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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.
I just dumped Mythbuntu and switched to XBMC Media Center. I don't actually have a TV signal, just use the machine for DVDs and recorded movies, music and pictures across the LAN. And for those purposes, I found it so awkward to work with as to be unusable. Particularly the interface for managing your music collection.
This article seems to focus entirely on the aspects relating to managing TV signals and shows. Is there anything in this new interface that might make me want to switch back?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The whole thing is such a PITA to set up and keep going without something or other packing up (usually the programme guide) that it makes it worthwhile paying £60 for Windows MCE just to save your sanity.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Huh? What installer? This is MythTV. It has no installer (other than a makefile). If you are thinking of Mythbuntu, Mythdora, Knoppmyth, or something like that, the guys on the MythTV team have little or nothing to do with any of that.
There are other MythTV distros than Mythbuntu (Knoppmyth, Mythdora) that you might want to try if you find the Muthbuntu installer difficult. That said, Mythbuntu 8.04 was the first version of MythTV that I got my wireless card to work without fuss (Atheros based), and with that one point, made the install heaps easier than previous versions.
Actually, this isn't a minor update. It is a significant rewrite of the user interface that has been in the works for years (the ticket for this new UI was opened in June 2005). However, this isn't something that is going to be so significant to the end user directly. A lot of what you'll see come out of this will be subtle. The bigger benefit of this is for developers. Both code developers and theme developers. I have a bit of experience doing both for MythTv, and from what I've seen this is going to be a cool change. It's not news for TV watcher, but I think it is for nerds (or at least some of us).
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.
That's what came to mind when I looked at it. Most of what they were doing seemed like adding thumbnails and transition effects all over the UI. I usually turn off thumbnails in any UI I use because each one tends to require one or more disk seeks to retrieve, so scrolling lists becomes sluggish and clunky. As for transitions, IMO they just add delays.
What I'd rather see is making an alternative UI for those using a computer interface (or logging in from another machine) in addition to the current TV remote oriented UI. If all of the configuration could be done through an app similar to the KDE control center, that would make MythTV much easier to set up, manage and understand. The TV-oriented interface is just too constraining to effectively present many of the complex concepts in the configuration options.
(Of course, I really can't complain since I'm not pitching in to improve things myself. I'm just putting my feedback out there in case anyone finds it useful.)
After my parents saw my Mythbuntu box with a 'professional' theme, they were interested. But, there are just a few issues and such when things like running out of hard drive space or log files that aren't limited in size grow and end up bringing down the system until someone troubleshoots it and fixes it.
I think visually, using a theme like Pear-TV (but replacing the pear with a mythbuntu/mythTV logo) would be all the improvement they need to make with the user experience in normal operation. It works just fine.
But it's the boring bug fixes, confusing menus and sub-menus, and coming out and approving hardware as mythTV-compatible that would make it a better product.
And I would like to see more guides on how to go from a pile of money to a working, functional MythTV box. I hope some are out there, but it would help a lot of people I think.
I'm only worried about whether it's easy to install. When I was looking for making a PVR a couple years ago, I tried with Myth. I really did. I tried for days reading through the docs, trying to configure MySQL and set up databases. Trying to get my TV Tuner to work correctly. In the end, I downloaded a trial of SageTV and had everything up and running in 20 minutes. Haven't looked back since. Best $80 I ever spent. I use open source when possible, but not when it's that much more work than the alternative.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I used Mythbuntu to install my current setup. It was as easy as anything else has been in Windows. Boot from CD, answer some questions, let it copy files and reboot. Then tell it that it's OK to install the binary NVidia driver and that all worked fine. I did have to tweak the XOrg.conf a little, but I understand that the new release of XOrg doesn't even require the conf file now. And my changes were more to make the TV output a little more how I like it than anything else, it worked fine out of the box. Then I told Myth what my tuner device was (HDHomeRun) and it found it and did a channel scan. Then I gave it my login info to Schedules Direct and it was up and running. Probably about an hours work from CD boot to working Myth install.
Note that I did pick my hardware for Linux and Myth compatibility. I knew that's what I was going to be using the hardware for, so I chose accordingly. It's still a hacker's TiVo, but I hacked my TiVo boxes, and Myth was easier than that.
