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."
.01 Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, let's get this right, in this update they have:
- Major back-end changes
- Major UI rewrite
- Significant new hardware support
- Also, apparently a more powerful themes toolkit
And this isn't even worth a .1 version increment. It's a .01
Really, if the version numbers are going to be this meaningless for tracking significant changes they should at least name them or come up with some other system. Something that let's people get interested and involved in the project and excited about the new release.
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I was under the impression that people got interested and involved because of... well, the list of fancy new features. If it was called "Dastardly DVR," think it would somehow improve it?
In that case, it's actually MythTV Eleventy Thrillion, Titty Tivo!
Re:.01 Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at .20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is .22. Now, based on that .02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?
No, don't go overboard. It doesn't need to be silly but it does need to provide a realistic feel of how the project is progressing. If your release notes are including the words 'major' and 'significant' and 'large changes' and 'major rewrite' it might be a good clue that it's worth going up by an entire .1
Or since I'm sure all these didn't happen over night or perfectly in sync it may have called for some internal development releases that would have this public release be 2.5 or something.
Or, yes, give it a name. It works for Ubuntu.
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I'm not a fan of arbitrary naming instead of incremental, but I agree that it needs a bigger version bump.
Projects like this usually have timelines that go something like this:
2002 -> 2009: 0.01 -> 0.22
2009 -> 2011: 0.23 -> 0.74
2011 -> 2012: 0.74 -> 2.2
Not saying it'll happen with MythTV - but version numbers seem to arbitrarily accelerate as soon as v1 is passed. They also accelerate on approach to v1.
I much prefer build numbers.
Software v1.1 b135
Software v1.1 b158
Software v1.2 b192
etc.
Th
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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 enou
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Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at .20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is .22. Now, based on that .02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?
And while you're stuck with your obsessive compulsive nonsense on version numbers, people that actually care are using it. .20, it's 0.20, and it's a version number, meaning it can become 0.22.1 for example. You must learn to read more carefully, you managed to miss the "0" a lot.
Besides, it's not
I guess you only focus on useless things.
.01 and the TV Myth (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly you haven't dealt with MythTV. The myth is that you get to watch and record TV. The reality is you spend all your time fiddling with it and cursing at it until your head is so bloody from banging it up against a brick wall that you give up and decide to give up TV altogether.
Re:.01 and the TV Myth (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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 packag
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It's just a number. Really.
Would it matter if it was going from version 2007 to 2009 (like MS office)? That's only a 0.1% change. At least .21 to .22 is a 4.5% change!
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.
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Really, if the version numbers are going to be this meaningless for tracking significant changes they should at least name them or come up with some other system. Something that let's people get interested and involved in the project and excited about the new release.
Since when have version numbers been consistently meaningful across more than one project/program? Just do like everybody else and see a new version number as an indicator that there is something different from the last version. Version numbers ARE meaningless.
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Software versioning does not necessarily follow the decimal system.
It has not gone from "point two one to point two two".
It has gone from "dot twenty one to dot twenty two", which in standard software versioning terms means it is still on the original code base but has had extra features added.
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It's just an integer increment. 1, 2, 3, ..., 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on. And they do a major rewrite of some part of it every time.
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database (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they fix the database encoding in this one?
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[from his sig]
--
Boycott Hollywood during December 2009 [No DVD's for Christmas, no Christmas BlockBusters] Spread the word.
Why, might I ask? (I suppose my sig makes this question kind of ironic/dumb-sounding... What specifically have they done this time?)
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.
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Ah, yes, I had to do the "fix your database" thing yesterday. Based on the complexity of the guide, I'm guessing a lot of users will just wipe and reinstall everything, rather than attempt to go through that ridiculous manual process.
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Not those of us with wives that have enormous emotional investments in their collection of Jane Austen movies...
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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.
Not exactly. The various MythTV binaries are supposed to cleanly update any 0.21 database to 0.22. The character set conversion issue described on that page is due to the default MySQL settings as shipped with Gentoo.
