[mythtv-users] We should consider a commercial partnership

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Sat Jun 23, 2007 at 02:07:44PM -0400, Marc Barrett wrote:
> concerning zap2it need to relax. I am quite confident that the MythTV developers will come
> up with a solution, and that it will work.

We appreciate your confidence.

> Unfortunately, I think what the MythTV developers will come up with, though it will work, will
> be a short-term solution.

OK, I take that back....

> Here is what I envision. MythTV is extremely rock-solid on the back-end. It just works, and

Don't worry, the fact that it is rock-solid is just a short-term solution.
We plan on breaking it in the near future and never fixing it again.

> works extremely well, almost no matter what kind of hardware you through at it. If it has a
> Linux driver and the hardware itself works, the MythTV back-end will use it with few (if any)
> problems. Where MythTV has most of its weaknesses (and complaints) is with the
> front-end.

Might be because the frontend does the harder job since most backends are
just streaming data from a capture card to the disk now unless you are
still using older bttv compatible cards and doing software compression.

> unwatchable on a standalone DVD player. (Motion 'fringes' or lack of A/V sync). What I
> envision is a partnership with a company like SageTV to make their front-end work
> seemlessly with the MythTV back-end. I know I would gladly pay for a good front-end if it
> solved all the problems I've encountered with the MythTV front-end, even if it ran only on

No partnership required.  You can go make your own Windows frontend.  Once
you get it complete with all the features of the existing frontend and
bug free then maybe someone will pay you for yours rather than using that
old buggy mythfrontend that most of us never seem to have any issues with.
If you want to take the short route, just download mplayer.exe and mount
your MythTV recordings directory on your Windows box and have at it....

> Windows. We could continue to maintain our Linux-only open-source front-end, and a
> commercial Windows front-end would be available for those people who would be willing
> to pay for it. In return we could get a solid source of TV listings thrown in for the partnership.
> 
> (BTW, as a fringe benefit, it would solve our problem of lack of a good Windows front-end
> for MythTV. The WinMyth project sucks, to be totally blunt about it)

Who has this problem?  Myth's core developers are driven by what
they want.  Evidently none of us want a Windows frontend enough to port
mythfrontend to it although there are a few guys working it now but
no-one with commit access.

Anyway, I wish you well in your new frontend, I'll continue to use that
old buggy mythfrontend which I have to restart every 3-4 months on average.
Not because it dies of course, but because I decided to upgrade my
production boxes to SVN head again to take advantage of some new features or
to burn in some of my own patches on my production systems before committing
to SVN.

--
Chris