MythTV
I’m watching the Olympics, and my primary tool as always is MythTV. Once you do this, it seems hard to imagine watching them almost any other way. Certainly not real time with the commercials, and not even with other DVR systems. MythTV offers a really wide variety of fast forward speeds and programmable seeks. This includes the ability to watch at up to 2x speed with the audio still present (pitch adjusted to be natural) and a smooth 3x speed which is actually pretty good for watching a lot of sports. In addition you can quickly access 5x, 10x, 30x, 60x, 120x and 180x for moving along, as well as jumps back and forth by some fixed amount you set (like 2 minutes or 10 minutes) and random access to any minute. Finally it offers a forward skip (which I set to 20 seconds) and a backwards skip (I set it to 8 seconds.)
MythTV even lets you customize these numbers so you use different nubmers for the Olympics compared to other recordings. For example the jumps are normally +/- 10 minutes and plus 30 seconds for commercial skip, but Myth has automatic commercial skip.
A nice mode allows you to go to smooth 3x speed with closed captions, though it does not feature the very nice ability I’ve seen elsewhere of turning on CC when the sound is off (by mute or FF) and turning it off when sound returns. I would like a single button to put me into 3xFF + CC and take me out of it.
Anyway, this is all very complex but well worth learning because once you learn it you can consume your sports much, much faster than in other ways, and that means you can see more of the sports that interest you, and less of the sports, commercials and heart-warming stories of triumph over adversity that you don’t. With more than 24 hours a day of coverage it is essential you have tools to help you do this.
I have a number of improvements I would like to see in MythTV like a smooth 5x or 10x FF (pre-computed in advance) and the above macro for CC/FF swap. In addition, since the captions tend to lag by 2-3 seconds it would be cool to have a time-sync for the CC. Of course the network, doing such a long tape delay, should do that for you, putting the CC into the text accurately and at the moment the words are said. You could write software to do that even with human typed captions, since the speech-recognition software can easily figure out what words match once it has both the audio and the words. Nice product idea for somebody.
Watching on the web
This time, various networks have put up extensive web offerings, and indeed on NBC this is the only way to watch many events live, or at all. Web offerings are good, though not quite at the quality of over-the-air HDTV, and quality matters here. But the web offerings have some failings read more »