[mythtvnz] still learning

[Aaron Whitehouse]

James Gray wrote:
> Call a company called sky, and ask for a MySky, there are a lot of HI
> [...]
> 
> On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 1:47 AM, Bret Everett <bretcarolyn at yahoo.com.au
> <mailto:bretcarolyn at yahoo.com.au>> wrote:
>     I am a believer in this type of system and would tell people of its
>     benefit's  but its a bit to complex for the lower ed person can you
>     make it a bit more easier to understand

James, I don't think this was really necessary.  Bret made his point
very politely.

The reality is that MythTV is incredibly powerful, but it is hard to
install and even harder to make everything work 100% (heck, I still have
buttons on my remote that don't work).  I was talking to a sys-admin who
is one of the best computer-users that I know and manages hundreds of
machines.  He had some issues (his sound device and remote wouldn't work
on reboot because the /dev/ node kept changing and needed a UDEV rule)
and was asking why it was so hard to install, because if it were easier,
his company would love to sell them.

Bret -- the main difficulty with MythTV is that it has to work on many
different hardware configurations.  If everyone was using MythTV on the
same hardware, it would be easy to set up and make it work correctly.
Another issue is that MythTV is software that runs on a lot of different
Gnu/Linux distributions and it is the distributions that talk to the
hardware.  Distributions like KnoppMyth and Mythbuntu are starting to
tie everything together, but it takes a lot of work.

As one example, it is very difficult to set up remotes automatically as
they don't tell the computer very much about themselves.

A company does sell MythTV pre-configured and supported:
http://www.mypvr.co.nz

There are other areas where MythTV is unnecessarily difficult to
configure and set up.   One real problem, Bret, is that MythTV is
written by developers, who are very good at using MythTV.  The better
one is at using MythTV and Gnu/Linux, the less of an issue the
configuration and usability seems. MythTV is becoming easier to use over
time and I believe that it will continue to do so.

James, your points about Sky putting holes in the wall aren't really
relevant to the usability of the device.  There are quite a lot of
things that MythTV could learn from MySky.

Regards,

Aaron