[mythtv-users] RANT: MythTV has a *horrible* end user experience.

Greg Estabrooks greg at phaze.org
Sun Feb 24 16:31:07 UTC 2008


> In my opinion, the biggest flaw is in playing back recorded TV versus
> playing back videos (AVIs, etc).  The problem here of course is that MythTV
> has two different movie players with two completely different sets of

 Use the Internal player. Then you have the same player, OSD and controls for everything. DVD's, Videos, and Recordings. The only real gotchas I know
of with the Internal player is poor seeking in MKV files which I expect to be fixed post 0.21.

> Any controls that require pushing number keys on the remote for operations
> should not be allowed.  There's no reason all menus shouldn't be operable

 I'm unaware of any that require you to push a number key, except for arbitrary FFW or REW. (like 5 FFW to ffw by 5 minutes).

> New video content needs to be automatically detected.  Having to go to
> "video manager" to scan for new content is neither necessary from a
> technical perspective nor user friendly.

 Configure mythvideo to browse the filesystem, and each time you go
into gallery/list/whatever it will read the content from the filesystem and not
just the DB.

> I apologize for being blunt, but you guys have all the technology in this
> thing to achieve "world-domination", and the only thing holding it back is

 I believe you have that available to you as well. Please provide patches for anything you think should be changed.

 And I'm not saying that as some sort of defensive "shut you up" response.
You con't have to be some 30 year master coding veteran to learn to do basic
patches. Or patch the theme XML files as you would rather than look, or update
the docs/helptext in the setup menu help windows. If these things were REALLY bothering the devs they would have been changed already.  There is no drive to
convert everyone to myth :)






More information about the mythtv-users mailing list