[mythtv-users] MythTV and the "average" user...

[jedi]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 12:04:14AM -0400, Ronald Frazier wrote:
> >> I've had a TiVo for 4.5 years, and other than maybe 3 times that I had
> >> to unplug it to reboot it, it has worked flawlessly. On the other
> >> hand, the mythbox needs regular intervention and behaves irratic on a
> >> regular basis.
> >
> >    From what I've seen of this it is mostly the frontend crashing or
> > locking up and that's pretty easy to create simple workarounds for. The
> > backend even crashes infrequently but that too is rather simple to
> > workaround. A decent INNODB setup on mysql might even solve the problem
> > of a hard box crash on the backend borking the db.
> 
> But it's not quite so simple. There are a host of things that can go
> wrong, and I don't know that its so easy to detect. Some of the things
> I've experienced recently (plenty of examples, but these are fresh on
> my mind)
> 

    LiveTV is well known as a neglected part of MythTV. I am not sure
I would recommend a PVR of any sort to anyone that would view LiveTV
as a must-have feature of their PVR. It's just not what this sort of
device is about.

[ LiveTV complaints 1-4 ]
 
> 5) DVD playback - between the Arccos protected discs, and discs that
> dont play for various other reason (Just last night I ran into a DVD
> that won't play becaue "libdvdnav: RANDOM or SHUFFLE titles are NOT

What was it?

I've never seen a disk not play in Linux due to anything but a faulty
disk or extra copy protection and I have played/ripped a LOT of stuff. 
Both of those are fairly unusual occurences and don't seem to occur 
with any greater frequency than bad disks in general.

Regular DVDs can be just plain annoying at times even when they do work
properly.

> handled yet."). Granted, Sony makes defective DVDs, and a TiVo can't
> even play DVDs at all, but when it comes to consumer electronics for
> the mass market, if you are going to give your average consumer a
> feature, it needs to work reliably.
> 
> 
> Now it probably sounds like I'm ragging on mythtv. Again, don't get me
> wrong...I love the software. I wouldn't spend so much time with it,
> and contribute patches and bug reports, and help people on this forum
> if I didn't love it as much as I do. But I can't just turn a blind eye
> to it's faults, and my experience tells me I wouldn't dare put this is
> the hands of someone who isn't tech savvy unless I was there to
> handhold them and fix problems on the spot.
> 
> -- 
> Ron
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