MythTV

MythTV is an open-source digital video recorder and media streamer software for Linux and Mac OS X. It is most often used in PCs as a free alternative to the popular TiVo service. It also has many of the network media streaming capabilities in Xbox Media Center. MythTV has almost all PVR functionality found with TiVo, including "Live TV" that allows you to pause, rewind, and fast forward live TV. It supports multiple TV tuners for multiple simultaneous recordings. Video is compressed using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). It is available as a free download, and is very often bundled with an Linux-based operating system for easy setup. One of the more popular MythTV bundles is Mythbuntu, a combination of MythTV and the popular Linux distro Ubuntu. The current release is version 0.21 released on March 8th, 2008.


Pros & Cons
Pros:

•Free, open-source alternative to TiVO
•Commercial detection/skipping
•Distributed architecture supporting multiple clients and multiple servers for a more advanced setup
•Web-based interface for remote recording
•Customizable menus
•Includes many other apps including weather, web-browser, gallery, music player
•Support for multiple simultaneous TV tuners
•Live TV functionality. pause/rewind/fast forward live TV
•Web-powered electronic program guide
•Control your set-top box with an IR blaster
•HDTV support
•Built-in DVD importer for "backing up" DVDs

Cons:

•Complicated setup geared towards more techie people
•Difficult working with digital broadcasts and HDTV
•Doesn't interact with digital cable/satellite directly but instead requires an IR blaster

More information

Features

•Supports ATSC, QAM, and DVB high-definition television.
•Pause, skip, and rewind live TV shows.
•Intelligently schedules recordings to avoid conflicts.
•Interfaces with free TV listing sources such as XMLTV or PSIP.
•Interfaces with subscription listings service Schedules Direct in the United States and Canada.
•Schedule and administer various system functions using a web browser-based interface.
•A backend server and frontend client architecture, allowing multiple frontend client machines to be remotely served content from one or more backend servers. A single computer can perform as both the frontend client and the backend server.
•Analyzes recorded shows for optional commercial skipping
•Plays recordings at an accelerated or decelerated rate, adjusting the audio pitch as necessary.
•Controls a decoder/STB using an infrared remote (Irblaster)
•Web interface for setting up recordings remotely
•Customizable, skinnable menu

Setup

MythTV should be installed on a PC (or Mac) with a compatible video tuner card. MythTV continues to support more tuner cards as they are released, but it currently supports Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150/250/350/500 series of tuner cards. The combination of PC + MythTV now can be used as a HTPC. The tuner card can be hooked up to your (1) analog OTA or cable directly, or (2) can be connected to your cable or satellite set-top box which can then be controlled using an IR blaster connected to the HTPC. The MythTV interface has an EPG (powered by XMLTV) that should be configured to your TV programming setup. A unique feature to MythTV is its distributed architecture allowing for multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network for a transparent experience to the user. For example, you could have MythTV connected to your digital cable in the living room, and have a second MythTV box in your bedroom that connects seamlessly to the digital cable and access the recorded shows remotely.

GIMP

GIMP is a popular open-source graphics editing program that is often used as a free replacement to Adobe Photoshop. Short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP is licensed under a GNU General Public License and is available for all major operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. GIMP is a raster graphics editor, as opposed to a vector graphics editor like Adobe Illustrator, or OpenOffice.org Draw (also open-source), and thus useful for manipulating digital images such as photographs. Common tasks include cropping, resizing, adjusting color, creating composite images, removing artifacts and other unwanted image features. GIMP is including as the default graphics editor in many popular Linux distros including Ubuntu, SUSE, and Debian. Originally released in 1995, the current release version is 2.4.5 as of March 1st, 2008.


Pros & Cons
Pros:

•Free alternative to Adobe Photoshop
•Open source application
•Supports read and write of PhotoShop .PSD file format
•Available for UNIX/Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
•Extensive file format support
•Extensive featureset, comparable to Photoshop

Cons:

•Missing some advanced productivity features found in Photoshop with layer management and history
•No Pantone colors because of legal issues

Audacity - Media Software

Audacity is a free cross-platform digital audio editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is a multi-track audio editor with many features found in commercial software. Audacity was originally written, and currently maintained by Dominic Mazzoni, now a Google employee, while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. The current stable version is 1.2.6 released on November 15th, 2006 and is currently one of top 10 most popular downloads from SourceForge.net.


Pros & Cons
Pros:


•Free, open-source audio editor
•Supports multi-track editing
•Great free tool with all essential features
•Silence detection for automatically splitting up analog recordings into multiple files or tracks
•Fast. loading files, zooming, applying effects

Cons:

•Commercial programs have better features for more advanced functionality
•Multi-track functionality is limited and could be improved

More information

Features

- free, open-source
- cross-platform, with support for Windows, Mac, and Linux
- recording and playback of sound files
- multi-tracking editing
- file formats: supports WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis
- many digital effects and plugins, that can be written in Nyquist (LISP-like language)
- noise removal
- amplitude envelope
- independent speed/pitch
- normalization
- fading (in/out)
- trimming
- support up to 96 kHz sampling and 24 bit resolution
- can detect silences in audio tracks to automatically break up files into tracks recorded from vinyl records and audio tapes