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If you're using Gentoo, you might find this blog post interesting:
MythTV 0.22 & the database problem [cardoe.com]
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Instead of using the UTF8 character set that the mysql devs have requested, mythtv makes you force your mysql installation to use the latin1 character set. Nope they haven't fixed it- now they just blame the problem on whatever distros don't automatically force mysql into latin1. I had to change some config files and dump and reload my database to get it to work with the new version. And from what I have read I wouldn't wait for them to fix it - they don't believe they have a problem.
Well done, you've got it exactly wrong. 0.22 requires the server to be utf8.
I for one welcome... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been using MythTV for a bunch of years now, and I find it an absolute blast. It works on every PC I can find, and even on my work OSX laptop, which still lets me watch The It's Alive Show [theitsaliveshow.com] while I'm hacking away. It even eats the commercials, and does a better job with digital television signals. I can't wait for multirec support for my HDHomeRun.
If you haven't tried MythTV recently, check it out again.
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!
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Does it save me from commercials? (Score:2)
I wonder whether this new release has an option of stripping out commercials from recordings on request. Does it? On prior releases one had to download a script, then go through a number of hops to get it working.
I hope it does and though the site is slashdotted, I thank folks at MythTV for their good work.
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I wonder whether this new release has an option of stripping out commercials from recordings on request. Does it?
MythTV has had the ability to mark the positions of commercials in a piece of recorded content for ages now. It has not, and AFAIK, continues not to have the ability to automatically cut those commercials straight out of the recorded content. Why? Simple: The commercial stripper is far from perfect. It does a decent job most of the time, but it just as often screws up royally. So you reall
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Watching live TV is a pain now because of this !
Re:Does it save me from commercials? (Score:4, Informative)
Is it still same config nightmare? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep. Still as wonderful as ever!
[Next Next Next Next Next Submit.]
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Only if you have told it not to display the mouse cursor.
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Um, what's wrong with:
Sure, you need the X libraries on the MythTV backend, but there's no need to run X on it!
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Admittedly, I've never tried it with Xming. But it's fine with a Linux/Xorg/openssh X server on a LAN. It's slow across ADSL/WAN, though.
Could be one of the best HD DVRs out there... (Score:3, Interesting)
Given official Hauppage HD-PVR support, this could be one of the best high-def DVRs out there. Especially when you combine it with an HD Fury2 to convert it to HDMI...
I don't know why the HD-PVR is the only capture card capable of high-def (1080i). HD Fury2 adds HDMI (with HDCP). Sure, it's only 1080i, but how many other high-def capture solutions are out there? For just over $500, you can get one that does HDMI/HDCP as well.
(HD Fury2 converts HDMI to Component or VGA. Sure it's analog, but the HD-PVR only has component inputs).
Especially good for those of us in Canada, where we are forced to use the ultra-crappy cableboxes. (It's why people go to TiVo...).
Re:Could be one of the best HD DVRs out there... (Score:5, Insightful)
Get back to me when MythTV allows support for CableCard tuners.
MythTV has supported DVB-C CA modules for some time. Get back to me when someone releases CableCard drivers for Linux.
I'm waiting for... (Score:2)
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.
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Put camera on TV. Put mic in room somewhere. Use TV as display. Voila, video phone in your livingroom. That was the idea.
Too little, too late (Score:2)
But Myth has lagged too long and it has always looked godawful compared to its competors.
With the release of Windows 7, I have found that I am able to do all that I need and it looks a hell of a lot better. This latest release of Myth (which is
Boxee is great! (Score:2)
Perfect on a Mac Mini (+link to howto) (Score:3, Interesting)
I set up an SVN snapshot of Myth on a Mac Mini about six months ago. I wanted to save power, so the Mini runs both the backend and the frontend. If you like, you can see a full description [boonstra.org] of how I did it. (The guide is out of date in the sense that I resolved jumpy playback issues by reducing the priority of commercial-flagging jobs.)
It's been wonderful. I get full HD video and convenient scheduling. I've had exactly zero crashes, and the automatic commercial skipping has been very reliable (maybe one mistake every 5 or 10 shows). I also really enjoy the ability to watch TV on any computer in the house.
