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Mythtv

76K views 397 replies 31 participants last post by  mwalma 
#1 ·
Mythtv has announced version 0.22 release candidate 1 is now available. Hopefully all goes well and a stable 0.22 will come out shortly.

The release notes are here.
 
#5 ·
The Terra theme replaces GANT as the default theme. It looks pretty slick.
A perfect example of style over substance
(pretty, but only barely functional).

Sideways scrolling menus.. limits the number of items shown at once to no more than 5, and the brain has a difficult time following them as one scrolls. Not suitable for long lists, like the 100 or so recordings currently in /var/lib/mythtv/recordings.

A vertical menu, on the other hand, can easily hold 10-20 items on a HDTV screen, and is much easier to mentally parse during scrolling.

Ugh.
 
#8 ·
Wow, is this ever bad, or what?

I just installed Mythbuntu-9.10-beta, with MythTV-0.22-xxxx.

The default Mythbuntu "theme" should be called "slowbuntu". Tons of mysterious 2-second pauses between screens, a font too huge to be useful on a widescreen, and only 3-4 lines of text on most menus.

Ugh, and Ughly!

Fortunately, some of the other themes are (barely) usable without most of those flaws.
Style over substance to the extreme.

Analog recording/playback is still not functional with the 950Q, despite blog postings from the driver dude claiming that it ought to be.

Other stuff just barely works, but crashes.

No way to stop a recording in progress.. the methods from all earlier Myths simply don't exist in 0.22.

Off to a great first impression, this one isn't.
Looking forward to Myth-0.23 now.

Cheers
 
#9 ·
I have not tried mythbuntu 9.10-beta yet, but I upgrade my ubuntu box from 9.04 to 9.10-beta. Nothing but problems. Over 22 errors and rising. Also I don't have my GUI anymore. I may just format my box and reload 9.04 or just wait for the stable 9.10 release later this month. All that to say, it could be the ubuntu side of mythbuntu giving you some of the problems.
 
#10 ·
it could be the ubuntu side of mythbuntu giving you some of the problems.
No, it's all self-inflicted by MythTV-0.22rc. Apparently that's the "new design" which has taken them the last year to implement.

Mostly they seem to be copying the disasterous early KDE4 methodology, which makes sense given that they've moved their stuff to the KDE4/QT libs.

I suppose it can be made to work, given enough effort by each individual end user. Again. Just like KDE4.
 
#11 ·
mlord said:
The default Mythbuntu "theme" should be called "slowbuntu". Tons of mysterious 2-second pauses between screens, a font too huge to be useful on a widescreen, and only 3-4 lines of text on most menus.
You follow the mythtv-users list, don't you? First, you're using a release candidate and there have been several people with UI response problems. Seems some have been solved by fixing permissions on directories used for caching UI elements. Others needed to install a missing font. (No firsthand knowledge here; I'm waiting for .22-fixes to stabilize in a few months.)

The whole point of .22 is a total re-write of the UI code to expand what can be done in the themes. The themes have to be created now that the UI code is settling down--although there are clearly bits that are now going to go into .23. Give the themers a chance to do their thing or stop bitching and roll your own!

Craig
 
#15 · (Edited)
OK, .22 isn't solely about UI...

From the Release Notes for .22RC1

Major Features


* MythTV UI ported to new MythUI library with all new capabilities
* VDPAU Video renderer and decoder for hardware accelerated playback of H.264, MPEG-1/2, WMV, and VC-1
* DVB-S2 support
* Support for the Hauppauge HD-PVR
* HDHomeRun Multirec support
* New channel scanner
* All new default UI theme and OSD theme
* Mythvideo now has season/episode support, fanart, banners, screenshots and much, much more
* Added Automatic Prioritization to the scheduler which uses watching behavior to automatically increase priority of shows that are watched close to their recording timeslot over shows that are delayed for longer periods of time. See [16477] for details until the wiki page is populated.


Major changes


* Windows port improvements
* Mythbrowser now uses webkit and has no dependencies on KDE libs
* MythMusic has fewer external dependencies
* MythTV switches from Qt 3.4 to Qt 4.4 libraries [16790] (No changes affecting end-user!)
* MythPhone has been dropped
 
#18 ·
There were some commits to trunk today that apparently fix a lot of the 'pauses' between screens, at least to the point of making the delays less apparent. 0.22 was about getting the UI presentation stuff done, 0.23 I believe will be about fixing the UI performance.
 
