[mythtv-users] Success story and my own Tivo comparison (long and windy)

[Joseph A. Caputo]

Comments inline.

On Thursday 09 October 2003 10:24 am, James L. Paul wrote:
> That about sums up my MythTV background. Now here's some thoughts:

[snip]

> Does everybody really prefer navigating a hierarchical menu system
> instead of single buttons on a remote? Most remotes have plenty of
> buttons, I'd rather just press one for a 'TV Guide' grid or whatnot,
> rather than navigate out of wherever I am and then dig through more
> menus arrowing around to get to the appropriate gui page. I intend to
> poke through the code to see if I can easily add some unused keys to
> jump me to commonly used features that I can map to my IR remote. Is
> there already a way to do what I want that I missed seeing?

This would be really nice; it's been discussed, and it's generally agreed that 
it would be a nice thing to have.  However, the question of how to implement 
it *well* looms large.  It really doesn't fit in with the current 
hierarchical GUI architecture.  Personally, I think that to do it right the 
entire Myth UI would have to be overhauled, if not completely scrapped and 
re-done from scratch.  I don't know about you, but I don't have the time for 
that large a task.

> Being a Tivo user, I'm addicted to the simplicity. For example, if I'm
> browsing the "Watch Recordings" and want to delete a show instead of
> play it, I don't want to back all the way out of where I am and switch
> to the "Delete Recordings" menu, I want to just hit a "Clear" key on my
> remote and delete the recording. Or, at the very least, I want the
> option to delete it on the list of choices when I select the recording.

Hit the 'D' key in the 'Watch Recordings' screen.  Also, I believe someone has 
added a pop-up menu to that screen now, which lists some of the more common 
functions.

> I have a lot of little usability issues like that. It's not that I want
> to duplicate the Tivo gui, it's just that I'm lazy and don't like to
> arrow all over the gui. It's too modal, I should be able to take any
> action that's possible for the current context.

[snip]

> Which brings me to a final issue: XMLTV is a great piece of work, and I
> hope nothing gets in the way of that. And I know it might be considered
> rude to scrape Zap2It's site repeatedly, but MythTV really falls down
> here compared to Tivo for guide accuracy because once a day's worth of
> listings are downloaded, that day is never updated. An extreme example
> is that my next 2 weeks of TBS listings are off by 3 hours since they
> were downloaded before Zap2It made the correction. I'm not aware of a
> simple way to update my database to correct that so I'm faced with
> waiting to get past the stale listings. A less extreme example is any
> one of the myriad program changes that happen with a week or less
> notice, and TBA listings. Of course, Tivo updates the entire set of
> listings each day, but Myth doesn't update at all. Whatever was on the
> listing more than a week in advance is what will stay there, no updates
> or corrections as the actual day approaches. I'm not sure what to do
> about it, it's not a technical problem, it's an etiquette and abuse
> issue. Tivo has seen my money, but Zap2It hasn't.


Actually, the way it works is that mythfilldatabase will always grab the next 
day's listings, plus any that are missing from the next 7.  So, on a system 
that runs mythfilldatabase every day, each day's listings are grabbed exactly 
twice -- once when it's 7 days out, and once when it's 'tomorrow'.  I'm not 
sure on those specifics, but it's something like that.  If there are any 
programming changes in the intervening week, the updates will be grabbed 
before the show airs.  For truly last-minute updates, you're on your own.

-JAC