[mythtv] MythTV Recording System Future

[Isaac Richards]

On Sunday 20 July 2003 12:35 pm, Pyroman[FO] wrote:
> So can the hardware MPEG cards do everything the MythTV native NUV
> format can?  I seem to remember some limitations when using the MPEG
> container.

It can't.  There are workarounds in the code because of this.  I don't want to 
have to write workarounds for every randomass format people would want to 
use.  I don't know what's going to happen when the ivtv driver supports VBI 
data, as it appears that it doesn't insert captioning information into the 
.mpeg data, so I'll have to come up with a storage format for it external to 
the mpeg stream or something.

There's no sense in doing stuff like this for software encoded captures, as I 
can dictate the file format for those.  Re-muxing hardware captures (or DVB) 
into some other format would be silly, so I _have_ to go out of my way with 
extra code just to make those cards work.

> Why not allow people to use other codecs if they can already 
> use the MPEG files with the limitations?  One file format having
> limitations doesn't stop you from supporting the features of another
> file format, it simply means if the user wants to use a certain
> codec/container that they won't have feature X.  Or would that be too
> confusing?

Yes, I'd think that it'd be way too confusing.  Or, are you going to deal with 
people emailing the lists and asking they can't do X with file format Y?

> Yeah, but for each program you patch to support the nuv format, you have
> to have someone maintain that code.  Look at the mplayer patch, for a
> while it wouldn't read all of the NUV files because a new version was
> released, and there was nobody out there who could fix it immediately.
> Whereas if MythTV could write to standard formats, either through
> conversion or directly, then no code would have to be maintained other
> than the main MythTV code, which is always up to date.

Same argument for including other software encoding formats in the mythtv 
codebase.  I _won't_ maintain that code, and I highly doubt any other person 
will for any length of time, either.  Most people that contribute code end up 
not contributing anymore eventually, and it would fall to me to maintain such 
code.  Take a look at the european teletext support (which has been disabled 
for a _very_ long time).  I'm getting ready to pull that out of the source 
since no one has bothered to fix it yet.  Same with the DVB support.  I 
accepted that into the source tree under the impression that it would be 
working shortly.  That was in early May.  It's still at pretty much the same 
state as it was back then -- broken.  Native alsa support?  Unfinished, 
author hasn't sent in any updates since the original patch.  Etc. etc. etc.

Basically, software encoding to different formats other than .nuv is not going 
to happen, and I'm really, really tired of answering the same 
questions/arguments every couple of months.

Isaac