[mythtv-users] Live TV playback frustration

[Adrian Saul]

> Oh - my humble experience are really in favour of 0.26.
That seems to be a consensus, which is good to hear.   I need to throw a 
few Ubuntu release upgrades at my setup to jump onto that train though.  
Therein lies my most hated part of looking after my mythtv setup - 
finding what random config and kernel changes show up post OS upgrade.   
Mind you I am from a Solaris background, so I am more comfortable with 
an upgrade and switch style OS upgrade, rather than upgrade in place and 
pray, but I have worked that into my setup anyway.

> Lets put aside for moment OP context (which for me seems to be rather 
> particular installation/config issue):
I would not doubt it - after 6 years I have no doubt there is some DB 
crud and stale config hanging around, but nothing I have found so far 
that would explain these issues.

> 0.26 has many fundamental changes i.e. within thread 
> locking/synchronization infrastructure which I clearly see as huge 
> improvement. I feel them in daily use. Believe me !
> Currently I would say 0.26 is first release I would qualify as: it 
> works as it should (regarding PVR/LiveTV functions).
Again, good to hear.   Like I said, we have used this for 6 years. We 
have used various workarounds for bugs, and there are features my wife 
won't use out of bad experience.  But on the whole over the years I have 
had more issues from OS  and hardware problems than Myth itself, or at 
least the hardware problems caused more pronounced issues than Myth itself.

>
> One thing IMHO is important at this stage: distinguishing design bugs 
> from implementation bugs.
> There are many commits in 0.26 addressing first category.
> This is great and it will highly pay-off for general MythTV stability. 
> Sure, it will be still masked by implementation bugs.
> In my experience all this is normal in software development and I'm 
> really happy that dev's are on exactly this route. There are many 
> alternative temptations so keeping this route requires some maturity...
> I think currently MythTV quality is enough high to look into OP system 
> setup as clearly there is possibility to have running MythTV with 
> production quality....

As above, in 6 years this is the first time I am sure my hardware and 
platform are solid and its really the first strong dig into MythTV 
itself I have had to do that was not answered by google or upgrading to 
a current version.  It has had quirks and a fair amount of cursing 
thrown at it, but I have yet to find anything else would convince me to 
switch away.   We have been using it as "production" in that time - the 
TVs do not even have their own antenna feed and both TVs in the house 
are driven by the one backend.  Its so production  most of the time my 
only windows for upgrades are when it is not recording anything between 
1am and 6am.   My children are confused at my parents house that they 
cannot simply pull up whatever show they want and watch it on demand.

For free software we have gotten quite a lot out of it.