks like to get my setup work had to install a custom audio driver. It’s called “aaf Optimus” which allows me to select Dolby digital as an option under “default format” in the audio properties menu.
Not sure this applies to you as my setup is kind of convoluted. Anyways when I watch YouTube the sound is just plain 2 channel audio and when I play something from Netflix it does pass through surround. Games are also in surround sound.
Just wanted to double check everything and give you a heads up. Good luck.
Thanks! I’m going through a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter because it was the only way to get 4K video. Pipewire is a bit flaky and applies filters that I don’t want. It’s a 3.1 channel setup. The goal is for the AV receiver to do all the decoding.