The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Linux Journal editor Nicholas Petreley is having a MythTV experience. "I admit that I find everything I have learned interesting, and I will enjoy writing it up as a Linux Journal article when I'm done taking this project to a point where I'm satisfied with the results. But I don't think I should have had to become so familiar with everything from driver firmware to the way television signals are formatted in order to get satisfactory results. It was never my goal to learn any of this."

to post comments

This is a common problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 17:18 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (6 responses)

I remember the first time that I set up ntpd, the network time protocol daemon. All I wanted was for my computer to keep the correct time.

But the ntpd author was the world's biggest time synchronization geek, and expected that everyone who set up ntpd should aspire to learn everything about the problem that he had learned. You can read all about frequency discipline, active/passive mode, "client/server broadcast/multicast and manycast, as described in the Associating Management page".

Or you can just never read the man page and use the setup your distro gives you, which is trivial (you can do this now, but it wasn't an option the first time I tried ntpd).

This is a common problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 17:46 UTC (Wed) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link]

ew ntpd, Good example of a crap (or overly) documented project indeed.
Took me 4 nights to grokk the options. Picking ideas from several unix manpages.

oh, another caveat with ntpd; be carefull that your dhcp client doesn't overwrite the config!

This is a common problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 18:38 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think it's also an example of loss of focus. If you're enough of a
timesynch geek to write something like ntp, you probably *do* care a lot
about microsecond accuracy, synching via specialized clock hardware and so
on: and the people who do that are important because they run the
low-stratum servers. So you tend to lose track of the fact that most
people (and just about everyone who needs the docs) are using ntp solely
to synch to some vague degree of within-a-second-or-two-don't-break-make
accuracy to a couple of servers out there on the net...

This is a common problem

Posted Aug 23, 2006 23:13 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (2 responses)

Use chrony?

Tell me about chrony

Posted Aug 24, 2006 0:25 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (1 responses)

Chrony can't be more trouble to understand than ntp, but what features does it offer? Is it easy enough to set up one master and have it be a server for a local net?

Tell me about chrony

Posted Aug 24, 2006 1:19 UTC (Thu) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

Haven't used chrony as a server but I found it satisfies my needs. When I have used ntpd it seemed to want to keep time accurate to within a very small fraction of a second, I don't need that and everything that went along with that kind of accuracy was more trouble than it was worth - for me. I just point chrony at my ISPs DNS and everything works great.

Heres the chrony description from Debian:
Description: Sets your computer's clock from time servers on the Net
It consists of a pair of programs :
`chronyd'. This is a daemon which runs in background on the system. It
obtains measurements (e.g. via the network) of the system's offset
relative to other systems, and adjusts the system time accordingly. For
isolated systems, the user can periodically enter the correct time by hand
(using `chronyc'). In either case, `chronyd' determines the rate at which
the computer gains or loses time, and compensates for this. Chronyd
implements the NTP protocol and can act as either a client or a server.
`chronyc'. This is a command-line driven control and monitoring program.
An administrator can use this to fine-tune various parameters within the
daemon, add or delete servers etc whilst the daemon is running.

This is a common problem

Posted Sep 2, 2006 21:33 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

And you can use pool.ntp.org (or us.pool.ntp.org -- or, if you must, 0.us.pool.ntp.org and 1. and 2.) as your timeservers.

And of course Dave Mills is a time geek. He wrote the fuzzball/PDP11 router code from the early days, which cared insanely about microseconds.

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 23, 2006 21:07 UTC (Wed) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (6 responses)

I have to agree that the whole linux TV thing seems to be inordinately difficult. I bought a USB2 DVB-T box at Christmas and now, 8 months later, I've got it sort-of working having spent an astonishing number of hours fighting with firmware, hotplug, udev, kernel versions, add-on module sources for em8300, lirc, and 2 different sorts of rt2570 driver, then discovering what my local transmitter was called, that I needed to run a runic scan command to get the stations from it, copy config files about, all about how digital telly is transmitted in muxes - which channels are in which muxes, that my old aerial is the wrong group and needed replacing (that bit at least would be the same with a conventional box), then how to install and configure VDR, mythtv, xine, kaffeine, and try to make them talk to my TV or the MPEG decoder card, and that hollywood plus, dxr3 and em8300 are essentially the same thing, but that they have loads of different options, none of which actually produce a working picture with my card, and that even if you get it working then mplayer can't display the menus over the TV picture, and how to configure lirc, and how to configure geexbox so it has your channels.conf and uses the right output hardware, then all about the different flavours of video output - shm and xv, and fbdev and, opengl etc.

And after all that I've basically discovered that my epia box isn't fast enough to decode mpeg2 at an adequte speed (although mplayer in geexbox gets close), my em8300 card is either broken or atypical, kaffeine is the only bit of software I've got useful telly out of, but only on my laptop, not on the media box, I've got lirc (and thus the remote) working on the laptop, but not on the media box, and I appear to be too stupid to get PVR or mythTV working at all.

I still have no idea how to get EPG working, nor am I quite sure what the list of freetoair channels is, and none of the radio channels seem to work.

It has all been highly educational, and even quite interesting, but I really didn't want to know this much about video, I just wanted a PVR that didn't cost a fortune, was reasonably flexible, and that the wife could use. I have plenty of other things I am supposed to be doing...