Have you checked the MythTV Wiki for your HDTV card, the MythTV Wiki for your Remote Control, oh yeah and the MythTV Wiki for for Graphics Card? All three are listed on the Wiki, looks quite well supported to me.
Perhaps he's talking about mythtv-setup.
df -h
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.
I built my 1st Myth system by hand without one of the new "nice" installers. Using apt-get and Jarod's guide. I got 95% of functionality working in one evening on the first try. Then proceeded pulling my hair out for 3 months to get the $@%ing remote to work. Totally existing P3/450. Only new hardware was the PVR-350.
Getting it working should be simple. Making it "wife friendly," maybe not so much.
About the remote control, that (like the installer) has nothing to do with the myth team. For remotes, you are looking for lirc support (the linux standard system for IR input). Once lirc supports it, myth will work with it just fine.
As for the video, I don't know about that particular card, but I know a lot of the All in Wonder cards have notoriously poor driver support under linux. If yours is one of those, I don't know how you expect a miracle when ATI would provide neither an adequate driver nor the necessary specs for an open source version to be created.
I made a mythbox for less than 200 dollars. The point is to buy compatible hardware from the start, don't blame the myth team though, it's hard to write drivers for devices that they get no support at all from the manufacturer. They do what they can and they do it well.
Like all things if you want the all the bells and whistles you have to get the best hardware. I have MythTV working on an old PIII box. I think I spent $200 and most of that was for the Hauppage TV card. Bear in mind, I can't play games and do a lot of the nifty features. But it served the basic purpose of a DVR on my 27" CRT. Now if I wanted digital and the best picture, I would have to drop some money. It still works but I've upgraded homes and now have a networked system. But the old one is in a closet and would be functional had I not used the HD in another machine.
So you're complaining that MythTV doesn't work well when you used cards (ATI) that do not have very good Linux support. When I built my DVR, I researched the type of card to use. By far, everyone said not to use ATi as there wasn't very much support. Not that some people couldn't get it to work, but that the support was lacking. There are other cards that you could have used. I would say rather it's a testament to Linux that it works at all.
To be fair, the problem is Linux doesn't have much support for your cards. The problem is not exclusive to MythTV.
For years now, Linux people have complained about ATI support. Until recently they have not helped the community much. If they had released a spec, an API, etc. Instead, all the work to date has been done by reverse engineering. nVidia has done a little more and in fact, nVidia has released binary drivers.
Now I don't mean to sound rude, but you're complaining that the free help with ATI you have gotten from the Linux community hasn't been enough. You're complaining that all the time and work these people have done for you without asking, without thanks, without compensation isn't adequate. Well, open source software has a solution for you. Learn C and write your own driver.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
MythTV is honestly a joke. (N.B. I've been running a mythtv box for 3 years)
For TV/PVR functionality, it's great. Want to watch a DVD or, gods forbid, a video file? Prepare for an exercise in pain.
Want to use some of the features it boasts (integrated emulators, image slideshow, etc...)? Suffer, worm!
Want to use an EXTREMELY COMMON remote(MCE)? Prepare to spend the better part of the evening manually remapping the buttons with vim. (I still have instances where I can't navigate DVD menus because of some weirdness on what is considered "up" and "down")
And if you DARE to want to record off of a non-tuned interface (RCA, e.g.) well, it will eat your face and lock you in the closet with a shoggoth.
But unfortunately, for TV, it is the best out there. :P
I am a long time XBMC user. I used it pre-fork when it was called XBMP (xbox media player). I am also a MythTV user.
I would love to see MythTV completely drop the entire frontend and have MythTV be only for backend recording. If you want that old crappy mythfrontend stuff around make it a separate project altogether and let users choose between mythfrontend or XBMC.
One thing I hate about myth's front end is the use of a DB for music or videos. Why can't you browse a NFS share, samba mount, or just a local directory live? You wanna build a DB so you can sort by artist, genre or whatever...fine. Do that, but let me just browse my files.
Seriously...drop the crap, write a good plugin for XBMC and be done with it.
