[mythtv-users] Watch TV works, but recording doesn't.

[Andrew Haigh]

Justin Hornsby wrote:
>>Andrew said:
>>
>>
>>>I would say its consumed a lot more than a few hours. And I'm a software 
>>>engineer with a fair bit of linux experience. How many non-software 
>>>engineers get it working?
>>>
>>>Finally, thanks to those people who replied, it gives me (some) hope.
>>>
>>>-- Andrew
>>
>>I'm most definitely a non-software engineer.  I'm a bit of a geek, but no software engineer ;-)

Past experience has seen me porting and embedded linux on custom non-x86 
hardware, and writing linux kernel debug tools, so I had hoped it would 
be fairly straightforward. But like everything in computing there is 
just a huge amount still to learn, no matter how much you already know.

>>When I first set about making a MythTV system it took me about a week's worth of evenings (until 2 or 3am) just getting my hardware working.  Actually configuring mythtv took very little time compared to that, but maybe that was because I was spending all the rest of my free time reading documentation.

Previos respondents have also indicated that they spent similar or 
greater amounts of time on it.

>>The first big mystery to solve was how to configure the xmltv grabber.  Back in October last year it didn't parse the list of channels and present possible matches like it does now.
>>
>>I made a fatal mistake earlier this year and wiped out my system with an rm -rf /* so had to reinstall everything.  It only took me a couple of evenings to put everything right (I lost my backups too), and that included Gentoo compile time!

Doh!

>>You talk about Mythtv like it's a commercial product.  It isn't.  So you can only be a user, not a 'consumer'.  If you're not prepared to put in a bit of time getting it to work you really have no reason to complain.  I mean it's not as if you paid for anything is it? ;-)

I sort of think this is why Microsoft stills sells so many copies of 
Windows. Most free software is written by geeks for themselves, and when 
  they've made it work, they are already an expert, and don't need it to 
be made 'easier-to-use'. At that point they very generously make it 
available for the world to throw rocks at :-)

>>Now my system is all set up it just WORKS.  My wife can use it - even to the point where she can solve problems (like jiggling a DVB-T recorded show to work properly when the mpeg decoder doesn't like the stream) herself.  She's no kind of superuser, so that must mean mythtv is user-friendly in operation.  The backend machine has, to the best of my knowledge never hung or crashed for months.  Uptime is in the region of 3 months now, and the last time I rebooted was for something non-myth related (adding a new HDD).
>>
>>I agree that Myth could be easier to set up for newbies, but even if you look at Windows MCE (eech), that asks you a bunch of questions at setup time - which you may or may not answer correctly depending on what you know about.  Answer a setup question wrongly and it's not going to work!

I thought about Windoze, but that wouldn't do the hundred and one other 
things I can do with a Linux box.

>>As far as what you have to do to get NTL Digital working on your system, there can't be many channels which the Radio Times grabber doesn't list - the channel_ids file in /usr/share/xmltv/tv_grab_uk_rt is 257 lines long!  So you have to add channels yourself and map them to the right NTL channel numbers, but if you start with the channels you **actually watch** then add the rest bit by bit later, it'll be a much nicer job.

Its going to be a few days from now until I get some time to play with 
it all again...

>>Justin.

Cheers,
-- Andrew