And, well, it’s more customizable, and no iTunes is required. Sounds strange from someone who otherwise likes Apple so much, yes? Don’t get me wrong, I think the Apple TV Take 2 is a great thing, but it still is tied to the fact that either iTunes and your movies, TV shows etc. is required. When it comes to on-demand TV, I like things to be a bit more… open and flexible.
MythTV provides all of this. If you know it, you know what I mean and you can skip ahead to look at my screenshots. If not, man, you are in for quite a ride. This software is pretty much one of the most powerful entertainment suites I have seen. If you have a receiver card, you have the power to rewind live TV, pause it, or schedule recordings and watch ‘em later. There’s also a plugin that hooks up to the running webserver, retrieves the TV programme information for the next two weeks and displays them in your browser. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg here. This tool comes with so much… unbelievable it’s free.
Well the standard themes are not bad, especially the take on Microsoft’s Media Center is very well done. But I didn’t really like it, so I took the theme Glass-Wide and simply replaced the wallpaper with this Apple TV one.
And if this is not enough, I also installed the plugin for Apple Movie Trailers and created its own menu entry for it.
I think I have got quite a cool front end for on-demand video content and other stuff such as news.
The main menu - customized for my needs
The movie selection screen. Pick one, then read all the info about the flick. The info and movie poster is brought to you by IMDB.
Beat that, Apple TV. Read headlines you like, then open the page with the article - all in MythTV.
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