[Discuss] Is MythTV dead?

[tmetro-blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Rich Braun wrote:
> Tom Metro wrote:
>> 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

That thread didn't illuminate much, other than to say XBMC doesn't work
with MythTV v.0.24 because MythTV changed the protocol.

mvpmc faces the same obstacle every time MythTV alters its protocol or
schema. This is just another artifact of the poor architecture employed
by MythTV.

It also doesn't help that the non-MythTV clients are treated like 2nd
class members of the MythTV ecosystem. With the increasing popularity of
XBMC, it may become harder for MythTV devs to ignore the alternative
clients.


> 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.

What's the "hard problem" in the case of XBMC?


> 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.

An early message in the thread you referenced said you could get it to
work if you built XBMC from source. Perhaps that was inaccurate.

XBMC actually uses the MythTV client library developed for mvpmc and I
see on the mvpmc users list that they had a 0.24 compatible firmware
build in September:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.multimedia.mvpmc.user/2992

And in December on the developers list they got started working on
0.24.1 compatibility:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.multimedia.mvpmc.devel/6349

So I'm not sure why XBMC doesn't have a 0.24 compatible build (if that
is indeed still the case). A search of the forums turns up:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=110694&highlight=0.24

which is announcing the availability of a new plugin for XBMC that takes
a different approach (see below), and supports MythTV 0.24.


> Period, end of story, it'll never work.  *Sigh*. 

I'm assuming you are exaggerating to make a point...


> And you wonder why people run out to Best Buy or the Apple Store
> to buy things that Just Plain Work.

Sure, but this has always been true if you are willing to accept
limited, canned functionality. And it has often been the case with open
source, even though we should be striving to eliminate these
complications. As an experienced open source user you can't really
exclaim surprise at this.

Getting a smoothly running home theater setup with open source software
is no different from how you approached building a Linux PC in years
past. It takes research to find what hardware and software components go
together well.

So for example, if you knew you wanted to run XBMC as your front end,
and found it didn't support MythTV 0.24, then use MythTV 0.23. (Granted,
not a very practical option if you've already upgraded to 0.24.)

A lot of the frustrations you seem to be expressing are centered around
being able to run the very latest MythTV, but I don't recall you saying
why that was important. The older MythTV releases do the job pretty well.

The good news is that even if DVRs are past peak, the open source media
player field is still very active and expanding. See last week's
announcement from Canonical of Ubuntu TV. And there are still enough
open source developers using MythTV who want to make it accessible from
the newer platforms. See for example this early stage MythTV client for
Android (developed by the lead mvpmc developer):
https://github.com/cmyth/lcm_android

perhaps someday becoming a Google TV app.


>> 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. 

My thought is that the best way to approach this is to create a proxy
server that runs on the MythTV back-end. This would be something that on
one side is tightly integrated with MythTV (knows about the database
schema, etc.) and gets revisioned with MythTV, while providing some
generalized DVR protocol as a public interface. (It looks like the
MythTV devs have taken some steps towards reducing the need to monkey
with the database directly by providing info in XML:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Category:MythXML )

While chasing links in the XBMC thread you referenced I ran across this:

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=MythTV_PVR_Addon
(see also: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=82015 )

which appears to be talking about an XBMC plugin using some XBMC DVR API
that implements a MythTV client. (I believe this is a different animal
than the current MythTV client for XBMC. This wiki page was created
about a year ago, and is actively being updated.) This implies that the
XBMC guys have dreamed up a generalized DVR API. (Looks like this plugin
uses the same libcmyth library from mvpmc, but the UI in XBMC is
DVR-like with program guides, scheduling, etc. rather than treating
MythTV like a passive, read-only media source.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/