[mythtv-users] time zone with distant frontend

[Michael T. Dean]

On 12/29/2009 09:26 PM, f-myth-users wrote:
>     > Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:12:19 -0500
>     > From: "Michael T. Dean"
>
>     > Oh, and, really, does /anyone/ have 2 hosts running MythTV applications 
>     > that /are/ actually in different time zones?  (Perhaps I should really 
>     > say, "Does /anyone/ who isn't stealing (cable, satellite, ...) service...")
>
> The use case I've always had in mind for differing timezones between
> frontends & backends is travelers who want to stream stuff from home.
> I always reset my laptop to the local time, so if I also tried to
> stream stuff, that would be an issue.  But this is probably a very
> small slice of potential users.  (And I've never tried this; if I'm
> traveling, the last thing I want to do is watch TV.  Business
> travelers who spend half their time in hotels in random cities they
> don't care about probably have a very different opinion.)  Setting the
> TZ via env vars at the mythfrontend startup is probably a good-enough
> workaround for that.
>   

s/workaround/solution/

After all, if you're a traveler who normally lives in the East Coast, 
US, and you're traveling to California and you reset your laptop time 
zone to America/Los_Angeles, do you /really/ want to see the EPG and 
recordings from primetime listed as occurring at 5:00-8:00pm?  Wouldn't 
it be easier to see the times you're used to so that you can easily find 
the recordings you're looking for when sorting by starttime (as the 
Watch Recordings screen does)?

All this notwithstanding the upstream bandwidth limitations at home, let 
alone the "shared by the entire hotel, including a ton of 
bandwidth-abusive guests" Internet connection provided by the hotel.  In 
other words, the airplane you rode to the West Coast has a /lot/ more 
bandwidth than the hotel (so load up your recordings on the hard drive 
before you leave--I've been doing that for years, now).

> This gets dicier if smartphones start getting spiffy enough to run
> mythfrontend on (perhaps they already are).  Such phones might track
> what they perceive to be the local timezone and may insist on using
> whatever -their provider- claims is the timezone, which might not map
> to any timezone on a Linux box at all.  Again, an env var setting
> trick might be enough on any phone capable of running a frontend in
> the first place, but it's one more thing we may see questions about...
> [And it may be that nobody would want to spend their bandwidth on it,
> but such predictions are usually wrong for -somebody-...]

Of course, I'll lay odds that the smartphone won't be running 
mythfrontend (at least not in its current incarnation), and will likely 
be running a MythTV client application that was designed for the 
smartphone (and all its limitations).

Mike