#19 ·
From one of the mailing list threads:

Ideally, the gap between .22 and .23 will be much, much
shorter than ever before, though I will refrain from making any
promises.
Looks like they are trying to get 0.22 out because there has been such a long delay since the last version. They probably want to get the new MythUI out into the wild to do a general improvement, and then do some clean-up and touch-ups in 0.23.
 
#20 ·
From that very thread:
the archtypical MythTV developer: said:
Thought I would share with you all that I am working on a new theme that I hope to have done for .23.

The theme is going to be released under a fairly restrictive license that disallows copying or derivative works, so I'm not anticipating this ever being distributed with Myth. 2) I'm using proprietary fonts that I cannot/will not distribute. I will provide links for where you can purchase the fonts (about $15) but will leave it up to the user to procure them.

.. it's fun to be a part of something lots of people in the community use.
Sounds really encouraging as a future direction for the project.
 
#22 ·
I'm not sure I follow your logic. What is in that thread that would cause you to not use MythTV? It was a thread about a theme that turned into a discussion about 'free' software and licensing. None of which was really talking about MythTV specifically.
 
#25 ·
For those curious (and with a lot of idle time on their hands), the full thread is here.

I think this is a tempest in a teacup. It is a THEME at issue. The theme-developer was using a font that is not freely available. He felt the theme wouldn't look right with another font substituted so he's employed a more-restrictive license. He has ALSO done at least 2 other themes that are available under a very wide-open license.

Some people need to untwist their undergarments.

Craig
 
#26 ·
That "theme developer" is also the head MythTV Dev/Tyrant, so what he thinks and does matters 1000X more than anyone else there.

Back on topic.. I sync'd my test drive with latest Mythbuntu last night, and some things appear to work now.

The themes are still mostly unfit for humans (very poor WAF), but the 2-second pauses are gone.

The HVR-950Q works in analog, but no sound in LiveTV. There is sound from it in a "proper" recording, though, despite identical "Recording Profiles" for the two.

But enabling analog killed the digital side of the 950Q, so we'll just call that an unusable work in progress. It'll likely get resolved about the time that analog completely disappears from OTA here, in August 2011. :)

I stilll cannot find a way to stop a recording in progress, other than by killing the backend. The nice little menu we used to have in the media->recordings screen for that is AWOL.

Other stuff might work well enough to give this a try on real hardware soon, though. Maybe in a few weeks, after enough others scream about the low WAF and other wrinkles. ;)

Cheers
 
#33 ·
The HVR-950Q works in analog, but no sound in LiveTV. There is sound from it in a "proper" recording, though, despite identical "Recording Profiles" for the two.

But enabling analog killed the digital side of the 950Q
I refreshed my test install again last night, and the latest Mythbuntu now has what appears to be a perfectly working HVR-950Q implementation.

Whoo-hoo! :)

It switches back and forth between analog/digital, and they both seem to work fine, in LiveTV and in Recordings.

Mmm.. 0.22 seems to be missing the unified channel-change patch that's been around for years now, though. Odd that. This is the patch that merges all channels from all tuners into a single CH+/CH- list for LiveTV.

I can always patch that in again, I suppose, while I'm in there fixing the menu navigation keys and such back to the 0.21 working state.

Things are starting to look a bit better overall now, I think. It still crashes (front/back ends) if I blow on it slightly, but that'll stabilize someday soon, most likely.

Cheers
 
#27 ·
...nothing but troubble!

I'd like to add my recent experience. This was my first exposure to MythTV & MythBuntu, but I'm an experienced Ubuntu user.

I just build myself a dual core AMD X2 3Ghz HTPC with HVR-1600 tuner this past week.

So I figured... Ah! 9.10 is almost here and MythTV 0.22 has some config changes so I might as well use the "new" Mythbuntu 9.10 beta using 0.22 MythTV and avoid having to migrate to 0.22 later.

I can state that if you've never setup MythTV before, do NOT use 0.22, stick with tried & tested 0.21

In short, Nothing worked! Lol Well, almost nothing. My HDMI to TV did work, but thats it.
I couldn't get the remote to work at all, the new channel scan found no digital channels and the analog scan stays stuck at ch2, and doesn't move so found nothing there again. DVD playback was buggy, at best.

