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Engadget and others are reporting that contrary to the very spirit of the set-top box DVR, TiVo says all subscribers with select devices will see ads prior to playing recorded shows after a software update rolls out. TiVo says subscribers will be able to skip the ads coming in the next 90 days, but did not elaborate on this as a user says they had to fast forward through the ads. Many subscribers are angry and threatening to cancel, calling the ads a feature that devalues the service as they pay for the ability to skip ads altogether.
This prompts the question: will cable companies, losing subscribers and looking to replace that revenue, do the same with their DVRs?
Original article: https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/21/tivo-pre-roll-dvr-ads-for-all-users/.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday September 23 2019, @11:44AM (12 children)
I'd been planning my move to Mythtv for quite some time.
Starting about two years ago, I began looking at various platforms to replace my Tivo. That started when they broke
HME support [wikidot.com] for mp3 and mp4 in 2016, and I could no longer stream my mp3s to the Tivo via pyTivo [sourceforge.io]. I tried a few different methods. Starting with Plex (Tivo has a built-in client -- see below for why it's garbage) and then ended up using mp3act [github.com]. However, since I could only access it via the vewd app, the UI was so slow as to be almost unusable. Also, using vewd, they were spying on everything I did, even though the mp3act server was on a local box.
Kodi was pretty nice, but I decided against it for a couple reasons:
1. I would have had to re-organize ~10,000 video files to comport with their arbitrary TV/Movie splits. I have a folder structure based on genre and have been refining it for more than a decade;
2. You mentioned re-encoding. IIRC, they recommend transcoding everything to one specific format. Again, with ~10,000 video files, that's way too much work.
Plex was my initial choice, as it installs easily and is actually pretty slick. The deal-breaker was that they require registration and record everything you do on your Plex server and clients (presumably for data mining), even if all the content and playback devices are on your local network. No thanks.
Emby was pretty cool too. But they had the same arbitrary Movies/TV thing as Kodi and some features were only available to "premium" (read: paying) users. They also require registration and do the "phone home" thing. And their codec support was somewhat limited. Grrrr!
I looked at a few others and found that Mythtv was the best choice for me. Open source. No spying. No arbitrary library distinctions. Excellent codec support. And pretty solid performance/stability.
I run the back end on a VM (linux) and the front end on a fanless 4 core Cherry Trail box (also linux). It renders 1080p pretty flawlessly (I'd get something beefier if you need 4K) and the interface (once I checked out a few different themes) is really nice. It plays my music. It plays my video. Very nice.
I haven't purchased a tuner for it yet, but that's coming soon. Likely when SiliconDust releases its 6-tuner HDHomeRun [silicondust.com] box sometime later this year.
As is pretty obvious, I definitely recommend Mythtv. It helps a lot if you know Linux, but once it's set up, it's definitely wife-friendly!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Monday September 23 2019, @01:36PM (3 children)
I'd bet some of that is because web browser publishers have begun to cause web browsers to require a secure context [pineight.com] to access "sensitive" JavaScript features. Even playback in the full screen is "sensitive" because a malicious site can use full screen functionality to impersonate the entire operating system [feross.org]. There are three ways to create a secure context in a web browser:
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday September 23 2019, @09:04PM (2 children)
Right. Plex spies on what you do, even when it's all internal to your home.
If it were just a CA/certificate issue, such certificates would be automatically installed at server/clients install time and there would be no need to send back megabytes of data (and not CRL requests, but lots of https encrypted data) to the Plex domain when using data exclusively on *internal* resources.
You can provide other apologia for them too if you want. But streaming content from one *internal* device to another shouldn't require any external connections. I tried blocking their domain and their software refused to function. that's unacceptable. Full stop.
If you are okay with that, go for it. Personally, I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:49AM (1 child)
And renewed every 60-90 days, correct? And who would pay for the domain name and DNS zone hosting? Currently Plex does, but that's probably ultimately related to ad revenue derived from telemetry data, which I agree is excessive.
I don't ask this to defend Plex. I ask this to determine whether there's a good way for a different platform, one built on free software, to obtain certificates for devices internal to a home LAN without opening client devices to social engineering by those who would want to MITM all of a user's external traffic.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:29PM
Even if that were really necessary for applications that are not web browsers like Plex, regular software/security updates could handle that pretty seamlessly.
I agree that's an issue. Every three weeks or so, I have to pay a burly thug who comes to my house and forces me to install public certs on all my internal devices, even though they don't access the internet.
