The future of MythTV

[Steve Goodey]

Mythtv Control Panel is great and we all need to get behind it!

I've never used it but it is good it managed to survive the MythBuntu distro closing down.

I believe Mythbuntu Control Panel is new work that aims to cover all the options that Mythbuntu Control Center covered, and was/is developed by user heyted.

[hedgehog52]

This is worrisome for me. I took a 4 year vacation from all things computing, and when I come back it's harder than ever to get what I want from TV, much less mythtv. My biggest bugaboo at the moment is that STBs are switching to RF controllers. So, the lirc that we've come to love and hate, is becoming redundant. And yet, we still need some way to change channels on these STBs. There are still dumb issues like "all tuners are currently unavailable" that are hard to fix or fix themselves and leave you scratching your head.

But this evening, I just realized one of the best things about mythtv, though it's probably not going to get you any new users, is that viewing what's playing on which channels is SO much faster than trying to do the same thing with your cable box and remote. AND if mythtv is working with your cable box, this gives it such an edge for those who just want to find something to watch, that you may want to just use mythtv instead of your remote and click the "watch now" button when you find something that appeals to you.

I'm a big fan of mythtv, in case you can't tell. I have 12TB of hard disk assigned to mythtv, and that doens't count still another 4TB of storage for the linux OS and all my other stuff. I have to admit that the issues with installing mythtv are really frustrating. But when it's working, it's great. The problem is that the other media access methods work out of the box. Their user interface may be slow and clumsy, but at least you don't have to get on a forum and hope that someone else has had your same problem and chose to post the fix on the forum that you happen to be on. If mythtv could aggregate all these things, TV, youtube, amazon prime, and other net-access content, it would be a big selling point. Or is that what "kodi" does? I don't need still another content access program, so if that's what kodi does, please don't bother telling me.

Bob

[jbennington57]

I have spectrum TV which is part of the huge cable providers in America. I absolutely cannot tolerate commercials. Besides the length of time it is also how irritating they have become by using very bright backgrounds and most are intentionally ridiculous. The only ones that are not are targeted towards teens wanting the latest cell phones. Anyway, I want to come off of the recorder at a specific time for already recorded Network shows and utilize the commercial deletion. I cannot find anything definitive as far as HDMI input to my laptop. Of course I do have HDMI out. One person wrote a how to for a virtual input. The problem is he wrote it as if I am a programmer. I am not. I can follow concise instructions. I truthfully want a way to import HDMI from either the recorder or a box so that I can remove commercials. The reason is simple. There are good Network television shows. But not when I spend 20 minutes of my life watching commercials. I believe mythtv is advanced enough. The thing missing is how to import HDMI with laptops. Very few people have desktops anymore. They are not compatible with a mobile society

[yajrendrag]

would like to see support for locast as a tuner. i've used mythtv for nearly 15 years using HDHomerun and HDPVR - seems like the handwriting is on the wall with respect to things like cable cards... i've already had 1 of my 2 HDHomeRun Prime's fail and SilconDust have had a 6 tuner replacement on their web site for about 3 years and i'm not optimistic that they'll actually replace it at this point. I'm too far away for decent OTA reception, but locast seems to be a great alternative if you're in a market they serve. For things like Plex and Jellyfin, there is locast2tuner which make locast appear as an HDHomeRun tuner to those servers, so if that existed for mythtv or there was native support in mythtv for locast that would be a good addition from my perspective. I've seen a thread where someone was able to hack together a way to make locast2tuner support myth, but it didn't sound that well integrated yet...

[dhwalker]

I second Locast. With support from MythTV, they would be a great alternative for OTA/CATV.

[alatar]

I found a TV recording from 2007. MythTV has been amazing and solid. I am using the same database that was created with first installations and it has survived all of the version upgrades on Ubuntu and MythTV; there are not many projects that can say that. I come back here every 4-5 years for a new upgrade cycle. Currently on 29.1 and looking to upgrade.

We originally used MythTV when cable was unencrypted and briefly tried the cablebox before we stopped paying those Comcast bastards. Now we record HD over-the-air local channels with a rooftop antenna with HDHomeRun tuner. OTA use has dropped off after streaming took off, but still used. Our main use is for playback for our videos. We greatly appreciate the TMDB interface. Playback is from a living room frontend and from the backend server.

What I see for the future (keeping in mind that I'm on 29.1):
1. The need for more device playback on tablets and simpler frontends (chromecast or smart TVs). My wife wondered by MythTV didn't work like Plex. Downloading to the device for offline use could be a killer feature here.
2. Streaming over the internet to remote devices.
3. I surveyed the family about interface integration with streaming services (Netflix, Disney), but they didn't think that was useful. It was too easy to open up another application.
4. Myth could get into video streaming for open license media, something like Wikimedia Commons.
5. Simpler default setup. Install and point to videos directory. This will be critical for growing a new user base.

Much admiration and appreciation from a long time user.

[Urkster]

Thanks for the replies.

Help me to understand why the hate for mythfrontend and the love for Kodi
What does Kodi do that mythfrontend doesn't

I need at least some of my frontends to run on windows. I don't want to have different frontends depending on OS.
This is almost the only reason I use Kodi.... on Linux, Windows and Android!