Not a great start when everything is new and you don't know if the problem is hardware or software. :confused:

So I installed XP, drivers & WinTV soft and everything worked. :mad:

I then wiped 9.10 and installed Mythbuntu 9.04 and almost everything worked right away, once I setup the card of course.
Remote works, Analog & digital scan worked. Recording & pause Live-TV worked.
The only thing I'm left working on is digital sound via HDMI to my TV. But I'm sure it's just some ALSA/Pulse Audio or Mixer problem that I will get fixed soon enough.

Oh, and xubuntu tools suck. I just want to mention that. ;)
It makes it hard to debug not having the usual ubuntu tools around. I know it's lightweight but, c'mon.

Anyway, I'm enjoying my new HTPC MythTV 0.21 setup.
I think I'll be sticking with 0.21 for a while. I don't think I'll have the patience any time soon to work on 0.22 again.

Marc
 
#28 ·
@mlord: there are 3 ways that I can think of (and verify right now) to stop an in progress recording in 0.22. From the frontend, watch recordings screen, highlight the recording, bring up the recording menu (usually I for info) and the third option is 'Stop Recording'. Or, from the same place, instead press D (if you have it bound to a remote key, or on a keyboard) to delete, and it will stop recording. From MythWeb, go to Recorded Programs, find the recording and select 'Delete' in the right most column of the recording, and it will stop recording and delete the file.

@Daemons: Don't confuse a distribution package that installs MythTV for you with a hand built and installed MythTV setup. The pre-packaged versions try to do it all for you, and sometimes they don't get it right. If you do it yourself, from scratch, you can learn a lot. If you don't have the patience, by all means use whatever works for you, but I don't think it's fair to slam MythTV for that. Yes, it's complicated, yes, it takes time to understand it all and configure it correctly, I've been using it for 5 years and still find out things I didn't know, but it does everything I want, and it does it very well, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Tom
 
#29 ·
Ah.. so it's now "I" instead of the more intuitive right-arrow from all previous versions? Well, at least I can fix that in the source code. Thanks for the pointer.

As for the rest, MythTV is Open-Source. That's its good point. The rest is simply "adequate" to "mediocre".

But, being Open-Source, at least a programmer (like me) can make it work somewhat better, given enough weeks of unpaid work on it.

So I've been using it for several years now, and *fixing* the worst breakages here in my own setup. And customizing the source to solve unrelated problems (multiple antennas) which cannot be done with any other (closed-source) software I know of.

So I still use it (0.21), but I never, ever, recommend it to friends any more.
Enemies, perhaps. But not friends.

Cheers
 
#30 ·
New users: stay with MythDora and/or Mythbuntu for now

Advice for new MythTV users:

Until MythDora and Mythbuntu release new versions based on MythTV 0.22 it is best to stay with their present versions (based on 0.21) unless you are experienced with rolling your own development software and know some or all of those ropes.

I'm not getting the sense that MythTV 0.22 has any real show-stopper features that would make it a desirable version for new users to try to wrestle with at this time. I'm positive that 0.22 will be worthwhile when wrapped in new MythDora and Mythbuntu releases as it will have been greatly debugged by then.
 
#31 ·
I think the real killer features of 0.22 are (1) VDPAU, and (2) HDPVR support. Sure, there's other stuff, but those two are the really biggies.

However, VDPAU has also now been available as a solid/stable backport for 0.21 since winter 2009, and is not by itself a compelling reason to risk 0.22.

HDPVR support is also available as a backported patch, but didn't work well in that form when I tried it here for a friend. So that friend has been waiting for 0.22 to try again, though I am trying hard to push him towards SageTV as a better solution.

The current -RC of Mythbuntu will turn final later this week, but anyone considering it might want to let the dust settle for another month of updates after that. I would hope it might be usable by December.

Cheers
 
#38 ·
The current -RC of Mythbuntu will turn final later this week, but anyone considering it might want to let the dust settle for another month of updates after that. I would hope it might be usable by December.
I downloaded Mythbuntu 9.10 earlier this week, but haven't had a chance to install it yet. This will be my first time using MythTV. From this, are you saying that I would be better off sticking with Mythbuntu 9.04 for now? If so, where can I get it? It doesn't seem to be on the Mythbuntu site anymore.

Will be using it with a 2.8 GHz P4 with an ATI Radeon 9000 pro (a system I have kicking around) and an HVR-1600. Nothing fancy. Just want to get it to work to get the WAF.
 
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