[mythtv-users] Dish Network DTVPal DVR

[Tyler T]

> That is, would getting
> it to work like I want (prettymuch a VCR replacement) require me to make it
> hobby?

Hobby. It took me over a week to get my backend and frontend working,
though my install was somewhat complicated by running a diskless
frontend (which required more setup) and running a Via motherboard in
my frontend (which required many lengthy kernel recompiles to fix
Via's various hardware bugs). Then, it took another week for me to
deal with the digital transition -- since my frontend will not play
HDTV content, I have to transcode my DTV recordings down to SD, and
that required a lot of trial and error (mostly error) with ffmpeg.

And I still haven't been able to get DVD playback to work.

A lot of the 'polish' is hard to get working, too. I have to turn my
frontend on (and wait 2 minutes for it to boot) and off with the
button on the front of the case, because I could never get standby and
resume to work via the remote control (or, indeed, at all). This is
more due to my distro and/or my hardware than Myth, of course, but
it's still a nuisance.

There are also a lot of unforseen gotchas. Like, if you use EIT
program listings or manually program in shows, you have to run a
special command on the backend every day in a cron job or your stuff
stops being recorded. You also have to restart your backend after a
Daylight Savings change or Myth records all the wrong things. I had to
discover these things the hard way, as the documentation is lacking.

Then there are bugs, like wrong descriptions in EIT program listings,
and a random slow-to-a-crawl on my frontend that requires me to
restart Mythfrontend about once a week (even though I boot it up fresh
every day). Or like the volume on-screen display that doesn't respect
the OSD timeout setting (I set the OSD timeout to 1 second, and most
of the OSDs do disappear after a 1 second, but the volume display
hangs around forever -- consuming a large swath of screen and blocking
my TV show). Then, most of the setup menus run off the bottom of my
screen where I can't see them, so to fix that I have to set my font
sizes really tiny to get everything to fit. And the problem with that
is, a lot of text becomes so small it's impossible to read on an SDTV.

I hope this doesn't just come across as just a gripe session, as I do
like Myth for the most part, but if you're not willing to put in a lot
of hours messing around with it you should just go buy something
off-the-shelf.
___
 /yler