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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."
Balmer, quit kidding around. Don't you have work to do?
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
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.
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
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.