Doug Goldstein

Well, I’ve been super busy lately with life/school/work and it doesn’t look like that is going to let up until the end of April. So expect to see minimal work and attention out of me until then.

However, I do promise to touch the MythTV ebuild and its associated plugins to do some fix ups in the next few days. As far as common requests to the MythTV ebuild, no I won’t be fixing the Firewire and Unichrome issue. The USE flags exist for those along with messages telling you that you need to do some stuff yourself to get it working.

Firstly, from everything I can gather, the latest Unichrome CVS / snapshot isn’t supported by xorg-x11 directly, requires some patching and won’t be supported by spyder in the official xorg-x11 ebuilds. So basically, I’d have to maintain some crazed subset of xorg-x11 stuff for it. Like hell I will… plus I don’t even have the hardware. Unless some user out there or Via themselves wants to make my dream come true and buy this poor college student a Mini-ITX board with Unichrome.

And the second request, Firewire. The MythTV firewire support depends on libraries which only exist in a Subversion repository, which is a constantly moving target and is no where near considered stable. I don’t have the time to maintain something that’s known to be unstable and doesn’t even have a release out yet and is constantly changing. So once again, if you enable that USE flag. Read the notice. Do what it says. Otherwise, turn that off. You don’t need it. You don’t use it. It’s only for the people with the Motorola boxes that nag me for Firewire support.

Now you might ask why did I have the USE flags for this? Because eventually, Firewire libs will have a release and eventually I would think Unichrome will get merged in. On top of all this, I’m not going to force users to build their own MythTV from scratch just to get that support. Just do the unsupported, hack things yourself.. and you can have a working MythTV on top of that. But don’t expect support from me.

Onto the realm of nuvexport, the one package I’m keeping up with lately. After withholding food, water, and other necessities from ChrisWhite, he finally fixed up the ffmpeg ebuild and the latest nuvexport depends on it. It also checks the USE flags you compiled ffmpeg with and forces you to compile your ffmpeg correctly for nuvexport. This should drastically cut down on the annoying users complaints on the mailing list saying that X codec isn’t supported, when they clearly compiled their system with -codec. emerge -pv package. That’s what it’s there for people. Only outstanding problem for me is Xvid support. I have +xvid for ffmpeg, however it doesn’t look like it added –enable-xvid to the compile. Back to work ChrisWhite!! BACK TO WORK!

Here’s a special section for you MythTV CVS users. If you use the MythTV CVS ebuilds, which are not maintained or endorsed or supported by me. I hope your box explodes like mine did last week. Just getting tired of all the people just assuming that a CVS ebuild that’s written by some guy, and has a bunch of problems that I’ve pointed out should work. And I should support it and the MythTV developers should support it.

That’s all.

Filed under: General, Linux, MythTV
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