[mythtv-users] MythTV vs XBMC

[Jim Oltman]

On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 9:21 AM, John Marshall <mythtv at marshallparty.org>wrote:

> On 5/8/2014 9:17 AM, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 09:08 -0400, Phil Bridges wrote:
>>
>>> Is commercial skipping now supported on the XBMC MythTV plugin?
>>>
>>
>> It is, but it's either none or automatic.  No option to just have keys
>> which skip using the commercial break information.
>>
>
> That's a serious knock in my book.  Skipping in general seems better on
> Mythfrontend.



> ..deletia


OK, so just playing the "what if" game, if the Myth devs dropped Frontend
from their work, they could focus on making the PVR-CMyth plugin better to
add this exact functionality.


> Another dealbreaker is the lack (I think) of timestretch in XBMC.
>

Same as above.

>
> XBMC can probably do these two things, but I have buttons on my remote
> dedicated to bringing up the guide in Live TV, and also for cycling through
> the zoom options, both of which are very also important to me.
>

I have had issues with this on XBMC.  Dedicated buttons for zoom control
would be nice.  But, with all the time the devs would have freed up from
MythFE dev work, maybe they could submit patches to fix this.

>
> As far as eye candy and metadata and things like that, XBMC may do it
> better, but it's not that important to me.  Vertical lists of
> titles/filenames is good enough for me, and in fact animations or anything
> else that reduce the speed and responsiveness of the UI are negatives in my
> book.
>

Then get an XBMC skin that meets your needs. The animations don't seem any
slower than when I went into Videos from the main screen in my MythFE.

>
> I like that recorded programs are separate from long-term media.
>

I don't understand this point.  In my XBMC, I have things separated.
 MythBE has it's own VM and storage.  XBMC has several NFS shares.  I have
media separated like this:

TV Shows
Concerts
Music
Movies

This is the way that XBMC says you should have things stored and it works.
 So it seems that long-term media and recordings are separated by more than
just where they live in the file system.  In XBMC, I go to LiveTV then hit
down arrow to find my recordings.  Or I can go to TV Shows or Movies.  This
is helpful in that by separating the content (Movies/TV) you can set each
folder for a specific meta data grabber.  This works quite well.  I've also
started renaming movies & put them in their own folder.

Django Unchained (2012)/Django Unchained (2012).mkv

This way, if I want to store subtitles with the movie, I can download them
(using an awesome plugin) and save them to the correct folder.  Cover
art/NFO files are also saved to that folder.  It's just cleaner.

..Deletia

> John


Basically it seems that lots of people are not wanting to give up something
they're accustomed to.  I can understand that.  However, XBMC has a lot
more going for it.  Why re-invent the wheel?  Why not partner up and try to
make XBMC better for all?  I'm sure some will say "Choice is a good thing!"
and they're correct.  However, it seems that everyone wants XBMC features
crammed into MythFE but a simpler interface.  That's going to take years to
get there (if ever).

I hope people won't say that XBMC is impossible to get new/better features
built in because of it's size.  Just a version or 2 ago, the Audio Engine
in XBMC was a disheveled mess.  They rebuilt it from the ground up and now
it can handle the same audio that MythFE can.  So, rebuilds of these
critical components can and do happen.
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