[mythtv-users] A plea for some consideration for the poor suffering MythTV users

[Martin Brown]

I've been a MythTV user for nearly ten years now. I'm also lucky enough to have some UNIX admin skills. I pity the poor
MythTV-er who doesn't have a very broad range of skills with UNIX and programming in general.

I had to upgrade my whole system this week owing to some failed hardware and I really hoped that it would be as simple as:
    1. Install a recent Linux distribution (I chose the latest Mint, Maya)
    2. Download, compile and install the MythTV distribution
    3. Re-do the mythtv-setup
    4. Get back to enjoying MythTV

Instead, it has now taken me nearly two days solid work to get all the issues ironed out - and I still have one or two.
I've had problems ranging from the compilation bombing out with strange linux header version mis-matches to the frontend
crashing as soon as I tried to watch anything.

I urge everyone building and writing doco for MythTV to please consider the long suffering users.

For example, one of my main problems was with the sound. After hunting through masses of errors , stracing the frontend,
etc. I finally found it was down to one thing: I hadn't installed the ALSA firmware software package.

The starting point for any MythTV documentation should be a _complete_ list of packages needing to be added to the
standard distributions before most of it will work successfully. Here's my list to be getting on with:

  *
    xmltv
  *
    mysql-server
  *
    libqt3-mt
  *
    libqt3-mt-dev
  *
    libmp3lame0
  *
    libmp3lame-dev
  *
    x11proto-video-dev0
  *
    libxxf86vm-dev
  *
    libgl1-mesa-dev
  *
    ffmpeg
  *
    libqt3-mt-mysql
  *
    php5-mysql
  *
    python-mysqldb (For archiving, burning DVDs)
  *
    mjpegtools (For archiving, burning DVDs)
  *
    libnet-upnp-perl
  *
    yasm
  *
    libmysql-devel
  *
    mythtv-python
  *
    libqt4-sql-mysql
  *
    libasound2-dev

Thanks for 10 years of MythTV!
Martin