[mythtv-users] Frontend as cable settop box--using Live-TV

[Kenni Lund]

2013/8/8 Rich West <Rich.West at wesmo.com>:
> On 08/08/2013 12:42 PM, lists.md301 wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 12:20 PM, Kenni Lund <kenni at kelu.dk> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Den 08/08/2013 16.23 skrev "lists.md301" <lists.md301 at gmail.com>:
>>
>>
>> >
>> > I throw this out as food for thought:
>> >
>> > I realize (and understand) that Live-TV has been of late a somewhat
>> > buggy/neglected feature, for good reasons.  Occasionally people question its
>> > value, and I have generally agreed with that.  I will offer a contrary point
>> > of view now, and this is not a plea for any current "issues" to be fixed
>> > soon, but just a reason for developers not to abandon it entirely.
>> >
>> ><..snip..>
>
> Out of curiosity, what is the ticket number of the bug report for this live
> TV crash? I don't remember seeing such a report recently.
>
> Best regards
> Kenni
>
>
>
> Really, you're going to mock me?  I like to think I follow the mailing list
> (and IRC) pretty closely.  I didn't think there was any secret that there
> are issues with LiveTV.  I'm sorry if you took offense that I used a short
> hand "crash", which may not be technically accurate--but I don't think it's
> a far off characterization that using LiveTV can be problematic, maybe
> ultimately requiring a frontend or backend restart.
>
> I happen to heed the suggestion of several developers I have seen here on
> the list over the years, to NOT use LiveTV but instead schedule a recording
> and watch it in-progress.  I do this for pretty much all of my MythTV
> viewing.  I only use LiveTV when I'm testing my setup after some kind of
> change (usually channel lineup and/or tuner modification), so I have never
> personally witnessed a crash--hence no ticket opportunity from me.
>
> I asked the question several weeks about the state of MythTV anticipating
> 0.27, as I am on still on 0.24-fixes, because it is stable enough for me and
> I have seen issues (from reading the mailing list and then looking at the
> open tickets) that have made me unwilling to upgrade (because I don't have
> the time to experiment properly and be prepared to revert if it doesn't work
> well for me).  The one thing I have noticed, from reading the list, is that
> "flakiness" has gotten worse (for various reasons) since 0.24, and pretty
> consistently no developers have had the inclination to dive deep and
> investigate because none of them use it.  Stuff like only a couple of
> channel changes before LiveTV gets stuck, or not properly switching between
> tuners after a while.
>
> If you or anyone is willing to say I'm mistaken about all the stability of
> LiveTV, I would be happy to hear that.  Part of the difficulty of searching
> the mailing list archives is knowing when something is truly resolved.
> Sometimes people are silent because of success, but also because they have
> given up in frustration.
>
> I just hope I don't see myself being mocked on IRC for sharing my scenario
> and opinion, and now asking a question.  I'm most not definitely asking for
> my pet issue to be fixed now or soon, just suggesting that there may be a
> user base for an existing feature that has historically had issues and for a
> variety of reasons, hasn't gotten much attention.  If in a subsequent
> release the developers decided to remove LiveTV entirely, I wouldn't
> complain about that decision.
>
>
> Maybe I missed something in the thread, but I don't think he was trying to
> mock you at all.  I think he was trying to make sure the problem was
> reported somewhere and not lost here on the list.

I'm not trying to mock you, I'm trying to make sure that critical bugs
aren't left behind in several MythTV versions due to lack of bug
reports. I haven't heard of or experienced any live TV crashes
(segfaults or errors causing mythfrontend to exit Live TV with an
error message) for a long time and I was therefore looking for a
recent ticket describing the issue. If you're on 0.24 that explains
why I wasn't able to find any tickets.

Once you have completed the upgrade to 0.27 you might want to keep up
with the current versions of MythTV, in order to receive the major
fixes/rewrites which doesn't get backported to earlier versions of
MythTV. You will perhaps experience some regressions when upgrading to
a new major version, but luckily these are usually minor and are
usually ironed out within a few weeks after a release (especially if
someone reports the issues in our bugtracker). Judging from your
message, it sounds like you already had what I would consider as major
issues with your current setup (live TV crashes), which likely was
fixed in 0.25 or 0.26.

Best regards
Kenni