[mythtv-users] Re: excellent review of mythtv vs. MCE

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Thursday 16 September 2004 11:36, Gavin Hurlbut wrote:
> Paul Hyui <phyui at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > at anandtech
> >
> > http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2190
> > http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2208
>
> I found that "review" to be quite flawed.  Choosing to use SuSE the
> first time around was boneheaded for a review.  He should have gone
> with something more commonly supported and documented (Knoppmyth,
> Fedora Core 1, Debian to name a few).

I agree.

> And then choosing not to use PVR-250 in the second run makes it
> comparing apples and oranges anyways.

Read it again; in Part 2 he priced out a system with 2 WinTV Go cards, 
but then notes that the PVR-250 based system was used in the actual 
comparison.  It definitely confused the issue, though.

> Some of his remarks were so off-base it's not funny.  Blaming Myth
> for him not reading the docs well enough is how it came across to me.
>  And he should have included the user support part of it.  Myth has
> the mailing list, IRC channel, and numerous wikis and forums
> (official or not).

Yep.  But then, I find that to be typical of this sort of review.  I 
imagine that reviewers think they're maintaining impartiality by not 
having a dialogue with the product developers, but when that extends to 
the point of getting basic facts wrong, it just does a disservice to 
consumer and vendor/developer alike.

> He also didn't state (that I saw) which version of MythTV he was
> using.

Right.  Probaby 0.15.1, I'd guess.

>
> There was no *quantatative* comparison (i.e. CPU usage using the same
> hardware, etc) that I could see.
>
> On the whole, I found it totally disappointing.

Ditto.

-JAC