More seriously, if your use case includes wanting to stream media to locations outside your internal network, to your phone (ewww), the homes of others, etc. then you don't have much choice other than to utilize TLS, and in many cases, DNS.
It's true that the vast majority of folks don't have the knowledge or inclination to set up and host such services.
I'm not one of those folks. I do have my own domain names and host my DNS zones locally and with secondary providers. However, my use case does not include streaming media outside my internal network.
Fair enough. Given that external *streaming* traffic isn't my use case, I haven't put much thought into that. Off the top of my head, I'd start with something that integrates platforms like Nextcloud [nextcloud.com], OpenVPN and Cloudns [cloudns.net] (dynamic dns hosting, assuming you don't have static IPv4 or a block of ipv6 addresses).
Securing access for external devices really obviates the need for certs on internal *client* devices. However, that can be done with OpenVPN's private CA as well.
The rub is supporting *arbitrary* devices. As long as you know which devices will require access, installing private certs/appropriate configs (even without DNS if you have static IPs) on OpenVPN clients is relatively simple and can be automated pretty easily.
But even in the case where you're at your sister's brother in-law's godmother's house and want to stream media there, there are tools [techadvisor.co.uk] (not sure about the FOSS bit, as this is definitely not my use case) which can allow you to redirect those streams from a configured device to another, un-configured one.
I'd note that there are turnkey solutions for Nextcloud and OpenVPN.
It's entirely possible that there are other, more seamless solutions out there.
So, yes. It's possible to do this with FOSS and without spying scumbags.
I'd also expect that utilizing GPG or similar to securely transfer certs and configurations to arbitrary devices could resolve the distribution issue as well.
Is that a workable solution? I'd say yes, especially if someone were to script server configuration/setup tools specifically for this use case.
Does that exist right now? I have no idea. However, if it did I'd probably have run across it while researching a replacement for Tivo.
Note that there may well be holes in this as I just pulled it out of my hat. However, as long as all external access would be through OpenVPN, the only thorny issue would be secure cert/config distribution for arbitrary devices.
Thanks for asking about this. It's an interesting problem with a fairly simple solution. But it made me think, and I like when that happens. I suspect that the only reason something like this hasn't been done as a public project is that there's no way to monetize it.
Here's an interesting take [smarthomebeginner.com] on such integration. Note that this is just one of the results from a web search for "Nextcloud plus openvpn media streaming". I have no idea who the poster is, nor do I have any interest in them, their site or any software they recommend. It also isn't clear (based on the skim of the post I did) whether it resolves the arbitrary device problem.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday September 23 2019, @03:23PM (7 children)
From memory the Emby directory classifier is/was configurable, so it might be easier to change your Emby config option for directories than to move everything. I have to admit I'm kinda impressed that you can find 10000 things to watch; unless thats pr0n in which case thats a pretty small collection by modern internet standards (just kidding)
Emby was GPL but went closed source around 3.5.something and naturally a fork "Jellyfin" formed that now appears to be more actively developed than Emby.
I used older Emby and it worked well enough; I guess the upgrade path for my legacy emby installs is wipe and install FOSS jellyfin, eventually.
The biggest problem I've seen in "media centers" since 2003 or so when I got started, is once they work perfectly for everyone, the programmers still gotta look busy and add stuff and mess with things until its unusable; kinda a "systemd" effect. An example in the general sense would be last decade the mythMusic mp3 player jukebox was so simple and easy to use my grandma could use it when she visited, but the current mythMusic implements an incredibly complicated and versatile system capable of anything a programmer can define (note the requirement for all endusers to be a programmer familiar with SQL concepts...) with a multi-modal multi-screen UI and advanced queueing and sorting and searching and its so complicated its practically a Turing complete language (slight exaggeration). The downside of implementing something that could almost replace a radio station DJ, is the features "required" have certain UI "requirements" such that I'm the only person in my family who can battle MythMusic for five minutes to play a damn mp3 file, whereas the old system was effortless for endusers and my wife STILL complains about how the old MythMusic was awesome and the new one is simply unusable.
