Stability Release (3 Viewers)

[Inker]

Heres my point of view.

Like someone else mentioned, I too have a love-hate relationship with MP.

What do I love?

Looks nice (and I can easily change the way it looks)
Does some things really great (myPhotos is in use for every presentation I give, myVideos works great for the most part too)
its open-source (since I know some programming I can add some minor things)
Works awesome with my MCE-remote (which I purchased especially for MP)
Tons of features
Feature request do get picked up (I recently requested that myPhoto plays videos too, which I was told would be added (I dont know if it already was, since my time is really short these days due to some personal things)

What do I hate?
Heavyweight (memory footprint/cpu time) - and yes I know this can hardly be avoided given its nature and DX usage, but still it bugs me sometimes.

Stability - most of my crashes seem random, meaning that they happen for no apparent reason, like right in the middle of playing a video. After restarting MP the video will play fine.....so I'm wondering what caused the issue. Same with myPhoto at times, will just pop up an error dialog saying it has to close. Weird. Given its unpredictable nature for me, this is especially annoying because you always have to hope that you get through this photo presentation or whatever and you dont have to explain to your relatives that this is "beta software" and stability problems are to be expected. Now again, I know its beta and all, but I have come to the point where I dont use MP for watching videos anymore, simply because I watch alot of them and crashes get annoying if you have them 3 times a day. I use Zoomplayer again now, which has not crashed for me once and I can control that just as nicely with my remote using girder. Of course I would much rather use MP for it, for the coolness factor alone.

Doesnt support my TV Card. No, since its not support I'm not complaining, I'm more whining that I cant afford (or dont want to afford) a new one ATM

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Now I too signed up in that other thread for testing, but never heard anything. While I understand that the devs have enough on their hands already, I believe that only they can structure for the rest of us what needs to be tested specifically. So some initiative would be nice.

Heres my suggestion. Every devs publishes one or several testcases (in the way that msn testcase is) in a specific forum. Then there is a thread where people can post their results, along with hardware specs. The bug forum right now is fine for bugs that were found on the fly, but a specific forum dedicated to running testcases would help alot IMO. After every release the Testcase responses should be locked and or archived, and the testcase should be altered by the dev to reflect changes and a new response thread opened. No user should be allowed to open threads in that forum. This way everyone can run the testcases of the plugins most important to him/her and give feedback. In addition, if a bug was identified and fixed in a CSV release that should also be announced in a locked thread by the dev to inform user that they should download the latest csv and/or that there is no more need to report that bug with previous versions.

Furthermore, I also strongly vote for a feature lock. "Lite features" can of course be introduced, by that I mean features that hardly interact with the rest of MP. If somebody writes a new game (like that tic-tac-toe games) its merely a plugin and can be released with the other release, because if that is unstable the rest of MP should still be stable and the user can just avoid using that specific feature.

Like somebody else said, I highly doubt that two weeks between the pre- and final releases is enough to do stability work. I would go so far as to say focuse exclusively on bugfixing and stability/performace work for the rest of the entire year, giving us updates say monthly to truely release a version that "just works" in the foreseeable future.

Thnx for listening

 

[Marcusb]

Inker, I had very bad stability issues with .1.3 but the CVS release from a few weeks ago fixed this for me. Now MP is completely stable. Have you tried this?
In the "Shutting down suddenly" thread the CVS date that fixes it is mentioned.

 

[infinite.loop]

@Inker, I had very bad stability issues with .1.3 but the CVS release from a few weeks ago fixed this for me. Now MP is completely stable. Have you tried this?
In the "Shutting down suddenly" thread the CVS date that fixes it is mentioned.

i have tried a few cvs snapshots this week and i got much more problems.
i.e. stuttering TV Picture/Audio -> crashes with my Skystar2.

 

[Marcusb]

did you look in the thread I mentioned? There was a period where the CVS was very stable and didn't crash but before the major work was begun on the DTV engine. Try the CVS mentioned in that thread and with luck you'll be fine ;-)

 

[tkortell]

i have tried a few cvs snapshots this week and i got much more problems.
i.e. stuttering TV Picture/Audio -> crashes with my Skystar2.

I tried my first CVS this week to and my experience was not good, then I backed up the system but I did not get the backup to work befor I uninstalled/installed 0.1.3. This realy scared me but I think I will try the CVS Marcusb mentiond tonight anyway

g/tk

 

[Marcusb]

you can also make a test install of MP as well.
When you do an install, just make a new folder called "Team Media Portal test" or something and install there. then you can apply CVS to that one only. Your regular MP will work as all the main shortcuts will still point to the live one. When you want to test the test install, just run the MediaPortal.exe file in that directory.

Also, when you apply new CVS, don't forget to run the start.bat file after or you will get issues.

 

[elliottmc]

General consensus

Hi,

Well, the general consensus seems to be that stability is an issue, and most people would like it resolved. This may be stating the obvious!

