[mythtv-users] Ubuntu TV

Matt Emmott memmott at gmail.com
Wed Jan 11 19:29:25 UTC 2012


On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 1:37 PM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:

>
>
>     Point your remote in the general direction of the living room or
> family room and click away. No need for another box in the kitchen in
> a remotely modern house.
>
> [deletia]
>
> There's a wall in my kitchen, can't see the living room.

I'm not sure if the disconnect here is my fault, or the misinterpretation
of others, or a combination of the two. If it's me, I apologize. But I
don't see MythTV as being just a television. If you do, and the thought of
using it as anything else is a waste of time, the rest of this rant won't
interest you.

A Myth frontend is a powerful machine. It can play and/or stream content
from almost anywhere. I don't care much about Pandora or Rhapsody on my
living room TV. But in the morning I listen to NPR in the bathroom via an
iHome radio. When I get home I listen to music or the news in the kitchen
on the iPad or TouchPad, or I break out the Macbook and use Myth. When I'm
working in the garage I have Pandora playing on the iPod touch or XM
skydock in the car. When in the office or the basement data center, I'm
streaming from an iDevice or PC to my bluetooth speaker.

The point is, I have a million devices doing things that could all be
replaced by a sane HTPC system. Maybe the HT is a misnomer at this point,
but that's the umbrella I'm working with. Myth is awesome because of its
record-once-play-anywhere infrastructure. But it falls short in the UI
department. There have been good strides with the integration of MythMovie
(is that what it's still called?) into the current UI and the  constant
updates to MythNetVision, and other pieces like MiroBridge and MythExport
close the gap on a lot of the recording and playing options.

I can't design, or develop, or really do anything useful but complain, so I
apologize for just sounding like an end user. And what I'm saying are
shortcomings of Myth might purely be because I'm trying to fit a square peg
into a round hole. But the holy grail to me is one big converged system
that can play all my media regardless of where it "lives", what format it's
in, or how I got it. I wish I had the skills and cycles to make such a
thing happen, because with the ubiquity of high speed internet and so much
content out there in - sorry - The Cloud, I think the opportunity is there
to make an insanely awesome experience, with MythTV at its core. Some of
the Ubuntu TV stuff really got me thinking in that direction, and again,
I'm sorry if I took that ball and ran with it.
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