[mythtv-users] Re: EFF calls for developers for MythTV

[Buechler, Mark R]

Without getting into the IVTV stuff, which is the work of an entirely
different group of developers, let me point out a couple things:

1. Vol- and Vol+ on a remote control is entirely configured through Lirc. If
your volume buttons are performing a function other than volume you should
alter your ~/.lircrc or ~/.mythtv/lircrc file.

2. Volume functions have nothing to do with MythVideo since Myth uses an
external player for MythVideo. You should look at Lirc support for your
particular player. I know both mplayer and Xine have support for Lirc.

- Mark.

-----Original Message-----
From: Francois Gouget [mailto:fgouget at free.fr] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 3:52 AM
To: Discussion about mythtv
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Re: EFF calls for developers for MythTV

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Jason Gabriele wrote:

> i can see what they are talking about. maybe a dumbed down version of
> mythtv with all the advanced options removed. in that case you probably
> wouldnt want to provide plugins like mythgame which can take alot of
> setup time. ive heard of people already making commercial

I think they did not necessarily meant a dumbed down version of MythTV.
MythTV is already impressive but IMHO there is still room for making it
much more usable without dumbing anything down.  Also MythTV brings many
together projects (ivtv, xmltv, lirc, mysql, mplayer (e.g. for
transcoding)) so, IMHO, these projects should be considered to be in the
scope of the EFF's call for action.  (well, maybe not ivtv since they
focus more on pcHDTV but you get the idea).

Here are some concrete items that I believe would fall in the just
slightly more general idea of making MythTV easier to use, And keep in
mind that I'm still relatively new to MythTV so feel free to ignore me.
Maybe some of the stuff below is obvious and I just didn't do enough
reading of the documentation yet... and then maybe I still have fresh
enough eyes that I can see where non-specialists might have trouble.

 * Improving and debugging the ivtv drivers would help a lot. For me
that was the hardest part to set up. In particular I was unable to guess
what to specify for the tuner field and only succeeded after reverting
to 0.1.10-pre2-ck64f and copy/pasting the settings of a fellow French
guy.

 * Simplifying the ivtv driver setup would help a lot too. For my
PVR-350 there are 6 modules involved and I need to specify the TV
standard 4 times, sometimes claiming it is SECAM, sometimes claiming it
is PAL! I also have to specify my tuner type twice. And after that I
still need to run commands to set the standard to SECAM!

 * When I'm watching a show, the Vol- and Vol+ keys on my remote control
don't change the volume as one would expect. Instead they cause the show
to skip forward or backwards. It's certainly not intuitive and fixable.

 * I initially had a lot of trouble finding where the Transcoders
configuration is located. Now I know but I find it non-intuitive.

 * I believe transcoding is an area where usability can really be
improved a lot. It makes sense to have some standard profiles. But
there are some shows I'd like to transcode so they will fit on CD and
others I'd like to compress more. So it's weird to me that the
transcoding settings are entirely determined by the format of the
source video which for me is always MPEG2.
   (Now, maybe transocding is just meant to deal with cards that don't
do hardware encoding and I'm trying to use it incorrectly)

 * There are recipies around for preparing shows to put them on DVD. But
this has to be done outside of MythTV and it not really obvious. Some
PVR boxes in France include a DVD writer and can save shows to DVD, no
fuss there. So it would be nice to have similar functionality in MythTV.

 * There's an aspect of the recording configuration which I find
confusing too. I can easily get a list of the specific instances of
shows that have been recorded. I can also go into the EPG and schedule
new stuff to be recorded. But how do I get to MythTV's list of things to
record, similar to a VCR's list of 8 timeslots to record.  Apparently
the trick is to go to the 'Recording Priorities' screen.  And that will
even let me remove stuff from that list though it's really not obvious
based on the name.

 * The EFF having a US focus they probably don't care about this but
improving internationalization would help:
   - The GUI is only partly localized to French (working on it)
   - In the 'Search Listings' section searching for Movies returns
nothing because my program listings are in French so the category is
called 'Films'
   - Xavier Hervy reported on this list that MythVideo fails to
correctly display and play files containing accents and I could confirm
that (but accents work fine in MythTV proper)
   - If I switch the GUI from French to English and go to 'Watch
Recordings' I get a 'No recordings available' because it's looking for a
category called 'Tous programmes'. It's a bit unnerving and switching
the GUI language should not cause such problems.

 * Better integration between Myth modules: when using the TV part I can
control the volume using [ ] and \, but that doesn't work in MythVideo.


All that being said I still find that MythTV is really great and I'm
sure it will continue to improve rapidly. I also have every intention of
continuing to use it and hopefully even contribute what little I can /
have time for (currently trying to resolve some issues in tv_grab_fr and
to improve the French translation).

-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
        War doesn't determine who's right.  War determines who's left.




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