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Media Television Linux

MythTV 0.22 Released 329

Posted by timothy from the excess-of-caution dept.
uyguremre writes "After a little over a year and a half in the making, the developers of MythTV announced that MythTV 0.22 is now available. There have been a lot of large changes since 0.21, including a port from Qt v3 to Qt v4 and a major UI rewrite to convert to MythTV's new MythUI user interface libary. As always, this release adds support for some new hardware, in this case VDPAU video acceleration, DVB-S2, and the Hauppauge HD-PVR. The MythUI toolkit allows themes much greater control over the user interface and today we're announcing a competition to design new themes for MythTV. With the new release comes a theming competition too. For a more complete list of changes and new features, read the Release Notes on the wiki."
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MythTV 0.22 Released More

MythTV 0.22 Released

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  • .01 Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Telvin_3d ( 855514 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:08AM (#30028604)

    So, let's get this right, in this update they have:
    - Major back-end changes
    - Major UI rewrite
    - Significant new hardware support
    - Also, apparently a more powerful themes toolkit

    And this isn't even worth a .1 version increment. It's a .01

    Really, if the version numbers are going to be this meaningless for tracking significant changes they should at least name them or come up with some other system. Something that let's people get interested and involved in the project and excited about the new release.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I was under the impression that people got interested and involved because of... well, the list of fancy new features. If it was called "Dastardly DVR," think it would somehow improve it?

      In that case, it's actually MythTV Eleventy Thrillion, Titty Tivo!

      • Re:.01 Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Telvin_3d ( 855514 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:46AM (#30028886)

        Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at .20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is .22. Now, based on that .02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?

        No, don't go overboard. It doesn't need to be silly but it does need to provide a realistic feel of how the project is progressing. If your release notes are including the words 'major' and 'significant' and 'large changes' and 'major rewrite' it might be a good clue that it's worth going up by an entire .1

        Or since I'm sure all these didn't happen over night or perfectly in sync it may have called for some internal development releases that would have this public release be 2.5 or something.

        Or, yes, give it a name. It works for Ubuntu.

        • I'm not a fan of arbitrary naming instead of incremental, but I agree that it needs a bigger version bump.

          Projects like this usually have timelines that go something like this:

          2002 -> 2009: 0.01 -> 0.22
          2009 -> 2011: 0.23 -> 0.74
          2011 -> 2012: 0.74 -> 2.2

          Not saying it'll happen with MythTV - but version numbers seem to arbitrarily accelerate as soon as v1 is passed. They also accelerate on approach to v1.

          I much prefer build numbers.

          Software v1.1 b135
          Software v1.1 b158
          Software v1.2 b192
          etc.

          Th

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by agrif ( 960591 )

          Versions are numbered this way due to tradition.

          Each numbered part of a version number is supposed to be taken on it's own as an integer. The jump from 0.2 to 0.3 is the same as 0.21 to 0.22. And yes, this means that version 0.2 is much earlier than 0.20, whether or not that makes intuitive sense.

          I'm not saying that these scheme makes any sense, or really helps at all for people new to open source. I'm just saying that's how this particular tradition works, and given time most people pick it up easily enou

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by ookaze ( 227977 )

          Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at .20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is .22. Now, based on that .02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?

          And while you're stuck with your obsessive compulsive nonsense on version numbers, people that actually care are using it.
          Besides, it's not .20, it's 0.20, and it's a version number, meaning it can become 0.22.1 for example. You must learn to read more carefully, you managed to miss the "0" a lot.
          I guess you only focus on useless things.

    • .01 and the TV Myth (Score:5, Funny)

      by syousef ( 465911 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:32AM (#30028768) Journal

      Clearly you haven't dealt with MythTV. The myth is that you get to watch and record TV. The reality is you spend all your time fiddling with it and cursing at it until your head is so bloody from banging it up against a brick wall that you give up and decide to give up TV altogether.

      • Re:.01 and the TV Myth (Score:5, Funny)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @01:42AM (#30029206) Homepage Journal

        The reality is you spend all your time fiddling with it and cursing at it until your head is so bloody from banging it up against a brick wall that you give up and decide to give up TV altogether.

        Close. The reality is that you spend so much time banging your head up against a brick wall that you just think you're watching TV.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by flithm ( 756019 )

          The reality is you spend all your time fiddling with it and cursing at it until your head is so bloody from banging it up against a brick wall that you give up and decide to give up TV altogether.

          Close. The reality is that you spend so much time banging your head up against a brick wall that you just think you're watching TV.

          I know that these are funny, but just so people know, it's really not true. Setting up MythTV is really quite easy, and if you're building a box specifically to run mythtv hardware support is a complete non-issue. Get one of the better capture cards (check the support list), and everything Will Just Work.

          I've been running Myth for years, and there was a time when installing it was problematic to say the least, but seriously, setting up MythTV these days is no harder than installing an app from your packag

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cowbutt ( 21077 )
        Speak for yourself. My MythTV system has been happily recording and playing back TV for over three years. I used Jarod C. Wilson's guide [wilsonet.com]. I think it took about a day to get the core functionality working, then I got the rest (emulator games, playback improvements, IR remote behaviour) tweaked to my liking over the course of the next month.