For a very concrete example of this "media center" anti-pattern, in the good old days my wife wants to listen to random christmas music using MythMusic in 2009, so she clicks music on the remote, scroll down the top directories just like MythVideo to find "Christmas" directory, hit the center button on the remote, select randomize instead of alphabetical by filename or whatever the default, hit the center button, all done, maybe 20 seconds. Using MythMusic in 2019, from memory, you need to have all your MP3 header genre info correct by manual editing and have the system completely (manually?) spider the storage beforehand, which is a much bigger PITA than "dump the ripped mp3s in the Christmas directory" like the old days. Then to actually play you need to start MythMusic, it'll start in the wrong interface mode probably, causing user panic, so use the menu to change view mode to ... playlist tree editor or something, then you need to use the multi-function search system to tree thru genre sorting, then find christmas as a genre along with 10 mis spellings and variations ("Holiday Classics", "Kids Christmas" etc what a PITA), then click that genre, not to play those songs, not to add those songs to the end of the existing playlist, but carefully select to replace the entire existing playlist. Then change UI modes all the way back to visualizer or player or some damn thing, then click play to start, then find the playlist randomizer (or was that in the playlist editor?) then play again... Oh Fuck This Shit Goddammnit Fing MythMusic has been unusable for years yell "Alexa play christmas music" and we're all done here. Its just sad the UI went from something a child or senior citizen could use in the '00s to something that a software dev says "fuck this" to in the '10s. Its like writing a SQL select query as the values for an SQL insert query not using a keyboard, not using a mouse, using a MFing GD PoS set of four arrows and center button. Un Fing believable that the devs ever used what they coded, simply unusable.
So... yeah... a decade ago MythTV had a usable music player, but it got "upgraded" into unusability so now we pretend it doesn't exist, kinda like how there was only one Matrix movie not a trilogy.
Another Myth peculiarity is I believe there was an inside job to destroy commercial skip around 2012 or so. Went from working perfectly all the time with a little OSD and remote skip buttons OR autoskip was 99% trustworthy, to it simply doesn't work, over one unpleasant software revision. Support forums are the usual full of shit stuff you'd expect from corporate support "uh uh uh wipe and reinstall windows or we won't help you" "must be a problem on your side" assholes. So yeah, commercial skip was essentially perfect around 2009 but has been broken for years now. Just set your fastforward button to move in 30 second chunks and hit it about 8 times ever commercial break and you'll be good.
A final rant against Myth is the software is enterprise grade in the sense that everything has to be upgraded in lockstep and the devs feel it an antipattern to do old school unix stuff like "be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send". So upgrade one remote TV software and you gotta upgrade the main host and the other remote(s). Otherwise you get a nice full screen "error expected protocol version 172 received protocol version 171" or similar with EVERY freaking upgrade. Which is probably why I'm still running multi-year old Wheezy packages with backported myth packages, probably at least 2 or 3 year old backported packages. Wonder is the newer myth is much better? Wonder what they've broken since 2016 or so?
I really need to wipe and reinstall my entire myth infrastructure, but there's so little worth watching on TV that its hard to motivate the effort to do so. I'm just gonna watch on amazon prime anyway. Or screen cast a youtube video to the TV. The whole technological infrastructure of NTSC/ATSC broadcasting RF is kinda disappearing from my life, so a lot of design decisions for myth no longer make sense. My kids don't even understand the concept of "broadcast" or "commercial break" generally speaking.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday September 23 2019, @09:54PM (6 children)
Configurable? Really? Tell that to the Emby developers I communicated with (on their support forum) who scoffed at my issue and basically told me to suck it up or move along.
I said I have 10,000 video files. That includes various TV series, movies, documentaries, etc. ripped from my own media, torrented or yanked off the Tivo via kmttg over the past 20 years. Do you expect that once something is watched once, it should be immediately deleted, then ripped/torrented/recorded again if you wish to share it with someone else or watch it again?
Pr0n? Why would anyone have a pr0n collection, as there are so many free, anonymous sites to stream it. I could see bookmarks of pr0n sites, but actual media files?
That's not really my use case. I prefer to create a playlist of the ~17,000 music tracks I have and randomize If there's something specific I want to hear, I can search for it (Using CDEX [cdex.mu] to rip my cds starting in the 1990s made that easy, as it correctly populates mp3 data automagically) without issue.
I also have a folder structure (artist/album, but not genre) that I've honed for decades. IIRC (as I don't use that mode a lot), you can still select "folder" ("Directory"?) view to view the folder structure and play music that way and that works fine.
That said, I agree with what you're saying about mp3 tags, as I did install iTunes on a computer -- *once* -- and was appalled that it didn't respect the folder structure, and instead created a separate database based on mp3 tags. That got uninstalled quickly.