Right now, I'm working here and there on integration with Plex [plexapp.com] because I'd like to have all media in just one interface.
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err.. How do you breastfeed a keyboard layout?
woosh!
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Re:Too bad Linux is for faggots. (Score:5, Funny)
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Are you high? What drug is that? Where can I get some (note to the humorless feds: I am kidding)?
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mythtv website got /.ed it would seem.
Bugger.
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Why oh why is it so hard for people to stick .nyud.net onto urls so they get coral cached before submitting them to slashdot? You people are supposed to be smart!
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Cuz that makes the targeted sites miss out on ad revenue?
General rule manual fixes (Score:2)
Why oh why is it so hard to include an automatic URL converter into slashcode, at least for links in the summaries?
You'd think that, since slashcode can intelligently decide to show the domain in brackets, that it could also apply that nyud suffix...
General rule > manual fixes (Score:2)
...bad preview, I meant "General rule > manual fixes"...
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mythtv website got /.ed it would seem.
So you're saying that the site is mything?
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Given XBMC is not a DVR, and MythTV is, yes, those of us who don't steal our content still use MythTV.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's coming soon. It is even in one of their svn branches
If you use ubuntu you can test it out
https://launchpad.net/~henningpingel/+archive/xbmc [launchpad.net]
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steal
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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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?
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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.
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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."
Fuck that! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's basically a fancy VCR! There is nothing wrong or illegal with it... what is worrying though is that geeks are actually scared of exercising their rights, and are scared of legal repercussions by companies that are taking away your rights.
Why is it that when it comes to media people are scared to stand up for their rights, but when someone tries to 'limit free speech' all hell breaks loose... It's both a right, as is the right to be safe from unwarranted legal action that will bankrupt you whether you're right legally and/or morally.
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records transmitted content (as well as media shifting) which typical is not allowed
It's times like this that I wish "Wrong" were one of the moderation options. Because you are. You've heard of TiVo, right?
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:5, Informative)
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No innovation? My experience with Windows Media Center is that it has gotten to be useless, because it respects the copyright flag. It used to be that this meant that you cannot record HBO, but now, the big four are using it. Of course, my Media Center PC stopped working six months ago, and I was so dissatisfied, that I just replaced it with standard XP. So, in the past six months, it is possible that they have fixed the "we won't record anything but PBS" policy of theirs.
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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?)
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And as a consequence, it doesn't allow you to manipulate the recording schedule from your TV, resolve conflicts, view your guide data, find programs, or basically anything else that makes a DVR useful.
So as a basic FE, yes, XBMC could work. But it can't replace a proper Myth FE.
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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).
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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 mor
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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?)
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I'm still not getting all this PVR love. Esp as a lot of it comes from US posters, who have their lovely unlimited (or nearly unlimited) download caps.
Here is backward Oz, where most people live with 20-30 gigs a month, we download everything and nobody gives a rats --- about PVR.
Your paid off the house middle age types buy the officially sanctioned 'tivo' equivalent that is locked down by the provider. Everyone else downloads everything and / or gets it off the standard morning pass-the-usb-drive around ri
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Not trying to create flamebait, But honestly does anyone still use it.
Yes. It's buggy and configuration is horrendous, but now it's going the only real problem I have is that it tends not to update the database properly when a table changes in a new version (e.g. mythbuntu seems to assume that you don't have a root password on the MySQL database).
That said, I'm not going to be upgrading to 0.22 until the current season of my girlfrend's favorite shows finishes, because I'll be in trouble if she misses some due to software changes.
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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.
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).
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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.
I have one MythTV backend in my server closet, plus 2 frontend in my house. I never fiddle with the settings, and the server keeps running and recording the shows we tell it to. It never seem to crash.
Since you have the same crashing with SageTV and MythTV, I would be tempted to say that the only point in common those 2 have is : YOU.
