What The Hell Are We To Do About TV? (2 Viewers)

[stefancrs]

upspace: keep in mind however that others have had somewhat of the opposite experience, that DVBViewer is buggy and unstable while MediaPortal is not. In your case, with your hardware and setup, DVBViewer "won", and in other scenarios, MP does. Which probably kind of points at that these kinds of software is tricky business. For instance, just in this thread, there's an extreme example of a MP success story (wtf, 6 HTPC's and one with five tuners! awesome! )

Regarding the focus, the way I see it, most of the changelogs for SVN releases mainly deal with the TV side of things, and I can't help but get the feeling that more and more people are satisfied with each new SVN (generally speaking, of course there might be a troublesome release every now and then). Keep in mind though that the TV focus has, rightfully, almost completely moved to TVE3.

 

[ziphnor]

The only thing not working great for me is the new subtitles, they work most of the time but the program gets very unstable.

If you are referring to the DVB subtitle support, and have these problems also with the latest SVN version (later than the one that introduced a nice configuration UI for the subs) then you should really get over to the associated thread and report your problem! Pretty please? ( the thread is here )

dvbviewer is rock stable. no issues for days while letting tv on, having my wife and kids using it.

Its possible that i have just been unlucky, or maybe there is a critical difference in our setups.

I tried it at home with my Dual DVB-C's and it would usually have crashed if left on overnight (not to mention that there didnt seem to be any way of turning TV off, so my HTPC consumed alot of power). Timeshifting didn't really work and the DVB subs were rendered at the same time as they were received which is usually way too early.

I also tried installing it at my parents house (they insisted they wanted a HTPC after seeing mine). They use DVB-S and DVB-T. Because of some problems with MP and the fact that at the time there was no DVB sub support, i tried to switch them to DVB Viewer ( thought they might have more luck with it). There has been nothing but complaints since. They cant figure out how to use it, it crashes and it messes up their recordings. They keep asking to get the 'blue man' back (MP that is

This shouldnt be seen as an attempt to bash DVB Viewer, its a pretty cool program for the price (and overall is probably the best alternative), but i just couldnt get it to work on my own or my parents setup.

every month or two whe i am coming back to media portal to give it another try i see it gets even worse.

Do you remember to report the issues you encounter? Looking at your posting history it doesn't look it (unless TV-out quality has been your biggest issue?).

I understand the frustration when things dont work (remember i was also a frustrated user once, now im a frustrated developer but please trust me when i say that we *are* working on it. Many of the problems faced has to do with rather weird details of DVB. This is probably also why DVB viewer works better for some people. They have a buggy implementation and we have a different buggy implementation (and each provider relies on their own personal buggy implementation). Depending on your broadcaster and how they feel about DVB you experience can vary greatly.

To summarize, i appreciate your frustration upspace, but either provide some more constructive criticism (as in bug reports for example) or go bug the DVB Viewer developers instead

 

[MacMini]

Well, it's after Christmas, after New Year's, and I am close to throwing in the towel and getting back to the VMC fold:-(

I love Media Portal: with the Monochrome skin, for me it's pretty close to the perfect front-end.

Except for TV. I have tried both a Hauppauge 950 and HDHomeRun. On two separate computers.

I can get the analog portion of the Hauppauge to work, sort of. It shows the dreaded "No video/audio detected" when I first enter TV, but if I just scroll and press Start TV again, then it starts working. But if I change channels, the Audio starts lagging, and it gets worse with every channel change. The result is, that the TV portion is unusable.

With the HDHomeRun, I can't even scan the digital cable or OTA channels: it crashes every time. It used to work a few months ago, prior to 0.2.3.0, but then the analog portion of the Hauppauge didn't work....

I see a lot of posts about these issues, tons of logs, but many logs end up showing "0 views," which means nobody looked at them:-(

The sad part is, if I run the same two tuners in Sage TV, or Vista Media Center, they get set up absolutely painlessly, and run perfectly within a couple of minutes. No Audio lag, no error messages, no glacial channel changes. Maybe this is naive, but why doesn't someone just take a look at what these guys are doing right, and emulate it?

Anyway, I've been preaching the gospel of Media Portal for a while, to anyone who would listen. And I am very grateful to all the developers, who spend their free time on the project.

But, at some point, it just has to work.

For myself, I am going to wait for a couple of more weeks to see what the apparently significant planned changes will bring to MP's TV portion, with my fingers and toes crossed in hope.

 

[Spragleknas]

Regarding analogue cards, have you seen this?
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/patch_improvements_analog_cards-t33290.html

 

[MacMini]

Thanks for the tip, Spragleknas.

I did try it, and have been trying just about every new build, hoping to find a way to fix my TV woes. It's not like these are such unusual cards: a Hauppauge 950 and a HDHomeRun. They work flawlessly in most other TV-enabled front-ends.

I had been pestering people and bringing up the problem, unfortunately without success.

I posted recently in Bugs (https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...-sync-after-channel-changes-36159/#post240814,) but as of today, not a single person has even looked at my log:-( Sadly, this has been all too common in the TV area.

I basically got to the end of my rope (well, my wife holds the other end)

So, last night, with a heavy heart, I uninstalled Media Portal, and spent some time reconfiguring Vista MCE (getting rid of menus I don't use, renaming menus, installing plugins like Netflix, MyTV, BR/HDDVD, etc..)

MCE is not as sleek as Media Portal (with Monochrome,) and the navigation is not as intuitive. After MP, there are a few things in Vista MCE, which definitely feel clunky and poorly designed.

But the whole thing works. One can watch TV, flip through channels, no sync issues, no freezes.

MP is, by far, the best designed, IMO, front-end out there. But the TV portion really needs to be nailed down. Maybe it needs new blood, and maybe the next version will solve most serious issues.

I am grateful for all the work all the developers are putting in, and if/when TV becomes functional for people like me, I'll be back in a heart beat (and will donate, and preach its wonders to others))

Thanks again!