MP recording or 4TR: pros and cons? (1 Viewer)

[infinite.loop]

The end of TVCentral was a good example: Many community members contributed excellent stuff to a product which was cancelled by it's own company - now everything is "lost". This doesn't happen with open source...

And if you go one more step back in time, you will see that TVCentral nearly died when Meedio was sold to yahoo and they did not get a new licence to continue to use the Meedio core.

Again, does not happen with OpenSource.

But, i do not want to keep it as secret that OpenSource has it's downsides in some specific cases as well.

 

[dvdfreak]

That's the main reason against closed source.
People's motivation to work on something that "belongs" to another person isn't particularly high.

The end of TVCentral was a good example: Many community members contributed excellent stuff to a product which was cancelled by it's own company - now everything is "lost". This doesn't happen with open source...

Let me sort of turn that comment around.

The GUI plugin and recorder/tuner have been made open source as mentioned before, and we're considering making other parts open source too. However, in the months and months that these two have been open source not a single line of code for possible improvements was submitted. So it's not all that obvious just to provide things as open-source.

They did however serve as good examples for other people programming against the For The Record API.

 

[infinite.loop]

They did however serve as good examples for other people programming against the For The Record API.

Erm... could you explain what you mean by "against" please?

Does not sound "positive".

 

[dvdfreak]

Erm... could you explain what you mean please?
Sounds like you imply that some people intentionally programm to "sabotage" 4TR.

No no no, not at all! Programming against an API simple means programming a piece of code using an API.

 

[infinite.loop]

They did however serve as good examples for other people programming against the For The Record API.

No no no, not at all! Programming against an API simple means programming a piece of code using an API.

He, He.

Okay. Somehow i thought "against" was meant in a "harmful" way.

 

[tourettes]

The GUI plugin and recorder/tuner have been made open source as mentioned before, and we're considering making other parts open source too. However, in the months and months that these two have been open source not a single line of code for possible improvements was submitted. So it's not all that obvious just to provide things as open-source.

They did however serve as good examples for other people programming against the For The Record API.

Actually it highly depends on many different things

- are there any people who are able to develop using 4TR on MediaPortal (possible candidates for providing fixes)
- maybe current 4TR MP plugin code is already good enough for the majority of the people? (especially for developers who use it)
- maybe people don't want to help so easialy on the plugin side when core is closed source?
- 4TR "API" was taken into use on Meedi(O)s side as they dont have their own TV system


So, I think it's not possible to make any assumptions about the Open Source in general based on that small "slice". I think l closed source has few issues that have been already mentioned in the thread:

- Application can go commercial (I don't like the possibility that my "free" work would be used to make money)
- Application development stops

 

[rekenaar]

It's too bad Microsoft made IIS installation optional, so now most users do indeed need to install it before installing For The Record (at least when they'd like to use Web Access, but who doesn't ).

IIS is the main reason I am only using Management console. Is it not possible to include a small open source web server with your app? Similar to Big Kev's Selfcontained Webserver?

 

[dvdfreak]

Is there an alternative web-server that support ASP.NET 2.0 and Ajax 1.0? If so, we could definitely have a look.

 

[rekenaar]

UltiDev Cassini Web Server looks like it conforms to that requirements.

a free, light-weight, redistributable web server capable of hosting multiple ASP.NET web applications or static HTML web sites on Microsoft Windows. It's perfect for situations when your target systems are unlikely to have IIS installed or supported.

By far the most important feature of UltiDev Cassini Web Server is ability for Visual Studio developers to include this very compact, yet very powerful ASP.NET web server into their applications' setup packages
in just a matter of minutes.

 

[dvdfreak]

Sounds promising... Will try to find some time to have a look!