Heya,<br><br>I've spent about 2 months now tinkering with DVB in various ways.<br>Along the way I've tried MediaPortal, ForTheRecord, MythTV, the various bits of terrible software you get with USB DVB sticks, looked closely at freevo and almost mustered the enthusiasm to configure it. I've even looked at / tried RitzDVB, AltDVB, dvbguide and the utterly obscure and out of date on Windows and Linux.<br>
I got to trying Myth because it has an aura of "That's the ultimate way to do it", and I've run Linux since Redhat 5.2, so that side didn't daunt me. Usually. Once you configure something in Linux, it works as you want it to, reliably, all the time .. (until a distribution upgrade breaks it). It's no effort getting a continuous uptime of days on Linux, so yup. Nice base for a PVR.<br>
After several weeks of trying to configure Myth 0.24, learning mistakes, going back, correcting, starting again ... it actually manages to mess up more and more often rather than less and less often. The last "gotcha" was from watching the logs and seeing a message that a transponder wasn't responding so I should do a re-scan. So I did. What it broke I have no idea. I gave up when it only managed to actually start recording 1 of the following 5 programs.<br>
<br>Perhaps Myth 0.21 or something WAS a great bit of software that worked reliably and could be debugged by someone reasonably proficient with Linux. But 0.24 just plain isn't. You're limited to either the TV style setup system or directly digging in to the database. The TV style setup is slow to go though, (has good help prompts in places for options! I'll give it that!) .. but then it fails horribly. If "Import channel.conf" doesn't fully work. Why not say "It doesn't fully work" or something? In fact seeing as entering your own frequency details also seems to mean you don't get EIT data, that's pretty pointlessly included as well. "Delete ALL" on the channels page. Doesn't "delete all". I'm not sure what it does, it clears what you can see but leaves a pile of mess in the database. Same with transponder details. Trying to fine tune the thing with a setup program that's leaving a trail of mess every time you try to do something is really NOT good.<br>
<br>Then there's the error logging.<br>When it comes to the "It should be working" stage. And it doesn't. More often than not, the logs have not even mentioned the fact anything went wrong. Start times are missed and expired. I've even had it start recording something then forget and leave it recording till I killed the backend. Not a blip in the log when it comes to the end time. Just nothing. I've had it record zero length files as well but log that all is fine and dandy. The one thing it does nag about in the logs is all the various frontend / backend / artwork / video / fanart folders ... why? I mean ... just ... DOH! What do I care if the pretty pictures gets loaded from the backend or the frontend directory? In fact ... why are you trying to store two copies of everything? And .. if your not .. then .. ARGH!!!<br>
<br>One thing it hasn't done is crash the backend on me. Which is actually a shame. If it crashed I'd know it had fouled up and not leave it for hours thinking it's managed to record things.<br>I'm sure all of you lucky people that installed 0.21, 0.22, 0.23 back when it was great are very happy. And well done! But .. uhm .. maybe don't upgrade yet?<br>
<br>What it actually needs is a well thought out NOT TV screen format configuration utility. Something in QT perhaps that actually checks and verifies what settings are entered and lets the user tweak and delete .. and actually do it safely to the database. You know. "Are you sure you want to delete" "Yes" then actually clear all the relevant database entries? Hell I'd even go for a very long text config file!<br>
<br>But for now. Myth. I give up on you. I've spent 2 weeks now tweaking and re-tweaking just myth. It doesn't take that long for me to download, compile and configure all of X11 up to XFCE including 3D acceleration, sound and all of the optional goodies libraries. Myth shouldn't be *that* bad.<br>
<br>So inside 2 hours. I now have ForTheRecord v1.6.0 installed on a Windows 7 machine. (<a href="http://www.4therecord.eu">http://www.4therecord.eu</a>). In that time, it's been possible to tell it *exactly* which frequencies I want it to use for each channel. All the EPG data works fine, and it's scheduling weeks ahead including skipping repeats from the 2 USB DVB sticks I've got, and I'm using DirMon2 to queue compressing the recordings with Handbrake and run comskip. The only drawback is. It's running on Windows. But what the ..... it works.<br>
<br>I don't know if Myth developers read this email forum or not. But if so. Guys. IMHO. Somewhere along the line, it must of become a bit of a mess. Even Windows comskip does a better job than Mythcommflag .. which stunned me! I'd of guessed the windows one was modelled on the myth code .. but apparently not!<br>
<br>Sigh. Well .. guess it kept me busy for a couple of weeks. Think I might watch some telly now.<br>