Mailing List Archive

On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 12:31, Isaac Richards wrote:
> touched gdb before. Please, if you're seeing a crash, spend the additonal 5
> or 10 minutes and generate a backtrace so I or someone else can fix it.

I appreciate that. I'm a developer myself, and I know how to file bug
reports, and believe me, I plan to be filing reports like crazy over the
next few days as I use MythTV more. Unfortunately MythTV hangs as much
as it crashes (or more), and those problems are a lot harder to report
and fix.

My original email wasn't a slam on MythTV or its stability. I'm going
to do my duty as a OSS user and try to improve its quality as much as I
can through testing and bug reporting. I was just curious how the
MythTV community felt about its competitors and its strengths/weaknesses
compared to them.

Cheers,
Jason.

On Friday 11 April 2003 11:18 am, Jason Tackaberry wrote:
> whereas MythTV crashes regularly.

<sigh>

It's not like it's difficult to generate a backtrace. There's even complete
step-by-step instructions on how to do so in the docs
(http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-18.html#ss18.9) if you've never
touched gdb before. Please, if you're seeing a crash, spend the additonal 5
or 10 minutes and generate a backtrace so I or someone else can fix it.

Isaac

Jason Tackaberry wrote:

>For those that have used both, I'm wondering if anyone can explain your
>experiences and compare/contrast these two pieces of software? Both
>seem quite good. I played with Freevo for a few minutes on my PC at
>work (no tuner card, but I'm able to test out movies/mp3/general
>interface).
>
>
as I understand it, freevo cant record tv, so you can't pause, rewind
and so forth. Since that is _why_ I would want a pvr in the first place
freevo is useless to me.

>My general sense is that Freevo is less feature-filled than MythTV, but
>it does feel a lot more solid to me. At least, it hasn't crashed on me,
>whereas MythTV crashes regularly.
>

I use 0.8 right now. Rock solid and has been up continuously since 0.8
was released. I use it constantly, so it is getting a good workout. If
you are getting a lot of crashes you must have something wrong with your
setup, or perhaps you are using cvs which does not advertise itself as
being stable. So by my count mythtv easily wins on features, and is
solid to boot.


cedar

On Friday 11 April 2003 11:39 am, Jason Tackaberry wrote:
> I appreciate that. I'm a developer myself, and I know how to file bug
> reports, and believe me, I plan to be filing reports like crazy over the
> next few days as I use MythTV more. Unfortunately MythTV hangs as much
> as it crashes (or more), and those problems are a lot harder to report
> and fix.

A hang is (usually) almost as easy as a segfault to report. You just run it
in gdb and ctl-c it once it's stopped. The only real difference is that it
helps to get a backtrace of all the current threads instead of just the
'active' one.

Really, if you're having massive stability problems, chances are it's not
happening to me, and I would appreciate decent bug reports.

> My original email wasn't a slam on MythTV or its stability. I'm going
> to do my duty as a OSS user and try to improve its quality as much as I
> can through testing and bug reporting. I was just curious how the
> MythTV community felt about its competitors and its strengths/weaknesses
> compared to them.

There are competitors? =)

Isaac

My wife and my son (three years old) are both using a cvs version of mythtv
from a month ago or more. Every week or so I upgrade their version with a
more recent cvs version. I never see a crash... maybe you have some faulty
hardware or you was unable to configure mythtv properly.

Thank you Isaac. You saved me from the vhs tape invasion.

Leandro

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Tackaberry" <tack@auc.ca>
To: "Discussion about mythtv" <mythtv-users@snowman.net>
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 5:18 PM
Subject: [mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Freevo


> For those that have used both, I'm wondering if anyone can explain your
> experiences and compare/contrast these two pieces of software? Both
> seem quite good. I played with Freevo for a few minutes on my PC at
> work (no tuner card, but I'm able to test out movies/mp3/general
> interface).
>
> My general sense is that Freevo is less feature-filled than MythTV, but
> it does feel a lot more solid to me. At least, it hasn't crashed on me,
> whereas MythTV crashes regularly. Not a fair comparison, mind you,
> since I've been using MythTV for 2 days and Freevo for 5 minutes. :)
>
> Still, what are others' opinions? (I hope this question doesn't launch
> any flame wars.)
>
> Jason.
>
> --
> Jason Tackaberry :: tack@auc.ca :: 705-949-2301 x330
> Academic Computing Support Specialist
> Information Technology Services
> Algoma University College :: www.auc.ca
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@snowman.net
> http://lists.snowman.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users

On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 12:56, Isaac Richards wrote:
> Really, if you're having massive stability problems, chances are it's not
> happening to me, and I would appreciate decent bug reports.

