[mythtv-users] Myth on WD HDTV Media Player for $99

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Oct 12 18:23:48 UTC 2009


> > Hmmm, maybe you should move to my neck of the woods, where the local
> > broadcaster (note the singular) can't afford an encoder with the fancy
> > telecine features:-)

Funny thing is, I'll bet if they turned off all the fancy features nobody 
would notice, except Myth people.
>
> I wish.  Though I suppose most of the Myth devs must already live
> there. :(

Well we (Wyoming) have the lowest unemployment rate in the nation right now, 
of course that's only of interest if you want to work in the oil and gas 
fields, or a coal mine.

Cheyenne has tons of bandwidth, since most of the cross-continental fiber runs 
go right through here. Unfortunately they don't give it away.

>
> My problem is described in this thread:
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/319838 However,
> asking the broadcasters to change their encoder settings is not really
> an option, as most of them here are doing that now.
>
> > I think we all know that Myth's player is not perfect, but perhaps that's
> > the price we pay for some of its nice features (commercial skip comes to
> > mind).
>
> The only way I've found to get both smooth playback AND commercial
> skip is SageTV.  Their Sigma based front ends communicate with the
> SageTV back end, and you get the full SageTV UI, including things
> like commercial skipping.  The problem is that the UI is sluggish,
> fugly, and missing MythTV features like timestretch that I find
> it hard to live without.
>
> > The problem is probably not just with Myth, but with some of the
> > underlying software it depends on.
>
> Since the only software I've ever encountered which plays things
> correctly is Media Center, then yes, I agree.
>
> > The Sigma chips have many years of commercial development behind them,
> > and none of us expect that the Myth devs would agree to an NDA and do
> > whatever might be required to utilize them.
> >
> > I don't think its a case of a lack of interest, anyone reading your post
> > would fix it in an instant, if they could. The fact that the problems
> > effect only a small number of users is going to effect the priority,
> > that's just the way it is.
> >
> > I think it's a case of the last 1% requiring 99% of the work.
>
> I'm not sure its quite that much, but I agree in general.  I'd be
> willing to offer a bounty if that could get a dev interested.
> I've already sunk $300 in a system that's just gathering dust.
>
> > I've wondered if there might be a way for a Myth system to simply appear
> > as a UPnP server, playable with Sigma-based devices, and the output of
> > Myth's frontend would simply appear to be one long continuous file to the
> > playback device.
> >
> > The Broadcom device might solve at least some of your problems, only time
> > will tell on that one.
>
> I certainly hope so!
>
> > Though it would be a pain, can you transcode the "bad" files to somehting
> > oyu can use?
>
> No. I haven't found anything that will produce a
> smoothly playing file.  I even tried some of the "commercial"
> products on Windows.  Since they are mainly just wrappers around
> ffmpeg, it is not surprising that they don't produce a smoothly
> playing transcode.

It's distressing how much high-priced commercial software leverages  Open 
Source stuff without attribution.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org


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