Not trying to knock MythTV. It rocks as a recorder and has an awesome web interface...but thats about it. Playback is pretty lousy. XBMC is an awesome at everything it does.
I think you're confusing the stupidity that the "We're ATI, Of Course We Have Drivers, Which Version of Windows XP Do You Have?" crowd with the "We're Linux, Please Just Release Some Damn Specs So We Can Support The Hardware Already" crowd. There's a difference, you know.
Remember, that address again is Investor.Relations@amd.com.
You should look into the Live CD versions to test out if you want to proceed. Many people are happy enough with them. KnoppMyth, MythDora, Mythbuntu.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Actually, the ATI HDTV Wonder is compatible with mythTV. In fact, the HDTV Wonder works better with MythTV than it does with Windows (since it natively supports QAM decoding, but is crippled in the windows drivers).
I will admit that it took me a long time to setup my HDTV Wonder, but that was primarily because I was impatient in the channel scanning process (and would cancel it before it found any channels).
The troll with karma.
It's worth remembering you only need a client in the living room.
I'd imagine you quickly end up with hundreds of GB of video, so you want some kind of RAID to protect from drive failure. That means multiple disks which tends to mean bigger box, more heat more fans and more noise.
Personally I'm using xbmc not having much need to record live TV. I run it on an eeebox that I picked up for $300. It's tiny. It draws 20 watts, is practically silent, runs 24x7 and can play up to 720P. It has DVI out so can be hooked up to HDMI and has optical audio out if you want to connect the sound to your amp.
It fills all my needs. If I was deploying Myth, I'd be looking for a tower with plenty of cooling to live in a cupboard and use something like an eeebox as the client.
-1: Wrong
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Some people have gotten them to work but support for ATi on Linux is lacking. Before anyone complains about the huge cost of getting a new card, you can get a cheap nVidia (FX5 or higher) for as little as $30.
Don't wipe out your system just yet wondering if it will work. Use a live CD and see if it work at all. If it doesn't, you can eject the disc and reboot without any harm to your system. Currently, MythDora, Mythbuntu, and KnoppMyth are the top versions
For basic DVR functionality installing one the previous versions mentioned above is easy enough for most people. To get all the features, you might have to invest in some hardware. To get a networked system, you're going have to know more about Linux. For digital OTA HD TV, you need a digital OTA tuner and a video card with at least DVI out. If you are staying on analog cable and TV, you can get it running on very cheap hardware. Right now using a digital cable tuner is not fully supported as these boxes don't always have API documentation.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Linux doesn't need to have ATI commit to a full time employee for writing drivers. Just the same level of access to the specs like the 5+ employees writing the windows drivers.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"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 Linux not supporting hardware from one of the two big players in the industry."
There is plenty of excuse. The biggest players in the industry tend to be the ones that don't give a damn about Linux and hence refuse to provide documentation. ATI TV cards are notorious in this regard - The AMD purchase/merger seems to be helping in this regard, but ATI cards (not just TV cards but graphics in general) had a very long track record of poor Linux support due to lack of manufacturer cooperation.
Maybe you should've given your business to a vendor that actually cares about Linux and has even given sample hardware to select Linux driver/application developers for driver development and testing. Hauppauge is a good place to start - they don't officially support Linux but are VERY cooperative as far as giving driver developers documentation, support, and even in some cases early access to new hardware (such as with the HD-PVR 1212).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_HDTV_Wonder
Instructions fail for 8.10.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_Remote_Wonder_II
Again, instructions fail for 8.10.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_All-in-Wonder_HowTo_(English)
All the page says is "will not work, will not record."
How do you call that "supported"???
All the responses posted to this one - especially those labeled "insightful" have themselves been either flamebait or ridiculous, while this one got the bad break of an early mod-down by a linux partisan who can't face the real problems within Linux.
Linux, at its core, is NOT user friendly. You can whine and complain all you like, but when normal hardware requires a ton of command-line stuff to push through and a script from a wiki site that may or may not work on YOUR particular distribution (and there's no standard between the distros) it is a LINUX problem that doesn't go away just because Linux people shout "we hate Micro$oft" really loudly.
