[mythtv-users] Some first impressions

Ross Boylan RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org
Fri Mar 9 07:40:51 UTC 2012


I've been using Vista Media Center as a stop-gap, and am now trying to
switch to MythTV on Linux.  Here are some of the things that struck me.

Getting it sort of set up was difficult, partly because I was trying to
do it in a chroot.  My system is Debian Lenny; the chroot is debian
testing, getting packages from Marillat's repository.

The system seems underdocumented.  In particular, I remain somewhat
confused about the different components involved in the setup and their
relation to each other.  There were more components than I expected:
capture cards, video sources and inputs all sounded as if they were the
same thing.  The name "video source" seems misleading; this seems to be
the source of programming information rather than video.

I have an HDHomeRun tuner (newer version, HDHR3-US) with US over-the-air
signals.  The ability of the Myth to handle more than one tunerwas very
important to me.  However, after setting everything up (including
setting # of tuners to 2 in the HDHR setup) I discovered I could not
record 2 shows at once.  Googling around turned up that I needed to
create a separate entry for each tuner, as well as the info that I could
identify them by their tuner id rather than IP address.  The
instructions I found were quite involved, and currently I show that I
have 4 tuners, probably because I didn't set the individual tuner counts
to 1.  I can record 2 shows at once.  It would be nice if HDHR handling
were more automatic, or at least documented in the installation manual.

BTW, the newer HDHomeRun boxes do not have a remote control receiver, as
far as I can tell.  The instructions I found had a lot about setting
that up.

I was confused by mythfrontend offering 2 different routes to setup.
The initial screen has "TV" and "setup", and then if you go to "TV"
there is another "setup" screen.  I wasn't sure which control operated
which options; I have only just realized these are 2 routes to exactly
the same spot (right?).

The keyboard shortcuts were not at all as documented in the online
guides.  I found a customization screen where I can see the current
settings, but I've found no good way to printout a chart of all the
shortcuts, which is really what I need.  And shouldn't there be a way to
accomplish the same effects without having to remember all the magic
keys?

I was absolutely delighted by the commercial skipping/deletion.

I was delighted that I could jump an arbitrary number of minutes forward
and back; there doesn't seem to be a way to do that in Windows Media
Center.  It would be nice if there were a way to jump to "N minutes into
the recording" as well; perhaps I just haven't found out how?

When configuring the transcoding I thought the initial choice of the
transcode target simply determined which options you were setting, and
something else decided which format to pick.  Also, figuring out which
rules are used in which situations is one of those examples of places
where I can't figure out how the parts get combined--i.e., there are
several transcodes listed ("Hi Definition" "Live TV"...),

Initially I couldn't view anything; the video had 2 copies stacked
vertically in the best case, and was completely garbled, using 100% CPU,
and unresponsive in the worst.  I fiddled with the deinterlacing options
and am having better luck now (but some videos are still garbage).

There are slots for jobs, but I have no idea what goes in them.

mythpython exists, but I have no idea how to use it.

I probably have not grasped the various recording options or the
deletion options.  In particular, when I thought I was deleting a
particular recording I think I ended up deleting the general
instructions to record the show.

There don't seem to be man pages.

FWIW.
Ross



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