[DdDave]

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.

 

[mlord]

Mmm.. No G.A.N.T. theme.. style over substance, I suppose.

Hopefully there'll be some kind of clear, well laid out theme that takes advantage of HDTV resolution.

 

[DdDave]

The Terra theme replaces GANT as the default theme. It looks pretty slick.

Old themes will still be there:

-Move all the old themes which have not been rewritten for mythui to a new oldthemes directory NOTE: If no one updates these themes they will eventually be removed.

 

[rpr]

Terra is pretty boring compared to Graphite or Blue-Abstract. The new MythBuntu theme is also a good compromise of flashiness and simplicity, if that makes sense.

 

[mlord]

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.

 

[rpr]

Then you will like the MythBuntu theme.

 

[EmmEff]

Wow! This was a long time coming. I've been running the SVN version for a while now and it's been great.

 

[mlord]

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

 

[greg225]

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.

 

[mlord]

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.

 

[pvrfan]

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

 

[stampeder]

The whole point of .22 is a total re-write of the UI code to expand what can be done in the themes.

If that's what the new version is really all about, I'll stick with .21 for now and not risk any troubles.

 

[mlord]

.. stop bitching and roll your own!

Ah.. a candidate for the Myth Development Team!

Cheers!

 

[pvrfan]

Ah.. a candidate for the Myth Development Team!

Yeah, they can be a bit...abrupt...sometimes, eh?

And I am mildly tempted to work on a theme. But then I give my head a shake, look at all the unfinished projects around the house, and move on...

Craig

 

[pvrfan]

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

 

[EmmEff]

My MythTV installation is just a backend for my Xbox 360 frontend, so thankfully I'm not subjected to these frontend issues

 

[stampeder]

Channel Scanning is a mythbackend function, so the new version might be worth a look. Other than that, I agree that this is mostly frontend stuff.

 

[rpr]

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.

 

[DdDave]

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.

 

[mlord]

From that very thread:

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.