MythTV 0.23 Released

An anonymous reader writes "After six months of our new accelerated development schedule, MythTV 0.23 is now available. MythTV 0.23 brings a new event system, brand new Python bindings, the beta MythNetvision Internet video plugin, new audio code and surround sound upmixer, several new themes (Arclight and Childish), a greatly improved H.264 decoder, and fixes for analog scanning, among many others. Work towards MythTV 0.24 is in full swing, and has be progressing very well for the last several months. If all goes according to plan, MythTV 0.24 will bring a new MythUI OSD, a nearly rewritten audio subsystem capable of handling 24- and 32-bit audio and up to 8 channels of output, Blu-ray disc and disc structure playback, and various other performance, usability, and flexibility improvements."

Comments

Grow some gonads

[Luke has no name]

Man up and call a version 1.0! The new 'hip' thing to do, having version 0.x so you can excuse bugs as "Oh, it's just a beta" is bull mess.

Re:Grow some gonads

[managementboy]

Does it really matter to you that much what number the version has? The versioning in MythTV is just a rolling number stating a stable release. It does not state that it is beta or unstable or anything else. If it makes you happy call it 9.10 or 1.0 for all it matters.

0.23 = Stable version as of 10th of May 2010.
0.23-fixes = Stable version + all backported fixes as of the moment you download the code from svn.

Re:Grow some gonads

[Anonymous Coward]

Like I said, "classic passive-aggressive "tactic" for open source products to avoid any kind of responsibility". If you dare to give any kind of criticism at all, this is how you are treated. It's always "shut up or help", let's all ignore our actual users who are just trying to make it just a little bit easier for themselves.

Re:Grow some gonads

[petes_PoV]

Don't be too hard on Myth TV. After all it's only some guys hobby, that's outgrown itself. If they want to keep it in a state where they can play around with the code, rather than entering the world of professional standards and expectations then that's their business. It does however raise one helluva red flag for people who want / need / expect a product that comes with proper support and can be relied on.

Re:Grow some gonads

[jedidiah]

What version number the developers choose to use is really the least important thing possible here.

Even MCE gets flack for being too complicated. So overselling expecations is probably a really stupid idea.

Re:MERTON FROM CHATROULETTE SAYS!

[JackieBrown]

I don't usually waste my time with these trolls. The post is for any mods that have not read the faq and are wasting their mod points with this trash rather than on legitimate posts.

Leave it to the editors to down-mod these stupid posts since they are obvious trolls and the editors have unlimited mod points. In fact, based on the faq, I imagine how that is how we are suppose to do it.

I prefer to spend my time modding up people.

Do Editors Moderate?

The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them. .....

The editors tend to find crapfloods and moderate them down: a single malicious user can post dozens of comments, which would require several users to moderate them down, but a single admin can take care of it in seconds. This tends to remove the obvious garbage from the discussion so that the general population can use their mod points to determine good. Otherwise, a few crapfloods could suck a lot of moderator points out of the system and throw things out of whack.

MythTV rant

[daid303]

MythTV is a mess. I used 0.21 for a while, and it took me quite a while to configure right, the scanning for channels crashed, backend crashed from time to time. The UI is not friendly for a media player.
I looked under the hood and quickly ran away, database is a mess, codebase is huge.

I wanted a few simple things:
-1 machine, which can record TV shows and watch them later
-Play other media files
-Have a web interface to choose what to record

MythTV with MythWeb and MythVideo should be able to do this all, but I never got the other media to work. That with the crashing backend, unfriendly configuration tool and stupid frontend UI. And it has no 'overlap in 2 shows' option, if 2 shows follow eachother on the same channel, why not save the overlapping time in both files? If the 2nd show starts early and I have watched and deleted the first show then I mis the first part of the 2nd show. Totally pissed me off.

Then I found XBMC, which does a wonderful job at playing media files. But doesn't do any recording. I already had tv_grab_nl_py for guide data, my TV tuner is a simple V4L device that gives an MPEG stream, so 1000 lines of PHP code later I had a daemon that records TV shows, a webinterface where I can select what to record. With thumb generation, reencoding. Basicly I replaced the whole of MythTV with 1000 lines of php and XBMC (in my case) which is running stable for months now.

Re:MythTV rant

[TenMinJoe]

It's a shame that you had a bad experience with MythTV. For the record, to provide some balance:

I have been using MythTV continually since 0.14, back in 2004. It's always been hard to get it set up in the first place, but this has improved over the years. Anyway, once it *is* set up, it's just fantastic, and I'd never settle for a lesser system (e.g. retail set-top-box) now that I'm used to the power of MythTV.

With power, comes complexity, but I think it's worth it. I love that I can tell it, e.g. "Record this show at any time, on any channel, as long as it's not an episode I've recorded before, and try to prioritise the shows that do NOT have a sign-language interpreter (but record those if it's absolutely necessary due to conflicts with other things I want to record)".

Re:MythTV rant

[daid303]

Does it record to two files if the shows overlap (due to begin/end padding)? Or does it still decide the two shows conflict, and records only one, or records both but only one partial?
Does mythweb has a record button on the shedule overview? or do I still need to go to the show page, change the state to record, save, and then go back to the shedule?
Does it play DVDs out of the box?
Does it allow me find&copy the recorded files to another machine so I can watch them on the road? (searching trough the hashed filenames is no fun)
(Looks like I missed a few)

My needs just don't match with the priorities of the MythTV team. Commercial flagging doesn't work here in the netherlands, don't need repeated shows, reencoding options are tough to setup, I don't need scheduling from the frontend, I don't need multiple machines.
Basicly, MythTV is great for a power user, but is really sucks for the basic user.

Re:MythTV rant

[juissi]

Does it record to two files if the shows overlap (due to begin/end padding)?

Yes. You can create up to five virtual tuners per tuner card, which will solve this problem.

Does mythweb has a record button on the shedule overview?

This I don't know. I would check, but my Myth box is not connected to the Internet right now.

Does it play DVDs out of the box?

Yes, at least for me it does. (Mythbuntu 10.04)

Does it allow me find&copy the recorded files to another machine so I can watch them on the road? (searching trough the hashed filenames is no fun)

Sometimes I have copied an episode or a movie straight from the Mythweb interface to some other computer.

Re:MythTV rant

[vlm]

I suggest you try 0.23 as most of your concerns have been addressed.

Except for the hardware problem that makes his backend crash. I know its a hardware problem, not software, because I've been doing what he claims can't be done with the same software, for many years on multiple sets of hardware.

Most likely outcome is he upgrades the software on the crashy hardware, notice it still crashes, and post to slashdot again that the myth software doesn't work.

Re:worth upgrading?

[ladybugfi]

Two weeks ago I was running Mythbuntu 9.04 with MythTV 0.21. I upgraded first to 9.10 with myth 0.22 and then immediately to 10.04 with myth 0.23.

I was very surprised how smoothly the upgrade process went. All I had to do after the upgrades were to fix DVD udev rules and reconfigure the 5.1 audio. Nothing got majorly broken.

That said, I'm having some LiveTV stability issues with 0.23, which nobody else seems to be experiencing. I also had an issue with DVD mount crashing the mythtv frontend but that has now been fixed in the daily auto-builds.

Re: recording cable

[colinnwn]

Do you have analog cable, or digital cable that your non-cablecard TV can tune to without a cable box? If so, MythTV can record it. Even if you have to use a cable box, MythTV can record the composite or component out on the way to the TV. There's pretty much no way a cable company can legally prevent you from recording non-encrypted, non-premium channels right now (by law that is required to include free to air TV stations). And there are ways with the cable box to record premium channels.