    • It's just a number. Really.

      Would it matter if it was going from version 2007 to 2009 (like MS office)? That's only a 0.1% change. At least .21 to .22 is a 4.5% change!

    • How version numbers work (Score:4, Informative)

      by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @03:06AM (#30029592) Homepage Journal

      And this isn't even worth a .1 version increment. It's a .01

      If they're recording their version numbers like most software does, the move from 0.21 to 0.22 is what you're calling a ".1" release.

      Version numbers aren't meant to be like normal decimal numbers. The stuff the the right of the decimal point is the integral minor release number. Going from 0.21 to 0.22 means an increment of one minor version, not a "hundredth" of a major version release.* There's no such thing as a ".01 release."

      In other words, the jump from 0.21 to 0.22 is the same "amount" of version increase as the jump from 0.1 to 0.2. if you're at version 4.9 of something and you push out a minor release, its version will be 4.10, not 5.0, which would indicate a major release. Likewise, version 4.1 of software is most emphatically not the same thing as version 4.10.

      It's also why a lot of version numbers have multiple decimal points, such as 4.9.1326. (The 1326 in this case is likely a build or other sub-minor revision number.) Obviously, if you're trying to interpret that as some kind of fraction between 4 and 5, it's meaningless.

      * Just to satisfy the pedants, there are some exceptions. Some software with lots of minor revision milestones number early minor revisions x.01, x.02, etc. Also, some software uses a version numbering scheme in which odd numbers are development versions and even numbers are stable versions, so for example, x.14 would be a stable release and x.15 would be the next development release. And some developers give their software stupid-ass meaningless version names instead, such as "Millennium Edition," "XP," and "Vista," so that you really have no idea what the hell you're running outside of a general four-year or so time window.

      To my knowledge, none of these schemes apply to MythTV, thank god.

    • Really, if the version numbers are going to be this meaningless for tracking significant changes they should at least name them or come up with some other system. Something that let's people get interested and involved in the project and excited about the new release.

      Since when have version numbers been consistently meaningful across more than one project/program? Just do like everybody else and see a new version number as an indicator that there is something different from the last version. Version numbers ARE meaningless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Thnurg ( 457568 )

      Software versioning does not necessarily follow the decimal system.
      It has not gone from "point two one to point two two".
      It has gone from "dot twenty one to dot twenty two", which in standard software versioning terms means it is still on the original code base but has had extra features added.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by andersa ( 687550 )

      It's just an integer increment. 1, 2, 3, ..., 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on. And they do a major rewrite of some part of it every time.

    • You seem to be confused. '.22' doesn't mean '.2.2' it's just a single revision number. So going from .21 to .22 is no less meaningful than going from .1 to .2

  • database (Score:4, Interesting)

    by visualight ( 468005 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:11AM (#30028638) Homepage

    Did they fix the database encoding in this one?

    • [from his sig]
      --
      Boycott Hollywood during December 2009 [No DVD's for Christmas, no Christmas BlockBusters] Spread the word.

      Why, might I ask? (I suppose my sig makes this question kind of ironic/dumb-sounding... What specifically have they done this time?)

    • Re:database (Score:4, Informative)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:50AM (#30028930) Journal

      Did they fix the database encoding in this one?

      That depends on what you mean by "fix".

      With MythTV 0.22, the database is expected to be configured with the UTF-8 character set. If you're upgrading a database that has been used with a previous version (which required the database to use the latin1 character set), you need to fix your database [mythtv.org].

      I would guess that if you're using MythTV as packaged by a major distro, by the time your distro delivers 0.22 it will probably handle the character set conversion automatically.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by paul248 ( 536459 )

        Ah, yes, I had to do the "fix your database" thing yesterday. Based on the complexity of the guide, I'm guessing a lot of users will just wipe and reinstall everything, rather than attempt to go through that ridiculous manual process.

        • Not those of us with wives that have enormous emotional investments in their collection of Jane Austen movies...

      • If you're upgrading a database that has been used with a previous version (which required the database to use the latin1 character set), you need to fix your database.

        Not exactly. The various MythTV binaries are supposed to cleanly update any 0.21 database to 0.22. The character set conversion issue described on that page is due to the default MySQL settings as shipped with Gentoo.

  • I for one welcome our MythTV .22 Overlords!

    I've been using MythTV for a bunch of years now, and I find it an absolute blast. It works on every PC I can find, and even on my work OSX laptop, which still lets me watch The It's Alive Show [theitsaliveshow.com] while I'm hacking away. It even eats the commercials, and does a better job with digital television signals. I can't wait for multirec support for my HDHomeRun.

    If you haven't tried MythTV recently, check it out again.