I would not let you touch my setup
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I'm going through the same. I've been using Myth for maybe 3 or 4 years (starting with 0.20-beta something). It was relatively stable, but did crash once in a while. Mostly what was driving me insane is for the past few months, it would stop responding to the remote for a few minutes, then suddenly play back everything that just happened. So you'd hit fast-forward, and nothing would happen.. hit a couple more times... then suddenly a few minutes later, it would skip forward several times. Lirc was seeing th
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I'm going through the same. I've been using Myth for maybe 3 or 4 years (starting with 0.20-beta something). It was relatively stable, but did crash once in a while.
MythTV has changed a lot since then. I've really started with version 0.21 (must have been 3 years ago at least) SVN, and the only crashes I experienced were with the frontend because of OS configuration problems (OpenGL, proprietary drivers, ...). The important part, the backend, never failed me once.
Mostly what was driving me insane is for the past few months, it would stop responding to the remote for a few minutes, then suddenly play back everything that just happened. So you'd hit fast-forward, and nothing would happen.. hit a couple more times... then suddenly a few minutes later, it would skip forward several times. Lirc was seeing the commands in realtime, so I have no idea what the problem was. It was intermittent, and I never found a common thing that was happening at the same time.
Yes, this bug has been fixed, among tons of other ones.
Taking away constraints of OS/software, there is just no solution that leads to a great networked PVR system out there yet, in my opinion. To clarify, I'm not looking for a HTPC - I want a UI, consistent on every TV in my house, that lets me watch live TV (not that I ever do that), watch and/or schedule recordings (and have any available on any TV), watch DVDs, watch downloaded movies/shows, listen to music (both stored and streaming), and things like pictures and weather reports are kinda handy too.
That's not true, there is MythTV. It has changed a lot since even 0.21, and these aren't just cosmetic changes. MythTV 0.22 is really a true milestone.
Don
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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.
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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.
That doesn't chime with my experience of MythTV at all. It took about a day of solid fiddling to get core functionality working, and about a month of on-off work to get most of the other stuff working. It takes maybe half a day when I do a combined hard disc/distro/MythTV upgrade. The rest of the time, it JFWs. I run it on very modest hardware; a P4 2.53GHz (use
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I'd use it WITH XBMC once the Myth backend is a bit easier to configure. As it stands now I'm more than happy to DL my TV content - and yes I still have a damned cable sub with premiums and a TIVO attached to it. I just find that torrenting a show is easier and quicker. This is no more "theft" than running Myth with an ad removal program IMO.
Anyway, I understand the pain of setting up a Myth box having TRIED to do it myself. Maybe time to try again? Many folks I know are using Windows for much the same thin
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I'd use it WITH XBMC once the Myth backend is a bit easier to configure. As it stands now I'm more than happy to DL my TV content - and yes I still have a damned cable sub with premiums and a TIVO attached to it. I just find that torrenting a show is easier and quicker. This is no more "theft" than running Myth with an ad removal program IMO.
You do realize you're paying for cable TV /service/, right? You don't become rights holder to everything broadcast on cable TV just by having a cable TV subscription.
Re:does anyone still use it? (Score:4, Interesting)
While there is a legal distinction, is there really a moral distinction between recording the show on your own DVR versus downloading a copy someone else recorded?
My TiVo HD records Mythbusters every week, but around 6 hours later my media server goes out to the internet and grabs a copy of the same episode. I could just script a few tools like kmttg does to rip the content off the TiVo and transcode to a format of my preference, but why bother when someone else has already done it for me and at the same time cut the commercials for me?
Yes, technically what I'm doing is illegal, but morally I can not see any way this is any different than if I was to waste my time scripting and waste my CPU time processing my own recordings in to the same end result.
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I've been running it for ages without major problems. The only problem I have is every time I upgrade the kernel I need to rebuild the driver for my tuner, but that's no biggy - got that scripted - and it's nothing to do with MythTV per se.
Sure, it was a bitch to set up the first time, but since then it's been stable and awesome and having done it once, I'm pretty quick at setting it up for others.
I too use XBMC, but only as a quick and dirty way of using an Xbox as a frontend. It just doesn't come close as
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I still use it, and it's reliable, but the 40 hours it took me to get this older version working has left me so scarred I don't dare do anything that might destabilize it (like upgrading). For me the upgrade path will be buying a whole new computer and capture device and spending another three weeks configuring the new version while I still have the old one working.
