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

[Maarten]

On Thursday 16 September 2004 08:11, Paul Hyui wrote:
> http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2190

Well, I'd say it's a reasonable article.  Not excellent.
For one thing, the minutes they state they spend on each setup & build section 
are by all accounts vastly too optimistic.  V-a-s-t-l-y.  Yes, even for 
someone with plenty of hardware && linux && myth experience.
Let alone that someone could ever convince me that they managed a first-time 
myth install in this amount of time.

But there is more misinformation. Take this quote:

"Opting for a different distribution that supports the PVR card natively would 
have been a better idea [...]"

Well I don't know of any _distribution_ that ships with IvyTv, or am I missing 
something ?

Next, this bit:
"Using the default compiling options, we had MythTV built and installed in a 
little under 20 minutes."

Well, that is a bit hard to believe...  Not even counting downloading and 
unpacking, the compiling of mythtv alone on my athlon 2600+ takes way more 
than 20 minutes (okay, that's from memory).  So this is also pushing it IMHO.

Mind you, I'm not saying they're lying outright about their stated wallclock 
time.  But I AM saying this story will lead to unattainable expectations. We 
couldn't care less how fast a well trained anandtech crew can build a fully  
pre-researched hard- & software project.  What is of importance is how long 
an average person with no prior myth experience might spend on it. And that 
is orders of magnitude longer than 4.25 hours.  Read this list and you just 
know that to be true.

Hell, just getting xmltv+deps on my SuSE 9.0 machine took several hours, (and 
I'm not a linux beginner by any standard).  They barely even mentioned xmltv.

Just picking some nits.

Maarten