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MythTV 0.22 Released
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."
uhhh...in case you haven't figured it out, that's kind of the roots of slashdot. But as a feminist, I certainly agree that they don't necessarily focus on the right issues, such as gender roles in computing, programming languages designed by women, breastfeeding keyboard layouts, etc.
Balmer, quit kidding around. Don't you have work to do?
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Given XBMC is not a DVR, and MythTV is, yes, those of us who don't steal our content still use MythTV.
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.
I have had it running via knoppmyth for a year, which I believe ran Myth .20 and just last week upgraded to Mythbuntu running a .22 pre-release version. It works great as a DVR, and the recent upgrades and changes have made it even better. I don't have many issues at all, and really enjoy the web frontend that lets me adjust my recordings, files, settings and schedules. A few friends have Windows media PCs and one is looking hard at switching over because their machine has gotten no innovation in the past two years while Myth has continued to improve.
Did they fix the database encoding in this one?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Do I still have to f**k around with 100 combinations/restarts of Qt, ffmpeg, XVideo, XvMC, libmpeg2, xv-blit, opengl, xlib, xshm, directfb, directx ...all whilst not being able to see the f**king mouse cursor and having to hit 'next' five times just to change one setting?
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).
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).
Speak before you think
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!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Use a dedicated distro and all the hard work is done for you. Such as LinHES for example.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
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
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if XBMC is or not, but Mediaportal sure is, and Mediaportal + XP = about the easiest to use homebrew DVR I've ever tried. Like the above poster I tried MythTV and just couldn't keep it running for any length of time, and Mediaportal is easy peasy and so far pretty stable.
Oh it is Open Source too, if you care about playing with the code.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Recording transmitted content has been a much used fair use right since the invention of the tape deck... And since then the industry has complained about, and tried to take away that right by imposing limits on each new technology that does basically the same.
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.
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.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.