[mythtv-users] OT: XBMC frontend use?

[Nick Rout]

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Gary Buhrmaster
<gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 10:37 PM, Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:
> .....
>> It has seemed to me for a while now at least that if the effort that is
>> currently spread across all of the bits and pieces that the Myth
>> frontend does (which replicates much of what XBMC does already) were
>> refocused onto XBMC to bring it's PVR functionality up to the level of
>> functionality that the frontend has, it would be a net win, IMHO.
>
> While I have only run XBMC in various test scenerios, I, for
> one, look forward to your code contributions to the XBMC
> project to improve its capabilities.  Having choices is
> usually a good thing.

I use xbmc more and more. My two main boxes are mythbuntu with
0.27+fixes, and they also have XBMC 12.3 on them. Despite claims in
this thread to the contrary, XBMC 12.3 does work with myth 0.27, you
just need to compile the mythtv plugin to get the later code than is
included with xbmc 12.3.

These boxes also dual boot with openelec, a specialised XBMC distro.
They have been running openelec 4.0 beta lately, which has been
tracking along with XBMC development code.

Now that XBMC 13.0 has been released, openelec has moved to 4.0. I can
report that mythtv frontend works fine in terms of what it is, but it
isn't mythfrontend (mfe) because:

1. The scheduling is dumbed down compared to mfe. No "series" recording.
2. no fast playback
3. not as good interface to recordings - unless I am missing something
the only list I get is of series in order of latest recording (latest
at the top), so looking last night for my latest recording of Grand
Designs I have to scroll thru a lot of stuff because it last recorded
a fortnight or more ago.
4. Skip functions are fine for watching ripped movies/tv but not so
good for recorded/live tv with ad breaks. I think this has been
alluded to earlier in this thread.

In all I think XBMC is very good, and makes a serviceable frontend if
you use mythweb for scheduling (which I tend to do anyway). I can stay
in XBMC (particularly openelec) for days at a time and still enjoy
plenty of recorded TV. I am glad to see commskip come to XBMC although
I don't use it myself.

Horses for courses. Some of this is that myth has always been about tv
recording/watching, xbmc has previously been about ripped media and
streaming.


Anyway, end of random thoughts.