I realise that the sort of feedback on the forums "it crashes/uses 100% CPU" isn't always the most helpful, but when this is coming from a significant number of users then it is almost certainly a real problem.

There hasn't been much feedback from the developers in this thread. It's not so much that I personally don't want to come up with a test plan. It's just that I don't know what form the test plan should take. When I was programming, I would be able to ask testers to run through a specific sequence to test a section of code. This is easy for the developer, since you know what the program is doing, so you can direct it to narrow down possible problems.

To echo Avalon111, if Frodo (or whoever) were to come up with a test plan to try to resolve the high CPU usage problems, I'm sure many users would provide the feedback. At the moment, we don't even know if this is considered a priority or if we are believed! What's the point in providing feedback if it isn't going to be used? There's nothing on Mantis which indicates that stability of myTV is considered an issue.

Tell us how to help, and we will.

A potted changelog (written so that the end user can understand it) in the CVS would really help, as we would know if something is supposed to be fixed.

How easy is it for a program to determine CPU usage? Could you temporarily incorporate this into your code to determine what the problem is? Personally, I would be suspecting a memory leak, but then I don't know what is going on under the hood. Memory usage does seem to increase with time.

Best wishes,

Mark

 

[Smirnuff]

I believe that only they can structure for the rest of us what needs to be tested specifically.

Yes in an ideal world we'd prepare test plans to cover every aspect of MP and hey we'd even have time to do them as unit tests so that nobody would have to run through the tests manually but it isn't an ideal world and to say that only the developers could structure the tests is untrue, especially when you take 'some initiative would be nice' into account - that statement sums it all up for me and can explain the following and a whole lot more:

here hasn't been much feedback from the developers in this thread

Come on guys shock us all, someone come along and say 'okay devs we acknowledge that you're too busy, lazy or whatever, I'm self-sufficient and self-driven, here is what I have for you...' not 'well if you tell us what to do then we'll do it'.

 

[infinite.loop]

Yes in an ideal world we'd prepare test plans to cover every aspect of MP and hey we'd even have time to do them as unit tests so that nobody would have to run through the tests manually but it isn't an ideal world and to say that only the developers could structure the tests is untrue, especially when you take 'some initiative would be nice' into account - that statement sums it all up for me and can explain the following and a whole lot more

what we need is a person who:

x knows how to test software
x knows how to test MediaPortal
x is able to write testplans

anyone has to take the initiative.
with the cooperation of the developers this person will be able to setup testplans that provide the developers with the information they need.

someone has to be the first. when we have seen how the testprocess is working, there will be more people who dare to come up with testplans.

but someone has to be the first. who is it?

 

[elliottmc]

I believe that only they can structure for the rest of us what needs to be tested specifically.

Yes in an ideal world we'd prepare test plans to cover every aspect of MP and hey we'd even have time to do them as unit tests so that nobody would have to run through the tests manually but it isn't an ideal world and to say that only the developers could structure the tests is untrue, especially when you take 'some initiative would be nice' into account - that statement sums it all up for me and can explain the following and a whole lot more:

here hasn't been much feedback from the developers in this thread

Come on guys shock us all, someone come along and say 'okay devs we acknowledge that you're too busy, lazy or whatever, I'm self-sufficient and self-driven, here is what I have for you...' not 'well if you tell us what to do then we'll do it'.

Sorry that you've taken offense at my post. It wasn't intended as an attack on anyone, but more a case of expressing frustration that I can't do more, and letting you know why I can't do more. I really would like to help out, but I don't know what information I can provide that would be useful.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that anyone is lazy, either the developers or potential testers. After all, the developers aren't getting paid for this. This isn't to do with being self-sufficient or not. It's to do with not having the fundamental knowledge. I want to help out, but I don't know how!

On a positive note, I've just tried the latest CVS version, and the CPU usage is much lower. This presumably means that something has been fixed, as I haven't changed any of the settings or installed new hardware drivers, but as there is no list of changes to the CVS written for the perspective of an end user, I am stuck with installing CVS updates on the offchance. Maybe with my level of knowledge I would be better off waiting for stable releases. However, if I do this then I can't help with the development.

This thread was started to discuss whether users find MediaPortal to be stable, and whether the general view is that this should be a priority. From my personal experience, the CPU usage is vastly better, which translates to better stability in my book. I've had very few actual crashes, but I consider a program to be unstable if say the TV picture stutters and starts during normal use.

If there was a thread in one of the forums giving a brief list of what has changed in each release, then it would be easier for users to provide feedback,

Eg. "Optimisations/bug fixes to myTV. CPU usage should be lower" would give all the users who have had problems a chance to test this and say yes or no. If the majority of users at this point give positive feedback then you know the bug is (at least partly) sorted.

I know how frustrating software development is, especially when you don't have enough time to do it and people are giving you useless bug reports. That's why I'm making the comment that we need a bit more guidance.

Again, no offense is intended. I think Media Portal is great, and can only get better.

Mark