[mythtv] Whats the deal with usability

[Steve Atkins]

On Jan 16, 2007, at 6:56 AM, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>

> My thoughts are that if you have the right hardware for the job (which
> you get automatically with Tivo, etc. but you have to research a  
> little
> for Myth), that you can get a Myth system set up in a matter of hours.
> With two distro based installers and the other packages based as  
> well as
> compiling from source, there are options for the least to most
> sophisticated users.
>
> I feel that most people fall flat because they chose or use hardware
> that does not work out of the box with Linux and therefore they run  
> into
> problems.

Also the list of supported hardware isn't constant. Most of my
installation issues were caused by ropy support for X11 on PVR-350
output, yet that was one of the suggested output devices when
I specced the machine.

There's also not a terribly good release process for Myth in some
ways - "proper" releases are few and far between, so in order to
get bugs fixed or additional features you install from cvs trunk -
and that makes getting a working, stable, supportable release
much more of a crapshoot than point releases. (I don't find this
a big problem, as I'm a developer and know what building from
CVS implies, but I suspect it confuses things a lot for the average
user, and makes it much harder for them to ask for support
effectively).

Cheers,
   Steve