The Linux community HAS to get beyond the idea that people ought to be building boxes specifically to run Linux. Parent post is a GREAT example of this: someone who's run a windows-based PVR for years, who gives Linux and MythTV a try, and finds out it doesn't work right.
This is the kind of person the Linux crowd is trying to convert to their cause, and yet what do they do when he gives them a shot? When he comes for help, does the Linux community help? Do they deal honestly and openly and say "yeah, we're having some trouble with this hardware right now, we're working on it and sorry it didn't work right"?
No.
He gets an insulting and completely undeserved "-1 Flamebait" moderation, he gets a dick posting a bunch of wiki links to old instructions that don't work on the latest distribution any more, and he gets spat on by a bunch of jerks who insult him for "buying the wrong hardware."
One actually insinuates that he's part of some giant DRM cabal simply for making a purchase of certain hardware years ago.
THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE LINUX COMMUNITY. Instead of being honest and open, instead of working on solutions, instead of having the simple integrity necessary to admit that their stuff didn't work and may need to be improved, they shout "heretic" and "burn it at the stake" whenever someone from "the outside" comes in... and these are exactly the kind of people they will one day need to win over if Linux is to succeed and get out of being a niche thing.
You got that?
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
Uh, sorry, the problem isn't the GUI. The problem is the extremely painful installation and configuration process.
Until there are easier methods to get tuners configured, finding the right firmware files (oh, sure, go grab the OEM Windows installer, extract a binary blob, place it somewhere under /usr/local, edit /etc/config/foo$, run insmod, watch it fail, retry with a different driver version, etc.), and then configure the dbms by hand, etc. it won't gain much acceptance. Add in major lag between remote clicks and seeing the response on screen (rendering cable guides somewhere painful and useless because the Myth display lags behind somewhere between 500ms and 750ms on a PVR-150 card) and you've got a recipe for failure.
I have a lot of patience in dealing with hardware configuration, but Myth is just too painful to spend any time on.
Improve the installation/configuration process. Include a proper compatibility list - and keep it updated.
Also where are component or HDMI input options? HDCP/DRM be damned, we need a high-def PVR option. Screw Tivo or cableco DVRs where the recordings are tied to that EXACT box. If the box dies, so does access to recordings on an external HDD.
That's not to say the new GUI isn't nice, nor to underplay the importance of GUI design. It's just that the GUI is not Myth's problem in gaining mass acceptance.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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."
Man I really wish there was a '-1 Just Plain Factually Incorrect'.
MythTV feels like using a computer to watch TV. Why does ther have to be so many menus and things? Look at VDR for a lesson on how to do a GUI.
I've read pretty much all of this thread and so far as I can tell, there is a serious misunderstanding going on here and everyone is now so pissed off that it's hopeless. Here's how I read it:
You *already had* some PVR gear that has been working fine for a number of years.
Some folks occasionally recommend that you try a mythtv solution. So you try it and it fails because of known hardware compatibility problems. Whether these incompatibilities were known by those making recommendations or not is debatable.
This causes you to feel that linux is an epic failure at pvr's.
lather rinse repeat.
Is that a fair assessment of the situation?
Assuming so, and moving on.
So you are correct, IMO, to be upset at people recommending you spend a bunch of money to get the linux solution to work for you. You already have a working solution with already-paid-for hardware. There is no reason for you to spend money just to *try out* another solution.
Likewise, those involved with the linux solution are correct to be upset with you for expecting known incompatible hardware to work properly without serious hoop jumping. They try to maintain reasonably accurate compatibility lists and are rightly annoyed when someone bothers them about their incompatible stuff not working.
The solution is this: In the future, if you decide to upgrade the hardware you might think about choosing hardware that is known to work with *both* products. Then you can actually try out the mythtv solution and make a real comparison and decide which you like, or which suits you better.
But, until someone with authority (like a driver dev) says that your stuff definitely works with linux, don't bother trying because you'll only be frustrated. Meanwhile, you should take a deep breath and stop being overtly inflammatory towards people who are probably genuinely, if misguidedly, trying to help.
hopefully I've provided a balanced approach to this silliness between all of you and we can move on... heh...
man, I feel like mold.