Deal.

> There are competitors? =)

Who else will you steal good ideas from? :)

Jason.

> Jason Tackaberry wrote:
>
> >For those that have used both, I'm wondering if anyone can explain your
> >experiences and compare/contrast these two pieces of software? Both
> >seem quite good. I played with Freevo for a few minutes on my PC at
> >work (no tuner card, but I'm able to test out movies/mp3/general
> >interface).
> >
> >
> as I understand it, freevo cant record tv, so you can't pause, rewind
> and so forth. Since that is _why_ I would want a pvr in the first place
> freevo is useless to me.

The latest version of Freevo does PVR, at least according to their web
page. I haven't tested it in a while, so I can't say how stable that
portion is.

-- RJV -- ..ooOO miracle@procyon.com

-- Institution of Postgraduate Education - Graduation 2001
-- Institution of Undergraduate Education - Alumnus 1997

The opinions expressed in any email originating from this account are the
sole opinions of the author. They do not reflect the opinions or policies
of any institution or individuals other than myself.

>
>
>The latest version of Freevo does PVR, at least according to their web
>page. I haven't tested it in a while, so I can't say how stable that
>portion is.
>

According to this page:
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/about.html#Status

freevo can now record a scheduled program, but still can't pause (and I
assume rew/ff) live tv. Getting closer though. I haven't tried it out in
a long time, but really the only thing I like better about freevo than
myth is how they package everything so that you don't have any
dependencies. Much lower threshold to entry. I'll probaby give it a
shot, just so I know what the competition is up to.


cedar

I just setup Myth yesterday and it's really not as scary as the instructions
make it out to be. As long as you just make sure you've got everything
installed, it isn't any harder than freevo.

Tim.

-----Original Message-----
From: Cedar McKay [mailto:cedarmckay@mac.com]
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 13:43 PM
To: Discussion about mythtv
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Freevo


>
>
>The latest version of Freevo does PVR, at least according to their web
>page. I haven't tested it in a while, so I can't say how stable that
>portion is.
>

According to this page:
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/about.html#Status

freevo can now record a scheduled program, but still can't pause (and I
assume rew/ff) live tv. Getting closer though. I haven't tried it out in
a long time, but really the only thing I like better about freevo than
myth is how they package everything so that you don't have any
dependencies. Much lower threshold to entry. I'll probaby give it a
shot, just so I know what the competition is up to.


cedar




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Nope, nothing even close!

> There are competitors? =)
>
> Isaac

> My general sense is that Freevo is less feature-filled than MythTV, but
> it does feel a lot more solid to me. At least, it hasn't crashed on me,
> whereas MythTV crashes regularly. Not a fair comparison, mind you,
> since I've been using MythTV for 2 days and Freevo for 5 minutes. :)

If you compare just the stability of the two applications I'd say your
estimation of the stability is pretty accurate. That said, it seems like
Freevo has worked on doing most of the easy stuff for a PVR while MythTV
is working on getting the hard stuff correct. Considering that and how
quickly mythtv is stablizing I'd say just comparing the stability of the
two platforms is like comparing a bicycle to a Cessena.

Things I like about freevo:
GUI implemented using a high level language. This makes sense since for
the most part the gui doesn't require super high performance except for
things like video playback that would have to be implemented as binary
modules written in a compiled language.

The stable releases include the dependencies necessary to make freevo work.

Things I like about Mythtv
Mythtv is farther along, it also does most of the difficult functionality
for the PVR for the most part and works fairly well.

It has been my experience that Mythtv's code is better organized and
easier to follow for someone wanting to contribute.