Right now I am having loads of stability issues with Kodi, and I would LOVE to try mythfrontend, but there is no way I'm gonna be compiling it myself!

So - Why no official windows version? - For the frontend at least.
Do you not think that maybe there would be more users if it could run on Windows?
(Can someone explain to me the apparent hate for windows and love for Linux? Lol :-p )

Rob

[alatar]

Thanks for the replies.

Help me to understand why the hate for mythfrontend and the love for Kodi
What does Kodi do that mythfrontend doesn't

I need at least some of my frontends to run on windows. I don't want to have different frontends depending on OS.
This is almost the only reason I use Kodi.... on Linux, Windows and Android!

Right now I am having loads of stability issues with Kodi, and I would LOVE to try mythfrontend, but there is no way I'm gonna be compiling it myself!

So - Why no official windows version? - For the frontend at least.
Do you not think that maybe there would be more users if it could run on Windows?
(Can someone explain to me the apparent hate for windows and love for Linux? Lol :-p )

Rob

Instead of a full client, wouldn't a MythTV web server streaming to a HTML5 video work well across platforms? The HTML5 player could be third-party even.

[aglet]

I'm not a frequent forum reader so it's taken a while to spot this thread but tbh, even the fact that the question has been asked is worrying to me.

I'm in the UK and have used MythTV as a DVR for FTA Satellite and DVB-T content for close to 15 years now. It's *awesome* and I'm incredibly grateful to the maintainers for providing such a useful piece of software.

Admittedly, we do now also watch a fair bit of streaming content through other hardware attached to the TV but I don't see an alternative that offers even close to the set of DVR capabilities available from MythTV (easy scheduling, web interface, multirec, hardware support, backend / multiple FEs etc). Administering updates, and in particular, GPU support has been a bit touch and go at times but if you leave well enough alone, it just works and has done for *years*.

[deadite66]

likely just easier in some countries, UK Freeview or Freesat just works as it always has.
though these days i hardly watch commercial TV, its mostly YouTube or Twitch now.

[rodr]

Using MythTV just for OTA here in Oz. Streaming services thru the Roku work well enough for non-free stuff. Mainly I'd like to see improvements in areas like documentation, dummy-proofing and bug fixes. And better commercial skipping.

[wmorrison]

I like MythTV just fine as it is. The only concern I have, is will it support ATSC 3.0 by the time a significant number of stations start switching over. Which should be a few years at least, there's only one station around here on ATSC 3.0 so far. I don't want to go back to cable, or subscribe to a bunch of streaming services.

[robthebold]

I've been using mythtv for a long time. Now I only use the back end for recording OTA TV and Kodi as the front end. IIRC, when I commissioned a new backend on new hardware I could no longer use my mythtv front end due to a version mismatch between (again, IIRC) 24 and 26 . . . For some reason I was unable to get the identical version of both front and back without some trouble I wasn't will to go to. Compiling it myself? Weird repos? I don't know anymore. XBMC had better compatibility with multiple version of mythtv then mythtv!

In the meantime, I've discovered it's also more family-proof. (My fantastic logitech DiNovo remote mini keyboard, D-Pad, trackpad all-in-one thing was not family proof. )

MythTV records antenna tv, Kodi presents it to me, as well as the rest of my media (ripped DVDs, CDs, etc) which is stored on a plain old file server. I do like the myth web interface for scheduling, browsing schedules, and basically managing the back end tasks from my desktop. Just a lot easier to do it that way than with a remote on the couch.

[PhilB]

I would request greater API stability.

The API interface is a great concept and it allows more people to contribute to development with ‘addon’ stuff.
My own stance is that I'm not comfortable delving into Mythtv itself. I'll dabble with documentation and have written and published API code but I do not have the equipment or time to keep up to date with the latest releases of Mythtv.

API changes have been made which seem to have no logic. Just a couple of examples:

The visibility of a channel with GetChannelInfo, GetChannelInfoList and UpdateDBChannel keeps changing. Some time prior to 0.27 it expected <Visible> to have values of 0 or 1. With 0.27 it expected false or true. With 31 comes an extra field: <ExtraVisible> with expected values of 'Not Visible' or 'Visible' which must also be submitted on an update otherwise it ignores any changes.

Guide/GetProgramGuide is similarly changed between 0.27 and 31 with different key words and I expect there are many other examples.

All these are little changes but they are sufficient to break API applications and create a maintenance load on the API application authors, many of whom will not have the resources to test against all new Mythtv releases. Please preserve compatibility with any future API changes.

Despite this, a great system!

Phil

[yajrendrag]

Thanks for the replies.

Help me to understand why the hate for mythfrontend and the love for Kodi
What does Kodi do that mythfrontend doesn't

I'm in the Plex/Jellyfin (started with Plex and moving more to Jellyfin now) camp vs Kodi... & the only reason is simply to have a single environment across all of the various devices and OSs... I have Mac, Linux, Android and IoS based devices and when I started using Mythtv, i just wanted one playback environment. Moreover, at the time, i travelled a lot and it was very easy to organize the content via the Myth backend - i have a post recording job that saves recorded content to a new location with appropriately named series and episodes and then I used Plex to sync the content to my ipad for travel as well as serve it up inside my home to be used across all of the devices..