MythTV 0.22 Released 329
uyguremre writes "After a little over a year and a half in the making, the developers of MythTV announced that MythTV 0.22 is now available. There have been a lot of large changes since 0.21, including a port from Qt v3 to Qt v4 and a major UI rewrite to convert to MythTV's new MythUI user interface libary. As always, this release adds support for some new hardware, in this case VDPAU video acceleration, DVB-S2, and the Hauppauge HD-PVR. The MythUI toolkit allows themes much greater control over the user interface and today we're announcing a competition to design new themes for MythTV. With the new release comes a theming competition too. For a more complete list of changes and new features, read the Release Notes on the wiki."
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:3, Informative)
I still use it.
It's not without it's warts, but they're pretty easily hidden, and my wife and daughter both love it.
I've never used XBMC - how good it it's PVR capabilities? For scheduling does it support Schedules Direct, or some other listings service (or does it require screen-scraping of some sort?)
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:5, Informative)
I ran MythTV for six years. The last year I've used SageTV. I got sick of MythTV locking up, crashing, and the constant non-stop twiddling with my configuration because I could never get things quite right.
SageTV isn't much better. I spend a lot less time twiddling, but it crashes and freezes about as often as MythTV used to. I'm still looking for that HTPC that just works. I haven't found it yet.
You sure these aren't hardware-related problems? I've had a dual-tuner, split FE/BE Myth system running for, oh... two years now?... with absolutely no problems. Any crashes I've had occurred early on, and have been hardware related (ie, hard disks failing), or problems with Linux itself (XFS+LVM causing hardlocks, bugs in ivtv resulting in tuners dying, etc). 'course, it helps that once I had a working configuration, I didn't touch it at all (ie, no OS updates, etc).
As for fiddling... honestly, I have no idea what you're doing with your system that requires that kind of care and attention. Again, I've been running a Myth system for two years, and it's required basically zero care and feeding once I got the system up and running and working the way I wanted (granted, that took a bit of time early on, particularly on the frontend, getting third-party software working right, tweaking the remote configuration, etc).
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:3, Informative)
XBMC is a media front-end, it has NO recording capabilities nor will it apparently. Rather than reinventing the wheel the developers intend to make it easy to interface with other back-ends, including Myth. As front-ends go though it ROCKS and I am able to access all of my MP3, DVD\BD rips (MKV), and many streaming audio stations. I look forward to XBMC getting some MAME support (pretty please), and for there being some sort of back-end PVR thing for it to interface with...
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:5, Informative)
I tried using XBMC on an Asrock ION 330 as a frontend for a while. Basically, it looks amazing (especially compared to Myth 0.21), and has some nice things like animations. It was dirt simple to get working with the hardware, including an MCE remote (as in, I basically had to do nothing).
The bad: it's not a DVR at all. It has half-baked myth backend support - in that it is supposed to understand the streams and be able to play content. However, you have to go into a menu item called "Scripts" and then start "Mythtv" from a list there, before navigating to recordings. It has no support for scheduling or doing anything besides playing back recordings. I ended up just making it look directly at the Recordings directory on my myth box and playing back files from there (note, I use a script there to symlink the mythtv recording files to their actual names).
The ugly: Due to the high potential, I started digging in more to see if there was anything I could do to help out, such as work on the myth backend support. What I found is that entire project has been mothballed, and they are working on a grandios rewrite of a generic PVR layer, and then later on top of that will have Mythtv support. Not a TERRIBLE plan, but 1) it's a huge plan, that will take a long time before it is even remotely usable, 2) it means the PVR has to be lowest common denominator support, combined based on what all the PVR backends they support have. It also means the devs are rejecting patches to the existing myth support, because it is not relevant in the wake of the new PVR backend.
On top of that, the architecture is sadly lacking. With apologize to XBMC devs, as I'm about to call your baby ugly, but It very much shows its organic and basic roots. The actual menu items are hardcoded into the theme, and intertwined with the code in the back. To do something that should be simple, like add another menu item to the main menu, from what I can tell you have to: 1) modify the core code to understand the command, 2) modify the theme to add in the button - which includes changing the x,y coordinates of all buttons below that one that now need to be shifted, and adjusting the animation code so it knows the positions of all the buttons. It's possible it is simpler than that (I didn't actually try), but from looking at the code, that's what it looked like to me, and so I lost interest due to the amount of effort and non-reusability (eg, my Mythtv button wouldn't be accepted as a patch, and I'd have to redo this anytime I installed an update).
Re:database (Score:4, Informative)
Did they fix the database encoding in this one?
That depends on what you mean by "fix".
