[Discuss] Is MythTV dead?

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Tom Metro <tmetro-blu at vl.com> wrote:
> After years of using mvpmc as a front-end client, and more recently
> using XBMC (though not as a MythTV client), I really can't see the
> appeal in using the MythTV front-end.  ...
> If you use MythTV as a front-end, have you tried XBMC? If so, why do you
> prefer MythTV's front-end?

Thanks to your posting, I just did.  It was a F R U S T R A T I N G waste of 2
hours of my life.  The bottom line is summed up at
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=85488&page=2; basically, you can't get
there from here.  The XBMC developers have stalled on a "hard problem" the
same way the MythTV folks have.  Neither has had a major release in over 12
months.  There isn't even a patch out there to solve the problem:  if you are
running MythTV version 0.24, you can't run XBMC as a front-end.  Period, end
of story, it'll never work.  *Sigh*.  And you wonder why people run out to
Best Buy or the Apple Store to buy things that Just Plain Work.

The frustration for me is that even if you go to those stores, you can't solve
the Wife Acceptance Factor problem with any of the solutions on their shelves:
 a single remote control that calls up any media from any source from a single
on-screen menu, the way a VCR used to.

> ...this is an artifact
> of the MythTV back-end not integrating well with *anything* other than
> the MythTV front-end. The client-server architecture has always been
> sloppy, without good separation between the two halves.

Yes, MythTV has shown its age in this way; in fact what's always driven me
nuts about MythTV is that you cannot run a newer version of the frontend
against an older backend; it forces you to keep every component of your entire
system in lock-step.  If you want to make your living room system run a snazzy
new version, you have to update the backend and break your bedroom and
exercise-room system, until you upgrade those too.  At one point I dreamed of
setting up an actual business setting up MythTV systems for end users, but
that dream was smashed on the shoals of this version-upgrade issue (along with
the myriad other issues discussed in this thread:  I've concluded the
entertainment business must be left to the likes of Apple, LG, NBC/Universal
and Sony--there is no employment opportunity here for the little guy).

> What should have been there is a MythTV protocol feature that lets the
> front-end negotiate with the back-end for supported video formats, and
> employ VLC-style on-the-fly transcoding.

Agreed.  But the cows left the barn too many years ago.  Even a project
started from scratch, that included this architecture, no longer has any real
hope of widespread adoption.  This loss of hope, I think, is what's led to the
rise of 1960s-style protests against the Establishment.  (But ironically,
protesters are mostly using Apple products to communicate among one another. 
Something is truly twisted about this whole thing, given that Apple is the
largest-cap company on all of Wall Street.)

-rich