[Discuss] MythTV: from bad to worse. Start over?

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On 12/04/2011 09:40 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
> I've almost gotten to the point of ripping out MythTV.  The project is falling
> over under its own weight (millions of lines of code abruptly added the past
> couple of years), the last major version is riddled with bugs, and developers
> seem unconcerned about the user community's desire for releases/bug fixes more
> often than once every couple of years.
> 
> What's got me ticked off tonight is a bug summed up at this URL:
> http://answerpot.com/showthread.php?2677877-Ticket+%239834%3A+Mythvideo+scan+lost+all+metadata
> 
> If you're on a frontend box which fails to properly mount the backend's video
> volumes, you get no warning upon "scan for changes".  The net effect is to
> truncate all video data, forcing you to revert to a MySQL database backup
> (presuming you have one).  Fortunately my backups are frequent, but the
> developer's response in closing this bug report as "not a bug" belongs back in
> the 1980s.

Wow.  That's... impressive.  And representative of what I see on the
mailing list frequently.

I can understand how the change in architecture could prevent a warning
dialog "are you sure?" dialog box, but surely the back end can return a
status code, so it could check whether the recordings are there and
refuse to run if not, reporting the condition to the front end.

> What direction should I take now that I've really finally had *enough* of
> MythTV?  I want to reformat the hard drives of all my frontends and start over
> fresh.  The goal is to be able to scroll through a couple thousand DVD ISO
> images, with meta data/cover art, and from the same user interface have a
> reasonably easy to use PVR system that records/plays back Boston's
> over-the-air channels.  Doesn't need to do a whole lot more than that.

"Doesn't need to do a whole lot more than that" is a whole lot.  I don't
know of anything else that has MythTV's PVR functionality, which is what
it was really designed for.  If I were you I would consider completely
different solutions for PVR and DVD if you're unhappy with the way
MythTV deals with that.