With MythTV 0.22, the database is expected to be configured with the UTF-8 character set. If you're upgrading a database that has been used with a previous version (which required the database to use the latin1 character set), you need to fix your database [mythtv.org].
I would guess that if you're using MythTV as packaged by a major distro, by the time your distro delivers 0.22 it will probably handle the character set conversion automatically.
Re:Does it save me from commercials? (Score:2, Informative)
Watching live TV is a pain now because of this !
Re:I for one welcome... (Score:4, Informative)
You were doing great up until that "it works on everything" part. Plenty of folks have pulled their hair out with Myth in the past and you make it sound like a breeze. Look at the numbers of folks posting here that have given up on it and you can plainly see it's far from easy. I for one hope that this version is VERY good but please, the rah rah it works great stuff can be saved - most of us know better having tried it already.
I lent out my HDHR to someone having given up on Myth previously. I have spare hardware though so maybe I'll try it again but if it's half as bad as the last time I'll put it down again. The Myth guys really have an uphill climb convincing people IMO. Myth seems like the epitome of what people have issues with when they talk about Linux. Funky config scripts, hair pulling, things that don't make sense, things that just don't work, picky hardware, painful broken upgrades, the list is long. A new version is great news, lets see if it flies. Call me cautious having been bitten about 5 times previously by this software!
Re:Does it save me from commercials? (Score:4, Informative)
Release Notes (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.22 [mythtv.org]
MythTV
New Features
* MythTV UI ported to new MythUI library with all new capabilities
* Added Automatic Prioritization to the scheduler which uses watching behavior to automatically increase priority of shows that are watched close to their recording timeslot over shows that are delayed for longer periods of time. See [16477] for details until the wiki page is populated.
* Added MPEG-2 support for ConvertX/GO7007 tuners in addition to the existing MPEG-4 support. [16538]
* Added new jump point for taking a screenshot and corresponding UPnP web method. [16532]. Network control also has this jumppoint [16613]
* Improved theme caching speed after a "make install" for users who update frequently. [16487]
* Added support for overriding the audio sampling rate in recording profiles on a per card basis. [16747]
* Support for the Hauppauge HD-PVR Component Video Recorder
* Vastly improved channel scanner
* Fanart, Banner, and coverart support in Watch Recordings
* VDPAU Video renderer and decoder for hardware accelerated playback of H.264, MPEG-1/2, WMV, and VC-1.
* Many software deinterlacers are now multithreaded
* New codec and container support from up-to-date ffmpeg libraries.
* Add support for DVB-S2 [21318]
* HDHomeRun multirec support
* Additional Myth Protocol socket functions, including file upload, deletion, and scanning of storage groups. [19979] [21134] [21156]
* Adds a popup dialog accessible from the main menu using MENU which allows the system to be shutdown or rebooted [20852]
EIT
* Fixed encoding for various french Astra 19.2E channels. [16792]
* Various Freesat EIT fixups
* UK EIT fixup - Adds handling of AD, S, SL and W tags in EIT data [20768]
* Fixed matching of programs for updating EIT data
Firewire
* Add Firewire Vendor & Model ID's for PACE STBs [17149]
* Add Motorola DCH-3200 vendor ID
* Add DCT6200 vendor ID
* Add firewire and channel changing support for the DCX3200 model STB [21514]
UPNP
* More exhaustive MIME test [17155]
Setup
* Allows input groups to work properly when each recorder has more than one input and so can be in multiple mutually exclusive input groups. [17172]
* Add commandline scanner [17175] plus many more changesets
* Adds option to mythtv-setup to disable automatic database backup before database upgrades [17479] (ensure you do a manual backup before upgrade if this is enabled)
* Add HD-PVR support [17493]
* Add support for multiple frontends per DVB adaptor [17832]
* Add scanning support for DVB-S2 [21317], [21318]
* Add a spinbox for specifying a value for the "LiveTV Idle Timeout" setting [21378]
* Channel scanner - add option to set off air channels invisble [21691]
* Channel scanner - Allow basic channel scanning with DVB version of HDHomeRun [21858]
* Offer to automatically shutdown backend at start
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:2, Informative)
My MythTV setup crashed a 2-3 times per week for several months. I eventually discovered that it was the Linux driver for my StreamZap LIRC receiver. I replaced it with a serial-based receiver, and haven't had a crash since.
What I'm saying, it's probably a hardware/driver problem, not a MythTV problem.
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:2, Informative)
When the hell did recording TV become not allowed? Or are you and your argument just full of shit?
And I am positive that all of the media being played on XMBC was purchased for that fair use media shifting right?
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:3, Informative)
All fair points.
