[mythtv-users] Anyone using arm with mythbackend?

[Raymond Wagner]

On Aug 19, 2013, at 16:10, Quinten Steenhuis <qsteenhuis at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Tyler T <tylernt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> As for a Myth BE, I already tried releasing PlugMyth, a MythTV
>> distribution for Kirkwood ARM devices, some time ago. You can find the
>> email chain in the archives. It did not receive a warm welcome. Which
>> is funny, because whenever someone complains about Myth, the response
>> is usually "it's open source, so fix it yourself". Well, I fixed it
>> myself, and all I got for my effort was abuse.
> 
> That's a bummer, I think lots of folks could benefit from your experience with this. I had seen your project in my research but didn't delve too deep after seeing it was with Mythbackend .23. I'm sorry someone discouraged you--an up to date version of your work would have made my experience trying to hack the GoFlex much better.

There needs to be some explanation of what "fixing it" means.  There really shouldn't be anything that needs fixing to run mythbackend on an ARM.  We have some low level ASM, but most of that should be inherited from ffmpeg, so if they support ARM, we should also be able to run on ARM.  The fundamental problem is that running the backend on such a system is very limiting.  There is no possibility for internal expansion.  There is limited possibility for external expansion.  There is little power to support external expansion.  The end result is that while you can make it work, and work fine, you cannot make it work on any decently sized system.  Claiming it's a happy wonderland to ignorant new users is going to do nothing but shine a bad light on the project once those new users start running up against those hardware limitations.  Running MythTV on an ARM is not something that should be done unless you already know what you're doing.  That's why there is a difference between minimum requirements and recommended minimum requirements, and just about anything ARM falls below the recommended minimum.

Now for something to do with ARM that would be very welcome, write an OpenMAX decoder.  ARM is pretty much dead in the water with regards to use as a frontend without support for hardware decoding.  Clean up memory usage on the frontend.  512MB is pretty much a bare minimum these days.  An AppleTV or RPi with only 256MB just won't cut it with mythfrontend's current memory usage.  Even XBMC has struggled with the RPi after the graphics core takes a big chunk of it.
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