    • Re:I for one welcome... (Score:4, Informative)

      by BLKMGK ( 34057 ) <{morejunk4me} {at} {hotmail.com}> on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:58AM (#30028968) Homepage Journal

      You were doing great up until that "it works on everything" part. Plenty of folks have pulled their hair out with Myth in the past and you make it sound like a breeze. Look at the numbers of folks posting here that have given up on it and you can plainly see it's far from easy. I for one hope that this version is VERY good but please, the rah rah it works great stuff can be saved - most of us know better having tried it already.

      I lent out my HDHR to someone having given up on Myth previously. I have spare hardware though so maybe I'll try it again but if it's half as bad as the last time I'll put it down again. The Myth guys really have an uphill climb convincing people IMO. Myth seems like the epitome of what people have issues with when they talk about Linux. Funky config scripts, hair pulling, things that don't make sense, things that just don't work, picky hardware, painful broken upgrades, the list is long. A new version is great news, lets see if it flies. Call me cautious having been bitten about 5 times previously by this software!

  • I wonder whether this new release has an option of stripping out commercials from recordings on request. Does it? On prior releases one had to download a script, then go through a number of hops to get it working.

    I hope it does and though the site is slashdotted, I thank folks at MythTV for their good work.

    • I wonder whether this new release has an option of stripping out commercials from recordings on request. Does it?

      MythTV has had the ability to mark the positions of commercials in a piece of recorded content for ages now. It has not, and AFAIK, continues not to have the ability to automatically cut those commercials straight out of the recorded content. Why? Simple: The commercial stripper is far from perfect. It does a decent job most of the time, but it just as often screws up royally. So you reall

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Windowser ( 191974 )
      Once the show is recorded, there is a background job flagging the commercials. When I watch a show, I just hit Z to bypass the commercial in a millisecond.
      Watching live TV is a pain now because of this !

    • Re:Does it save me from commercials? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Techman83 ( 949264 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @01:03AM (#30028992)
      Use a dedicated distro and all the hard work is done for you. Such as LinHES [linhes.org] for example.

  • Is it still same config nightmare? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by distantbody ( 852269 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:41AM (#30028848) Journal
    Do I still have to f**k around with 100 combinations/restarts of Qt, ffmpeg, XVideo, XvMC, libmpeg2, xv-blit, opengl, xlib, xshm, directfb, directx ...all whilst not being able to see the f**king mouse cursor and having to hit 'next' five times just to change one setting?

  • Could be one of the best HD DVRs out there... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Monday November 09, 2009 @12:44AM (#30028874)

    Given official Hauppage HD-PVR support, this could be one of the best high-def DVRs out there. Especially when you combine it with an HD Fury2 to convert it to HDMI...

    I don't know why the HD-PVR is the only capture card capable of high-def (1080i). HD Fury2 adds HDMI (with HDCP). Sure, it's only 1080i, but how many other high-def capture solutions are out there? For just over $500, you can get one that does HDMI/HDCP as well.

    (HD Fury2 converts HDMI to Component or VGA. Sure it's analog, but the HD-PVR only has component inputs).

    Especially good for those of us in Canada, where we are forced to use the ultra-crappy cableboxes. (It's why people go to TiVo...).

  • I'm waiting for 1.0

  • Release Notes (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.22 [mythtv.org]

    MythTV
    New Features

    * MythTV UI ported to new MythUI library with all new capabilities
    * Added Automatic Prioritization to the scheduler which uses watching behavior to automatically increase priority of shows that are watched close to their recording timeslot over shows that are delayed for longer periods of time. See [16477] for details until the wiki page is populated.

  • I've used Myth for years. Since the 2.4 kernel days when you had to recompile the kernel to get DVB and ALSA working. It used to take hours and hours to get even the remote control working, but I perservered because it was far superior to anything out there.

    But Myth has lagged too long and it has always looked godawful compared to its competors.

    With the release of Windows 7, I have found that I am able to do all that I need and it looks a hell of a lot better. This latest release of Myth (which is
  • I am new to the HTPC world. I tried XBMC and Boxee. I found XBMC user interface design confusing to configure it and get it actually working. Boxee (yes it's based on XBMC) automatically did everything for me like an appliance. XBMC i couldn't even get the darn thing to scrape properly, the configuration is confusing (haha, that wiki instruction is a joke) , and nothing just worked as easily in Boxee. In 10 minutes I figured out in Boxee how to setup the directories, and it did all the rest (all the video

  • Perfect on a Mac Mini (+link to howto) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GlobalEcho ( 26240 ) on Monday November 09, 2009 @10:48AM (#30032644)

    I set up an SVN snapshot of Myth on a Mac Mini about six months ago. I wanted to save power, so the Mini runs both the backend and the frontend. If you like, you can see a full description [boonstra.org] of how I did it. (The guide is out of date in the sense that I resolved jumpy playback issues by reducing the priority of commercial-flagging jobs.)

    It's been wonderful. I get full HD video and convenient scheduling. I've had exactly zero crashes, and the automatic commercial skipping has been very reliable (maybe one mistake every 5 or 10 shows). I also really enjoy the ability to watch TV on any computer in the house.

    Right now, I'm working here and there on integration with Plex [plexapp.com] because I'd like to have all media in just one interface.

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