[mythtv] ring buffer and live TV

[Joe Votour]

--- Felix Rubinstein <felixru at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why do you impose limitations on users?
> Why not to let it choose what he/she wants?
> Did it ever occured to you that your're doing a
> project for many users or
> you always though about running it on different
> hardware?
> 
> And what about live tv, really live like real-time
> live tv with buffering
> capabilities, man, you have commercial products
> doing it on old hardware
> pretty good with 0 (zero) delay!
> 
> Improper use of myth, what improper in connecting
> myth with S-Video without
> EPG?
> Guys, stop imposing limitations, your're running on
> Linux, you have all the
> fancy libraries and OS, just don't impose
> limitations on users, give it a
> chance by any mean, copilation flag, run-time flag,
> anything.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 

The limitations you speak of are not necessarily
intentionally imposed by the developers, they wrote
the code in the best way that they could to accomplish
the goals that they had.  Perhaps those goals weren't
universally liked (although, they seem to be for the
most part), but they wrote the software, so it's their
choice.

If you feel that MythTV has limitations, then you are
certainly free to either:
1. Write the code yourself to fix these limitations,
2. Pay somebody to write the code for you to fix these
limitations, or,
3. Switch to a product that doesn't have the
limitations.

You bring up the point of users using different
hardware.  I have to say, that as a professional
software developer who does video-related embedded
software, that supporting different hardware platforms
is very difficult.  The set-top boxes like the one
that you have are able to do what they do, and so
quickly, because:
1. They all have the same hardware (or hardware that
acts in the same way) - thus you can take shortcuts
and make optimizations specifically for that hardware,
2. As a paying company (the people who make the
set-top box), they get documentation and support,
which believe me, is BIG.  MPEG-2 encoders and
decoders are very complex things.  Writing software
like MythTV is very complex, I've actually written
sofware for a set-top box.

Having to account for different hardware actually
makes things more difficult on the developers, and
leads to a lot more work having to be done to
accomodate all of those people.  I give lots of credit
and props to the developers for actually supporting so
many options (the ivtv drivers for a while had their
own non-conforming API, DVB uses a different API than
Video4Linux, etc.).

If you want MythTV to work properly, there is no
problem using an S-Video input - but, you have to let
MythTV control the device that the S-Video signal is
coming from.  If you don't allow that, then MythTV
can't change channels on it, and you can forget about
recording working properly.

Anyhow, from reading your posts on the -users and
-devs list, you seem intent on only complaining, not
listening, and not even trying to solve your problems.
 Therefore, this is the last that I will say on this
issue.

MythTV works great for me, I have a channel change of
less than five seconds (when I actually watch LiveTV,
which is rare) on both my ATSC (DVB) card and my
PVR-250/350.

-- Joe

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