<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/18/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Damian</b> <<a href="mailto:damian@gingermagic.co.uk">damian@gingermagic.co.uk</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">I was almost at the end of my MythTV project the other day. It's just<br>too temperamental for me. ...
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">I simply don't have time to put such effort into a system. Something has<br>got to change or I'll just buy a Freeview box or something.
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<div>I've got to say - I love my MythTV, which has morphed into a bit of a hobby for me, teaching me about Linux, etc. BUT - the occasional instability does drive me a bit crazy. I can typically get things going again in less than a minute - but the problem comes for me when I'm travelling and my wife is at home with Myth alone. I occasionally get the 'help the TV isn't working email/text". She's learnt to restart the frontend, and can even go to the server, and do a "service mythbackend restart" now. That tends to fix 99% of issues, and I can ssh in remotely for the remaining 1% - but she occasionally grumbles about how Sky+ would be better!
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<div>For us the killer feature, relative to a standalone DVR, is the client-server architecture. We can start a show in the living room, mark the position, stop it, and resume in exactly the same place upstairs. Having a DVR matched to a single TV wouldn't work for us.
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<div>I'm not sure what specific problems you are having - but I've found a Fedora backend running fairly standard (except for the 4x750GB drives in RAID 5) hardware to be fairly stable. Some of my issues there are my CAM not resetting which requires a backend restart every few days. And my frontends - which are a mottley crew including 2 old laptops and a Mac Mini - all running Fedora (except the Mini which dual boots Fedora and OSX) -are pretty stable except for the occasional hang - in which case a quick reset of the frontend does the trick. I'm not at 'appliance' reliability - but I'm at 'good enough'
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