[mythtv] First Impressions and Feature Requests

[Jon Nierenburg]

Hi,

I'd like to say that I am very impressed with the project.  I have been 
playing with it for about a week now, and while I don't have it working 100%, 
I must say that I am impressed with the quality of the code base, and the 
overall product.  I can see mythtv turning into one of the more successful 
GPL projects (such as XFree, or GCC :-)

I'm running old, and relatively slow hardware:
k6-2 500 
256 MB 
80 GB ATA-100 (utilizing ATA-66) 
nvidia card (using vga-> composite video converter box)
pixelview bt capture card
Hollywood+ mpeg2 decoder
256 MB ram
Mandrake 8.2
Built Mythtv using debug options

Problems I encountered:
-DB Problems caused by my hand built QT3 libs (using mandrakes contrib libs 
solved the problem) 
-The known k6-2 problems
-configure broken?  After realizing that I was going to need to compile mythtv 
on the k6-2 instead of my athlon desktop machine make install stopped 
working.  The following three lines were incorrect in my bottom level 
Makefile's:
MOVE     = mv 
CHK_DIR_EXISTS=
MKDIR    = 

The correct lines are:
MOVE     = mv -f
CHK_DIR_EXISTS= test -d
MKDIR    = mkdir -p

Features I'd like to see / help improve:
-Optimizations for slow machines.  (Possible homebrew mpeg2 hardware _encoder_ 
anyone?)
-Dxr3 / HW+ support
-Plugins for viewing my other video collections (ie.  Simpsons.rm) I think 
this could be done using mplayer....
-I live in boston and we have a very antiquated system were the cable comes in 
on 2 pieces of coax - channels 2 - 78 A  and 2 - 55B ... (what do you expect 
from an industry that took 20 years to realize you could send electrons in 
two directions down one wire).  I'm going to try and add another tv card and 
an IR transmitter to my system so that I can control a converter box (needed 
to descramble the B side channels - I need Junkyard Wars)  
-A Mythtv based linux distro / optimized kernel... To save space, make for 
easy newbie installs and easy deployment...

I'd be very interested to try the cvs client server version of Mythtv, it 
sounds like a nice / key feature.

Thanks to everyone who made this program possible.  Your work is impressive 
and appreciated.

Jon