Things I would like to see from the Freevo project in Mythtv:

I would like to see working Perl and Python bindings for at least libmyth
and possibly libmythtv. I think this would really open the project up to
contributions from people who already know perl or python. It also would
potentially make it simple to create modules that use existing perl or
python modules (say for example a short python program that using the
pykde binding to embed a khtml object in a module for a simple web
browser)

I

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net]On Behalf Of Dwight Hubbard
> Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 4:31 PM
> To: mythtv-users@snowman.net
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Freevo
>
>
> Things I like about freevo:
> GUI implemented using a high level language.


I thought C++ *is* a high-level language.

Jason Tackaberry wrote:
> For those that have used both, I'm wondering if anyone can explain your
> experiences and compare/contrast these two pieces of software? Both
> seem quite good. I played with Freevo for a few minutes on my PC at
> work (no tuner card, but I'm able to test out movies/mp3/general
> interface).
>
> My general sense is that Freevo is less feature-filled than MythTV, but
> it does feel a lot more solid to me. At least, it hasn't crashed on me,
> whereas MythTV crashes regularly.

No doubt that this has been your experience. However, for the
past few months, the CVS versions have been fairly stable
and problems are normally fixed quickly. It is possible that
you may be seeing crashes that most others don't see.

For example, I use Debian Sarge which recently updated things
like libc and glib. Apparently, the current qt 3.0.5 Debian
packages don't play nice with the new kids. I had horrible
stability problems with MythTV but noticed it was crashing
on things like freeing memory in libc.

I changed my gnu compilers to version 3.2 and built QT 3.1.2
from source the recompiled MythTV. This fixed most of the myth
crashes. I still see some segfaults but I get random crashes
in other apps so I believe at least some of these are still
a matter of the Sarge updates that still need to be ironed out.

-- bjm

I have read up on Freevo and Myth. The only advantage that freevo has over
myth is that it seems to run using less processor power. It claims you can
run it on about a 400 Mhz processor, and what i have seen for specs on most
machines here is around 1 Ghz or higher is required. Going with the lower
end processor would quite the system down because it would require less to
cool it which is where most of the noise comes from. Would this seem about
right?

Myth seems to have more functionality when it comes to the live tv portion
but I wonder what Freevo has along the lines for capturing resolution. All
it says is it needs a faster processor for higher resolution, which could
mean 1 ghz. Good to see there is somewhat sound competition for Myth,
competition breeds better products

--Joshua Malinski
01001111 01101000 00100000 01111001 01100101 01100001 01101000 00100000
01001001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101111
01100100 00100001

Joseph A. Caputo wrote:

>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net
>>[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net]On Behalf Of Dwight Hubbard
>>Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 4:31 PM
>>To: mythtv-users@snowman.net
>>Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Freevo
>>
>>
>>Things I like about freevo:
>> GUI implemented using a high level language.
>>
>>
>
>
>I thought C++ *is* a high-level language.
>
>
You have to think of high level and low level programing languages as a
sort of spectrum. C++ is a high level language if you compare it
assembly or even machien code. But when compared to python, perl or
something like visual basic it is much lower level. C++ sort of sits in
the middle.

Thats how I understand it anyway

I would think that the 400mhz proc is either based on you using a
hardware encoder or mpeg1 @ 320x240. Plus I doubt it would fare that
well if you tried to encode and plyaback at the same time. Freevo and
MythTV don't set the processor requirements, the codecs, codec options
and resolution you encode at do.

- John

-----Original Message-----
From: mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net] On Behalf Of Josh Malinski
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 5:48 PM
To: 'mythtv-users@snowman.net'
Subject: [mythtv-users] Re: MythTV vs. Freevo


I have read up on Freevo and Myth. The only advantage that freevo has
over myth is that it seems to run using less processor power. It claims
you can run it on about a 400 Mhz processor, and what i have seen for
specs on most machines here is around 1 Ghz or higher is required.
Going with the lower end processor would quite the system down because
it would require less to cool it which is where most of the noise comes
from. Would this seem about right?

