MythTV 0.24 - some comments

[Rich Braun]

The newest version of MythTV came out on the 10th of November, and it has a
lot of rewritten code along with Blu-ray support so I thought it'd be a big
win.

One major improvement I found is closed-captioning now looks like that of a
regular TV (much better choices for fonts, meaninful contrast, longer
on-screen time).

In the couple weeks I've been using it, the software has not crashed except on
a few of the DVD ISO images known to cause crashest in the past.

Alas, I found that it didn't play my numerous problematic DVD ISO images any
better than before despite "substantial rework, stabilization, and improvement
of DVD playback," the MythNetVision installation still doesn't produce a
usable result, and then I also discovered buried several screens down in the
release notes that:

"DVD Ripping Settings Screens - DVD import/riping support has been removed, so
remove settings"

Scanning for audio, as suggested in the release notes, didn't work
automatically; settings from 0.23 didn't work and I had to fiddle with manual
settings for 15 minutes before the speakers finally woke up.

The feature that supposedly "automatically attempt[s] to grab all metadata for
items as they are inserted into the library" doesn't work for me; I will have
to do some debugging (with previous versions, you had to press Info and to
download movie-descripton metadata from an online IMDB-like database).

Thumbnails for scheduled recordings are no longer generated on my backend,
something else I need to debug (might be the same problem, if there is a new
path name for which I need to set appropriate permissions).

This version seems to represent one of the biggest MythTV updates I've seen in
the past 3 years; it's got some rough edges that I hope will get polished in
0.25.  The overall look has not yet been updated; it still looks more
2002-vintage Tivo than 2010-vintage Android O/S.  But those cosmetic things
can be tweaked easily; the basic functionality of MythTV is really not found
in any of the myriad systems whose functionality goals are comparable.

I'll write a separate post looking for suggestions on DVD ISO generation and
usage of MythNetvision.

-rich