For one, you are correct about the Live TV support. One of the benefits of having such a large community is that we get a multitude of third-party plugins, scripts, skins, etc. That is also a problem in itself though, because they are often half-finished and poorly implemented. The MythTV frontend is such an example, though it has recently been picked up an greatly improved by our own dtierney.
The DVR rewrite is much more than that, it is an entire add-on framework that makes development more modular. It is being designed as a 'pvr-frontend' solution, one that you can hookup to one of many backends. There's no reason to rewrite what's already been done.
Your baby is ugly too! Really, though, the XBMC skinning engine is so powerful that simply diving in and changing a few things isn't exactly easy. That's also why we've drawn the interests of so many talented skinners and modders, the possibilities are endless. So it's a trade-off.
Currently Live TV certainly isn't what XBMC is known for, but it certainly excels as the face of your media library. We hope to improve that as time goes.
Sorry to hijack. Congratulations to the Myth devs on your release.
TheUni
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:3, Informative)
The very court case that led to the concept of fair use is about recording television content. Get your facts straight. Recording content in Myth is a direct relation to Sony v. Betamax which was, you got it, about time shifting, which is what a DVR/VCR are.
How version numbers work (Score:4, Informative)
If they're recording their version numbers like most software does, the move from 0.21 to 0.22 is what you're calling a ".1" release.
Version numbers aren't meant to be like normal decimal numbers. The stuff the the right of the decimal point is the integral minor release number. Going from 0.21 to 0.22 means an increment of one minor version, not a "hundredth" of a major version release.* There's no such thing as a ".01 release."
In other words, the jump from 0.21 to 0.22 is the same "amount" of version increase as the jump from 0.1 to 0.2. if you're at version 4.9 of something and you push out a minor release, its version will be 4.10, not 5.0, which would indicate a major release. Likewise, version 4.1 of software is most emphatically not the same thing as version 4.10.
It's also why a lot of version numbers have multiple decimal points, such as 4.9.1326. (The 1326 in this case is likely a build or other sub-minor revision number.) Obviously, if you're trying to interpret that as some kind of fraction between 4 and 5, it's meaningless.
* Just to satisfy the pedants, there are some exceptions. Some software with lots of minor revision milestones number early minor revisions x.01, x.02, etc. Also, some software uses a version numbering scheme in which odd numbers are development versions and even numbers are stable versions, so for example, x.14 would be a stable release and x.15 would be the next development release. And some developers give their software stupid-ass meaningless version names instead, such as "Millennium Edition," "XP," and "Vista," so that you really have no idea what the hell you're running outside of a general four-year or so time window.
To my knowledge, none of these schemes apply to MythTV, thank god.
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:2, Informative)
Although I have not tried it (yet), there is a more complete third-party MythTV plugin for XBMC. You can find it at http://code.google.com/p/mythbox/ [google.com] and it works for Linux, OS X & Windows
Features:
(Why are <li>'s double line spaced?)
Re:.01 Really? (Score:2, Informative)
Versions are numbered this way due to tradition.
Each numbered part of a version number is supposed to be taken on it's own as an integer. The jump from 0.2 to 0.3 is the same as 0.21 to 0.22. And yes, this means that version 0.2 is much earlier than 0.20, whether or not that makes intuitive sense.
I'm not saying that these scheme makes any sense, or really helps at all for people new to open source. I'm just saying that's how this particular tradition works, and given time most people pick it up easily enough.
(While on the topic of versioning traditions, a lot of projects go by major.minor.revision, with revision changed for each packaged release, minor with new features / binary changes, and major for complete rewrites. Gnome 2.26.n? OGRE? Often, if minor is odd, the software is a development release. This tends to happen a lot with GNU software, too.)
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:3, Informative)
In more recent years at Sony, the left hand might not know what the right hand is doing, but I don't think they had this problem back in the '80s. You meant Sony v. Universal [wikipedia.org], which is colloquially known as the "Betamax case" or "Betamax decision."
Re:.01 and the TV Myth (Score:3, Informative)
Close. The reality is that you spend so much time banging your head up against a brick wall that you just think you're watching TV.
I know that these are funny, but just so people know, it's really not true. Setting up MythTV is really quite easy, and if you're building a box specifically to run mythtv hardware support is a complete non-issue. Get one of the better capture cards (check the support list), and everything Will Just Work.
I've been running Myth for years, and there was a time when installing it was problematic to say the least, but seriously, setting up MythTV these days is no harder than installing an app from your package manager, running through a few configuration screens, maybe signing up for a listing service. That's it!
Re:Release Notes (Score:3, Informative)
Put camera on TV. Put mic in room somewhere. Use TV as display. Voila, video phone in your livingroom. That was the idea.