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Preview the New MythTV User Interface
Tombstone-f sent in a cool update on a project that I continue to keep an eye on. MythTV has become a dominant force in the do-it-yourself media-mega-box space, so any improvements to the UI matter significantly. "One of the biggest new features of the next version of MythTV (version .22) will be its new user interface. This new interface will offer many new features to MythTV, including animation, better interactivity, and faster and easier development for themers and developers alike." I think it still has a ways to go to compete with some of the more mainstream PVR boxes in terms of minimalism and good use of whitespace, but hopefully the improvements will get more people into the door.
It is a hacker's TIVO. I have tried it and had nothing but difficulty in getting things the way I wanted it. I spent hours...not to mention that ATI drivers in linux just suck.
I ended up with XP and SageTV. That product took a total of 20 minutes to install and configure (including my huge media library) and not hours to get nothing like mythtv.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Let me correct that for you.
If I had a no-name brand capture card from some fly-by-night taiwanese company, this might make sense, but there is NO excuse for one of the two big players in the industry not supporting their hardware on Linux .
Myth shouldn't be struggling to support hardware. You think Microsoft have to reverse engineer and hack away at every card to make it work with their media center? The folks at ATI should be making sure something like a capture card works properly on linux with mythtv.
For anyone considering SageTV, it has it's own problems and gotchas. Having to pay for it would really piss me off.
No, Microsoft sits down for a bit and thinks about how they can best support a particular kind of hardware. They sometimes call up the relevant hardware manufacturers and say "hey, helps up define the API for this." After a few months they come away with an API that clearly defines what they hardware manufacturer is responsible for, what Microsoft is responsible for, what the basic functionality is. Then they stick to it. They don't change shit on a whim because "it's better this way." Thus the hardware vendors don't have to rewrite their drivers every few months just to provide the same functionality they had in the first place.
True, sometimes Microsoft fucks this process up and the standard just isn't right (wrong functionality, wrong prediction of what the future holds for a particular technology.) But quite often they're right, or at least right enough.
Linux might get more buy in if hardware vendors didn't have to commit to a full time employee rewriting drivers to suit the whims of some hobbyist on a caffeine and sugar bender.