[mythtv-users] Live TV playback frustration

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Wed Aug 8 20:22:47 UTC 2012


On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 15:17 -0400, Jim Morton wrote:
> On 8/8/2012 3:01 PM, Saul A. Peebsen wrote:
> > On Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:15:53 -0400
> > Jim Morton <Jim at Morton.hrcoxmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Mostly people that use DVRs for any length of time get away from
> >> watching live tv. The advantages of recording everything you might
> >> possibly want to watch and then then picking from what has been
> >> recorded are many. I don't know of any advantages to watching live tv.
> > I beg to differ.
> That's why I said "mostly"...

Yes, but you also said "I don't know of any advantages to watching live
tv", and I would say that depends a lot on your usage patterns. With a
couple hundred channels available, it's not possible to record
"everything we might possibly want to watch". My wife enjoys channel
surfing, and with two HD-PVRs taking up the set top boxes, using MythTV
is the *only* way to get HD onto the main TV. (We do have one of the
digital converters, but that of course is SD-only and only gets the
"expanded basic" tier of channels). So there is a use case for LiveTV;
she may sit down and not have a clear idea in advance of what she wants
to watch, and she wants to decide by watching a bit of it rather than
going through listings and setting up a recording.

All that said, we are watching recordings 95% of the time. When we do
know what we're going to be watching, it is very nice to be able to skip
the commercials with a single button press, and even for sporting
events, I don't mind watching it an hour behind real time to gain the
advantage of skipping commercials. Heck, with something like the
Olympics, even NBC's "live" coverage is usually several hours behind
here in the USA.

But for that 5% of the time, it is very handy to have LiveTV available.
So "mostly" may be accurate, but "no advantages" is not. I'm sure the
devs understand this, which is why they want LiveTV to work even if they
themselves don't use it.

--Greg




More information about the mythtv-users mailing list