Have they fixed the behavior yet that you have to completely shut down your backend service in order to run the setup program to do a channel sc
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A friend of mine - who is a linux/java dev full time - runs a myth box. He has wasted far too much of his life (his words not mine) debugging the POS, spent all of last saturday trying to figure out a timing related issue whereby the audio and video goes out of sync on dvds, he reckons that the issue is totally random and not consistently reproducible e.g. patching a simple debug output affected the threading enough so that it fixed it on two of his test machines, but not on others. People working on the is
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I don't know what you're doing to your myth installation, but mine has been pretty much zero maintenance between upgrades. The only glitches I've had for the last two years have been due to changes in digital broadcast MUX'es and the, eh, slight problems in the distributions audio subsystem.
Before that it was mostly issues with the TV cards and drivers, but I cant really blame Myth for that either. Going further back than that tho, (pre-0.20), yes, it was rather painful. I think I spent two months compiling
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Not trying to create flamebait ... due to the hideous complexities in keeping the damn thing running and the endless complaints from "she who must be obeyed" because MythTV box has once again died in the arse during her favourite POS drama show.
Not to create flamebait, but what are people doing that causes problems? Or what am I not doing, that I'm supposed to be doing, that has a side effect of ruining the system? I set up a terabyte-sized back end in the basement, back when a terabyte was several hundreds of dollars, and set up front ends on all my TVs and installed the front end software on all usable computers (like, 1GHz and faster CPU, etc), and it all "just works out of the box", hands off, no care needed, never the slightest problem. It
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Every day. One thing that is a problem for some of us is XvMD and CBS. They seem to do something with their 1080 that screws up playback. Anybody know whether VDPAU fixes that?
That isn't a bug in MythTV per se. The program has it's bugs but it does most of what I want. I agree that the audio jukebox is mighty ergonomically ugly. Assumes you'll just call up a playlist? You can elect to have the music player continue while you do other stuff -- so why not allow the same option with streaming music? Th
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Freevo is similarly stagnated, they've been working towards 2.0 for years. VDR handles the backend, but is lacking a nice 10-ft frontend. Moovida looks promising but is currently lacking a TV recording backend (combined with VDR, it may be the ideal solution).
I'm currently using Freevo, but starting to become frustrated at the broken plugins and limitations in its input (can't assign events to Ctrl key sequences which are generated by some of the Windows Media Centre oriented media keys on my wireless keybo
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
MythTV seems stagnated in development, even with this release, and seems bulky and awkward. Are there any other viable alternatives for home TV boxes/media boxes, that *don't* include a console in any way (xbox media centre, PS3, Wii, etc...)
I'm pretty happy with myth, but you are right, forward progress has slowed. To the point of ridiculousness.
For example, the devs recently refused to accept patches for the support of R5000-modified tuners [nextcomwireless.com] - tuners which are perfectly legal under the DMCA because they only modify the tuners that do not include access control (if the box has access control, typically 4C on firewire, the company will refuse to make the modification because of the DMCA.)
The reason the devs refused to accept the patches?
Assumpt [mythtv.org]
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It'll never get to 1.0, but it might get to .999... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Rip the kid's DVD to a NAS in ISO format, something like unRAID will work fine or whatever SMB thing you're willing to roll. Hell NFS might work too. Anyway, get the kid's stuff onto spinning storage. The load up XBMC on something small and cheap like an ASROCK ION 330 - run Ubuntu with VDPAU. Slap an MCE remote on it, plug it into the TV and stereo, be happy. I have done this and can access ALL of my DVDs. Instead of having racks lining my hallway the DVD are now in boxes and no one is the wiser as to the
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It may not have intelligent filtering, but MythTV's ability to easily schedule recordings using an EPG makes it trivial to speculatively record things that if one had to use discrete appliances one might not bother setting to record.
It's true that I'm watching more TV since I've had my MythTV box, but I'm pretty sure the quality of the TV I'm watching has improved. For a start, I've virtually eliminated my old habit of channel-surfing through hours and hours of the reality TV pap that's shown in peak hours