There is a really scary amount of room for improvement in terms of making it straightforward to make a general-purpose box into a PVR.

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 3:47 UTC (Thu) by laidlaws (guest, #26237) [Link] (4 responses)

What are television sets for? If I want a car, I don't buy a rocket ship. There is the same approach with the Wine project. Users want to run Linux and believe they are running Windows. Now there are plenty of Linux programs to do the equivalent job, or else I boot into Windows. The right tool for the right job is my philosophy.

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 25, 2006 0:52 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (3 responses)

TV sets are indeed great for watching analog TV. But mine can't do digital telly so I had to buy something, and they hardly ever do recording so that means yet another box (VCR or PVR). Obviously getting a freeview box would have worked pretty painlessly but would be less flexible and a proprietary PVR is expensive, and I'm sure the interface would annoy me one way or another. It really ought to be possible to make something better using non-proprietary stuff (and it obviously already is, and will get easier to do so as time passes).

OK, my previous posting was a bit of a rant. I meant absolutely no disrespect to the people working on this stuff - they are doing a fine job, and I'm not really helping them (beyond reporting a couple of my problems to relevant lists). But I really hadn't realised when I started just how 'beta' all this stuff currently is. I post merely as a warning to others contemplating the same game.

The 'less than v1.0' point is not really much of a clue. I use an awful lot of software with very small version numbers that shows no signs of 'betaness'. Version numbers are rather random in this regard.

For example Geexbox is already v1.0 and I haven't got that to show me any telly yet. The app that is by far the easiest to use so far is kaffeine and that is v0.8.1.

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 26, 2006 4:48 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I use Mythtv just to record tv shows mostly.

I am not a big TV watcher, but there is a occasional program I like to watch... but I keep odd hours and the times that these shows are on I don't want to or can't watch tv.

What I do is I have a WinPVR-250 have it plugged into my little server box at home. I watch movies on my computer monitor, and watch tv over the wireless on my laptop.

Also I've gotten rid of my TV more or less. Pretty much gave it to my roomate for the occasonal time we rent a movie of playstation game.

I don't know how many people know this, but with mythtv you can have it run as a window on your desktop. Go into settings and find the selection to add windows decorations. Then launch it like such:

mythfrontend --geometry 320x240

or 640x480 or 800x600 The only bad part is that you can't resize the window after you start it up.

So mythtv is a nice way to watch the news on your desktop in a little window.

Unfortunately I think that Mythtv has reached it's pinnacle. The developers are doing it without much care for their users (which is fine, it's their choice. Just stating a obsvervation) so while they do bug fixes and such unless your actually running the latest svn version of it don't expect a lot of help.

So it doesn't look like it's ever going to be easier to use. Not unless something dramatic happens to the mythtv developer community.

Now as far as the hardware goes. The IVTV project is working hard on getting it included into the kernel. They take care of the WinPVR series of tuners + mpeg2 encoding cards from Hauppage.

There is a USB2 device whose makers released code AND documentation for Liunx. (not a gentoo user, but here is a nice description of it)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_go7007

It has recent support from the Mythtv people. The nice thing about it is that it does mpeg4 compression so files are much smaller then the Hauppage mpeg2 encoding device.

I don't know much about the Europe DV* cards, though. (I wish U.S. standardized digital tv years ago like Europe did. Each cable company has it's own mpeg2 variant with encryption and crap like that so even if your a subscriber you can't get it without approved equipment)

For HDTV there is the pcHDTV device. It can do non-encrypted cable signals of certain types, but it's mostly usefull for broadcast over air HD. It's made specificly for Linux also. Doesn't even have Windows drivers!
http://www.pchdtv.com/

There is support for that in Mythtv also.

As for the future of easy-to-use TV don't look for Mythtv (like I said before) to acheive that.

Maybe Elisa from Fluendo?
http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/screenshots.php
http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/features.php

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Sep 2, 2006 21:58 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (1 responses)

But I really hadn't realised when I started just how 'beta' all this stuff currently is. I post merely as a warning to others contemplating the same game.

With all due respect, that's not the project's fault.

They're following the rules -- the version number's only 0.20, for ghod's sake. That other projects *fail* to release a 1.0 does give people a false perception of how version numbers are supposed to work

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 29, 2010 15:29 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

A very late update to that posting to snap the link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 13:51 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link]

Shall I remind you that MythTV is still pre 1.0 release ? This makes a big difference. Even when software is post 1.0, there are still some issues. If we were talking about non-beta software, I would agree that the setup is a pain for end-users but we're still talking beta software produced by talented people who certainly don't have all the various hardware that anyone can buy in order to test the setup, not counting all the combinations of hardware.

I recently setup a MythTV box. I knew it would be a pain but I chose to stick to usual hardware, not the latest greatest one as the author does all the time and by following the fairly simple steps found on wikis, and my box went up pretty quickly.

I still don't understand that guy (Nicholas Petreley). It seems he does everything to piss off programmers since he wants stuff to run out of the box when it's not ready for it. I'm a programmer, and if I could find spare time to help, I would love to, but based on some jerk reactions, I don't think I would stand it.

It's too easy to say: "I want (unpaid for) open-source software to run as if it was (paid for) closed-source software without doing anything".

The ongoing MythTV saga continues (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 17:00 UTC (Thu) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]

I thought this recent comment on Slashdot was interesting:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193371&cid=15864227