[mythtv-users] The future of MythTV

[Ian Campbell]

On Fri, 2021-06-04 at 14:17 +0100, Paul Harrison wrote:
> Give us your thoughts on what direction you would like to see MythTV 
> take now it's original purpose is slowing being killed of.

FWIW we use MythTV pretty much daily (since ~2006) and are very happy
with it, I suppose we are lucky that there is plenty of decent OTA
content (amongst all the rubbish...) on Freeview DVB here in the UK and
schedules direct works well as a corresponding data source (and is
worth every penny IMHO).

As well as the OTArecording stuff we use mythmusic a fair bit, it's a
little clunky in places but absolutely works ok. We also use mythvideo
a bit for ripped DVD/BD content which also works fine for our use (as
someone else said, so long as we can navigate to the video and play it
everything is fine). I occasionally find myself grabbing stuff off BBC
iplayer into mythvideo (e.g. when we discover a series too late after
the OTA repeats of the first episode have all passed already). My wife
did used to use the old mythgallery a bit but the new one isn't quite
up to it and I think she mostly uses the chromecast functionality in
google photos now anyway since she tends to have the photos there
anyway. I don't think we use any of the other plugins.

Our primary FE in the living room is mythfrontend on the same machine
as mythbackend, the integrated Intel graphics work fine for everything
we have, easily deals with OTA FreeviewHD but up to Blu-Ray content (in
mythvideo) is fine too. Audio is a simple optical out to an amp and
stereo speakers, so nothing complicated. Recording is via a pair of
Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD DVB dongles. The system runs Debian testing with
the packages from deb-multimedia.org which very are well maintained
IMHO, although I'm pretty technical so YMMV, personally I don't have
much trouble with the maintenance side of things or LIRC etc but I can
see how folks who just want an out-of-the-box appliance might have
issues.

We have a second frontend upstairs running leanfront on an Nvidia
shield, which also works great.

For occasional streaming (e.g. non-BBC (non-iplayer) where we missed
the first OTA or sometimes Amazon Prime) we tend to use Chromecast (an
Ultra dongle on the living room TV and via the Shield upstairs) which
works fine for us, I don't feel any particular need to have mythtv do
that as well (even if the ads to grate a bit). The harmony remote
downstairs makes it reasonable seamless to switch HDMI inputs and the
shield upstairs does it all anyway. The majority of content we get
through mythtv not streaming though.

We barely ever watch live TV and when we do mythfrontend works well
enough, but we don't channel surf at all -- more often than not we
watch in-progress recordings rather than using actual live TV.

Thanks to all the devs for what (for us at least) is a fantastic
project.

On the subject of dev while I have the capabilities to do C++ etc I
perpetually have more ambition than time and in any case my personal
itches are generally pretty minor so they don't often get to the top of
my stack, but I do often wonder if there is something more useful I
could be doing to help/contribute.

Cheers & thanks again,
Ian.