[mythtv-users] RANT: MythTV has a *horrible* end userexperience.

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Feb 26 02:04:03 UTC 2008


On 02/25/2008 10:40 AM, jedi at mishnet.org wrote:
> Deletes seem more painful than they should be. They are unecessarily
> slow

With slow deletes enabled, it takes about 2min/GB on my system.  This
works out to just the right speed for deletes.  However, I have a
feeling you're trying to say, "The user interface seems slow when I
delete a file."  If so, you'll be very pleasantly surprised by 0.21.

>  and tend to crash the backend.
>   

I haven't seen any of your backtraces, so I haven't attempted to fix the
cause of the segfaults on your system.  I can say that mine never
segfaults...

> There seems to be a common approach of "fetch everything and let the
> client sort it out" that slows down a number of things like fetching
> the list of recordings in MythWeb. I suspect this causes problems in
> the frontend too.
>   

Again...  0.21...  Pleasantly surprised.

> There doesn't seem to be the option of deleting a single tuner card.
>   

D (Yes.  I really meant to type only a single character.  That's the key
you press to delete a single capture card.)

> I removed one because the driver was causing kernel panics,

You mean you physically removed the card from the system...

>  deleted
> the offending kernel module ko file and still Myth wants to try and
> tune into it.

before you removed the information about that card from the MythTV
setup.  If you were able to get the card configured in MythTV (which
takes a bit longer than deleting it),

>  Myth could be a bit brighter about missing hardware.
> (any sql hints for doing this delete directly?)
>   

Since you didn't do it in the right order, you have two options:  a)
reinstall the capture card and drivers and then remove the capture card
individually from mythtv-setup as above or b)
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/264034#264034 .

> That said, minor bugs that crash either the frontend or backend are
> easy to work around either with a kill script or keepalive script.
>   

While I have a keepalive for the frontend (because video is full of
errors, so it's not uncommon for it to cause a segfault in libav*), you
shouldn't need anything of the sorts for the backend.  If you do, we'd
love to see backtraces created from a debug build of MythTV as described
at http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-22.html#ss22.2 .

> Although with any PVR there's the problem of creating and maintaining
> rules and pruning out stuff that you don't want wasting space. This
> can be a bit of a pain even with a Tivo.


Yep.  It's your data so we let you clean it up.  Though autoexpire will
allow Myth to manage the recordings files, and rules for shows that
ended and whose episodes you've recorded won't be an issue with
duplicate matching enabled (and good guide data), it still is nice to
keep the data clean.  In the future, perhaps we'll have some tools to
help out...  (Now I just need the time to finish some of my ideas.)

Mike


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