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Freevo Developers Interviewed
prostoalex writes "O'Reilly's LinuxDevCenter features Freevo, 'a media platform that brings together various applications for video recording and playback.' They interview the developers, and talk about the current plans for the project. Freevo is not just a standalone product, it's a platform to which other developers, interested in home media on Linux, can plug into."
This is because your average customer of this software and equipment doesn't realize exactly what it can do. I think there is going to be a backlash when people figure out that all DRM means to them is the inability to play a media file. I'm still waiting to hear about an actual feature or benefit this gives to the end user.
I'm probably just rehashing what has been said before but it is difficult to see how digital piracy can be eliminated.
The only way is for music and video to be safe digitally is if non drm formats don't exist. As long as they do it will always be trivial to convert between the two. Even if the conversion process is difficult, you only need to do it once.
I have faith that as long as non drm formats are legal consumers will (after trial and error) favour the format that "just works" and never causes any hassles.
Depends on what you want to do. If you want a media center to handle video and audio files then Freevo sounds like a good solution.
But for me.. sorry.. Freevo is useless. If they're going to play off the "TiVo" name by calling it Freevo it should be able to handle timeshifting of live TV.
If I cant pause/rewind/fast-fwd live TV then I'm not touching it. If they ever figure out how to add that functionality then I'll take a look. They're currently "working on it" but they've been doing that since I looked into it a year ago.
It seems that Freevo would be far easier to modify and write plugins for than Myth (which mostly written in C).
Probably, Myth is written mostly in C++ though. The code is a horrible hack job though. Written by a college student. Not that all college student projects suck, it's just that usually the inexperienced create poor designs initially.
Even the creators of Freevo claim they did not know Python before they started.
This is not a good thing either. Same problem as above.
Overall, MythTV looks a lot better and has more features because more people have been working on it. The code is often buggy and hard to hack on. However, it does work resonably well and I've been happily using MythTV for over a year with no major issues.
The ratio of people to cake is too big