Yes. That is annoying. I have not yet purchased a tuner for Mythtv (as my Tivo has served that purpose and if I want to keep something I just pull it off the Tivo and transcode it with kmttg [sourceforge.net].
Since I'm not using the live tv/dvr functions (yet), I don't have experience with the commercial skip feature. There is commercial detection [mythtv.org] that can be used to detect/skip [mythtv.org] commercials, and a mechanism for removing [mythtv.org] them.
I haven't had occasion to use this, as I have no tuner right now. So I can't speak to the quiality/efficacy of either method.
Fast Forward/Rewind is (IMHO) poorly done in Mythtv (I'm still searching for the setting/DB field that defines the length of ff/rew per keypress). I'll work that out eventually.
I don't currently watch live TV or use the DVR function on Mythtv (as I said, I don't have a tuner -- as I mentioned, I will likely get an HDHomeRun 6 tuner device when it's released) and have been using MythMote on my phone (which is not a pleasant experience), but have purchased an IR receiver for the front end and will try different remotes until I get something I like.
But yes, that's definitely annoying. Another annoying bit is in the metadata. When displaying the cast of a particular item, it doesn't sort them. At all. Not alphabetically, not in order of role importance, not in order of appearance, or even in order of how well known the actors may be.
For the record, I'm running Mythtv v0.30. When I first started checking it out (with 0.26/0.27 or so), I ran into the "database schema/protocol mismatch" when manually installing on various systems. That was incredibly annoying.
However, If you use your distro's repositories, that's not an issue. I'm not talking about Mythbuntu either. I just enable the RPM Fusion [rpmfusion.org] Free and non-free repositories in my package manager config, and versions are always the same, as I always apply updates to the Mythtv frontend and backend contemporaneously. New frontend or backend? They get the same stuff from the same repositories. Easy peasy.
Apparently (a 10 second web search, so YMMV) there is no such equivalent for Debian. Perhaps the Debian/Unofficial [debian.org] repository list would give you that as well?
Is Mythtv perfect? Far from it. Does it do most of what I want it to do? Definitely. Given that whatever hardware I have/will purchase for it can be used with other platforms as well, I'm not concerned about that. For the moment it's meeting my needs.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday September 27 2019, @11:36AM (5 children)
I was motivated enough to log in and try to find it, and failed. Possibly I was remembering in setup - library - advanced you can set up custom metadata storage locations as opposed to parsing metadata.
Thats not been my experience with any auto-populator as theres infinite spellings and capitalization of musicians names and genres. I suppose if you don't use that data, it doesn't matter if auto population is wrong enough to make it unusable.
I have one of the originals in my basement; this is the hardware 1.0 works perfectly up to this day, naturally people living off R+D and repurchasing (iphone style) need to be selling a version 6, LOL.
Setup - TV settings - Playback Group - (probably default unless you've made multiple ones) the seconds will be toward the bottom of the page and forward and reverse can be set individually. I like 30 secs fwd and 10 secs rev but whatever. Obviously every version of Myth might be a LITTLE different, but generally speaking its a TV - Playback Group option. Best of Luck!
http://www.deb-multimedia.org [deb-multimedia.org]
Some of the software on the old debian-multimedia system was outright illegal in some jurisdictions where debian operated, so they can't cooperate, and no cooperation means trademark violation, so the Debian (TM) name had to be scrubbed from deb-multimedia. Google probably still should have found it? Just some Debian lore from the ole pre-systemd days back when stuff worked.
Yeah, ditto, but my experience is more like "barely works and using / maintaining gives me headaches"
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday September 27 2019, @11:43AM (3 children)
Sorry to post a reply to a reply as an addendum but IF you feel the need to manually reorganize 10K files, the mmv command might help out in a programmatic sense. Probably have to install it from your distros repository. There's and option -n no execute as you'll see on the man page and its completely regex and subdirectory understanding, so its possible your big reorg could be a one liner. Or not.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday September 27 2019, @04:34PM (2 children)
Sorry not to reply to your addendum in my original reply, but I forgot about this until after I submitted and it was in my face again. :)
I appreciate the suggestion and am familiar with mmv. However, it's more of an issue of principle than a technical one. I've spent a long time putting together my folder structure and don't think I should be forced to conform to some random jerk's idea of what it should be. That may be a little arrogant, but it's my media library and I'll do what *I* want with it.
That said, I did have to do a significant amount of file renaming to get mythtv to recognize TV Show/Season/Episode (this isn't an issue with Tivo, as they use a text file to store that information) for metadata download purposes.