Myth seems to have more functionality when it comes to the live tv
portion but I wonder what Freevo has along the lines for capturing
resolution. All it says is it needs a faster processor for higher
resolution, which could mean 1 ghz. Good to see there is somewhat sound
competition for Myth,
competition breeds better products

--Joshua Malinski
01001111 01101000 00100000 01111001 01100101 01100001 01101000 00100000
01001001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101111
01100100 00100001

_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users@snowman.net
http://lists.snowman.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users

This is starting to get off-topic, but... IMHO C++ is not any more or less
"high-level" than Perl, Python, etc. The main difference is that it is a
compiled language rather than a scripted/interpreted language, and as such
introduces extra learning dependencies, such as using compilers & linkers,
writing makefiles, and explicit memory management. However, the features of
the language itself (syntactically) are not any less "high-level".

-Joe C.





On Friday 11 April 2003 06:13 pm, Charles Mason wrote:
>
> You have to think of high level and low level programing languages as a
> sort of spectrum. C++ is a high level language if you compare it
> assembly or even machien code. But when compared to python, perl or
> something like visual basic it is much lower level. C++ sort of sits in
> the middle.
>
> Thats how I understand it anyway

Yes, Freevo is much easier to install than Myth. I
have installed Freevo many times, but have not yet
been able to install Myth.

--- "Keller, Tim" <Tim.Keller@stratus.com> wrote:
> I just setup Myth yesterday and it's really not as
> scary as the instructions
> make it out to be. As long as you just make sure
> you've got everything
> installed, it isn't any harder than freevo.
>
> Tim.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Cedar McKay [mailto:cedarmckay@mac.com]
> Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 13:43 PM
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] MythTV vs. Freevo
>
>
> >
> >
> >The latest version of Freevo does PVR, at least
> according to their web
> >page. I haven't tested it in a while, so I can't
> say how stable that
> >portion is.
> >
>
> According to this page:
> http://freevo.sourceforge.net/about.html#Status
>
> freevo can now record a scheduled program, but still
> can't pause (and I
> assume rew/ff) live tv. Getting closer though. I
> haven't tried it out in
> a long time, but really the only thing I like better
> about freevo than
> myth is how they package everything so that you
> don't have any
> dependencies. Much lower threshold to entry. I'll
> probaby give it a
> shot, just so I know what the competition is up to.
>
>
> cedar
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@snowman.net
>
http://lists.snowman.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@snowman.net
>
http://lists.snowman.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users


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On Sat, 2003-04-12 at 11:08, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> This is starting to get off-topic, but... IMHO C++ is not any more or less
> "high-level" than Perl, Python, etc. The main difference is that it is a
> compiled language rather than a scripted/interpreted language, and as such

I think you might be confused about what "high level" means.

Consider Perl references versus C/C++ pointers. In C, you pass pointers
around, and you always have the possibility of having invalid pointers.
Try writing to an invalid pointer and the operating system will spank
you in various ways (segfault, GPF, locking up, depending in your
platform). With Perl or Python, you pass around references, and you
always know they're going to be valid, and garbage collection happens
for you when all reference to that object go away.

It's difficult to argue that a language with late bindings,
introspection, garbage collection, etc. isn't higher level than a
language like C++ where the programmer must explicitly deal with these
issues.

> introduces extra learning dependencies, such as using compilers &
> linkers, writing makefiles, and explicit memory management. However,
> the features of the language itself (syntactically) are not any less
> "high-level".

I'll grant you that compiled vs. interpreted and project management
approaches (e.g. Makefiles) don't differentiate high and low level
languages. (For example, Python can be compiled into bytecode.) But
certainly having to deal with memory management or worry about
architecture issues (endianness, for example) is precisely (by
definition) what makes a language lower level than a language that does
not have to worry about these issues.

Expressiveness is also another indicator, but to a lesser extent.
Compare using regular expressions in Perl with using libpcre from C.
Perl regular expressions are not merely syntactic sugar here. Regexp in
Perl adds significant expressive power to the language. This is what
differentiates it from lower level languages like C and C++ which lack
the constructs for this level of expressiveness.

Jason.

--
Jason Tackaberry :: tack@auc.ca :: 705-949-2301 x330
Academic Computing Support Specialist
Information Technology Services
Algoma University College :: www.auc.ca