For shows with multiple seasons, I generally created ad-hoc scripts to do the renames, but with single-season/miniseries shows, I used a tool called qmv [ubuntu.com] which worked nicely.
Thanks again!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday September 29 2019, @01:36PM (1 child)
Yeah I can agree with that. Interesting thought experiment... symlinks are cheap to make and cheap to traverse and you could probably make a very small perl/python/shell script that walked thru /something/my_real_library and made a symlink forest solely for one media server app named /something/fake_directory_tree_for_some_app
I suppose a crontab could clean it on a regular basis.
This kind of thing always expands into being non-trivial... now how do you lock "app" such that "app" doesn't slow down the process and mess up your GUI with a partial index half why thru the symlink process? Its easy to add symlinks but don't forget a followup to delete any dead links to files you deleted. Humorous thought experiment, say your REAL library accidentally got a symlink loop inside it, then traversing that loop will probably provide hilarious results. Programming is so much fun, mostly.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday October 01 2019, @03:00PM
It's an interesting thought. And could be accomplished pretty easily. The time consuming part would be creating appropriate mappings (in the case we discussed, folders that contain movies need to link to one hierarchy, while those that contain TV need another) between the source content and the destination tree.
I'd expect that could be handled pretty easily. Stop the app associated with a particular symlink tree, sync the symlinks (including pruning of dead links), then restart the app.
If that's not viable (uptime requirements?), then use a mirrored volume for the symlink trees, break the mirror, sync onto the "offline" mirror and then resync the mirrors.
Then again, unless you're constantly updating your media library (especially moves and deletes), which isn't so likely for a personal media collection, synchronization should be pretty pain-free.
I recall having to do something analagous to this many years ago. The details escape me at the moment (CRS syndrome [onlineslangdictionary.com] is a terrible thing). Something to do with presenting documents with multiple views/organizational formats without using a database. It was a pain in the ass, IIRC.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday September 27 2019, @04:24PM
That rings a bell. I don't have my Emby VM any more, but as I recall, you can set up custom groups, but my folder structure (Genre>[movie or TV show]>[media files/season folders, then files]) would have made doing so a nightmare, with folders from all different places mashed together by the DB. Yuck. And lots of work.
A reasonable point. CDEX uses FreedDB [freedb.org] which, while usually pretty good, isn't perfect. I haven't really had problems with that, as my use case isn't dependent upon mp3 tags.
I don't know the version number, but the '6' refers to the number of tuners (cf. https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-prime-6/), [silicondust.com] but that's a bit problematic as I would like to cut the cord (which is why I haven't bought anything yet -- but baseball season is just about over now), so the Connect Quatro [silicondust.com] may be the way I go.
As I mentioned, I currently only use mythtv for video/music and not TV. As you know, mythtv's menus (I'm running into that issue now as I configure the remote control -- No more LIRC, by the way, there's kernel support now) are highly context sensitive. And since I don't have a tuner to watch TV, I never thought to check the TV settings. I'll check it out. Thanks!
I figured there would be an equivalent to RPM Fusion. I'd note that like deb-multimedia, the packages aren't included in *any* RPM-based distributions, and presumably for the same reasons Debian doesn't, and the reasons they wanted their name off the repository.
As a long-time sysadmin, I understand your point. As I mentioned, since the mythtv packages are all hosted in the same repositories, keeping things in sync hasn't been an issue. That said, I just have one frontend and one backend -- both running the same Linux distro/version -- and have no need of more, so that simplifies matters considerably.
I have no interest in running a frontend on my phone, and mythmote just sends keyboard commands to a listening socket (default TCP/6548 IIRC) on frontend via wifi rather than interacting with the database.
As such, it's unnecessary to keep the versions in sync. I do find that using my phone as a remote control is an inferior experience.
Setting up mythweb [mythtv.org] on a (existing?) backend is really simple and supports pretty much all browsers. I used it a lot for testing before I bought a dedicated frontend, and it works pretty well.
It sounds like you haven't messed around with newer versions of mythtv, and assuming it's included in the deb-multimedia (I just checked and they seem to be in the stable repository at least) repositories, version sync issues aren't really an issue. You're obviously pretty experienced (more than me, but I'm learning!) with mythtv, so you likely wouldn't have the ignorance factor working against you as I did/do.
As such, you might want to give 0.30 a look. Or not.
Either way, I appreciate the discussion and your knowledge. Thanks!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr