As MythTV is free to anyone that cares to download/install/configure it, I fail to see how Human's Dragon systems (which are not configured to use Zap2It) are any contributing factor to the Zap2It problems.

What is your stand on LinuxMCE, Mythdora, MythUbuntu and the like? I would assume from your posts that KnoppMyth is as big a contributing factor to Zap2it's decision?

I've already edited my last post and apologized. End of discussion.

OK, I'm a fairly patient person (you get that way at my age, bringing up children) but I have to say your posts really strike me as from someone that doesn't "get it". Your was apparently posted without thought, and now you retract and apologize. Best of luck to you on your political endeavors...

I couldn't agree more...

Wow, this is very unfortunate. Is there a way to continue using mythtv once they shut down their service? My current subscription is good to July 9, so I'm going to be in big trouble soon....

Marc

It's not hard to draw a line between what this says and what I said. Regarding me "getting it" all I can say is I've contributed hundreds of posts on various mythtv forums, most of them answering the questions of others. I even submitted a line of code that was committed a few months back.

I said something in haste, I apologized, now lets move the conversation forward.

What's the next step? It seems to me we have about 10 weeks until Myth becomes a lot less usable.

In Australia, we have a free, community based guide. Warren Twomey started it as a labour of love. Perhaps someone who wants to contribute and has the resources can do something similar?

Just a suggestion of course, and Warren Twomey, who runs it, is a nice guy and has been very willing to share in the past. It is now one of only two epg services left here (the 'free' one we used for KM prior to this now uses Warren's).

http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/view

Cheers

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Re: a community-maintained program guide. Is the Australian market as fragmented as the US market? (I honestly don't know, I'm asking.)

I mean, in my city alone there's at least two providers (Comcast and Verizon), with hundreds of differently-numbered channels for each provider... and the provider, channel lineup and numbering scheme can be different the second you go to the neighboring county.

Re: offering to pay Zap2It for data. There's a poll on the Zap2It forums and so far there's only 40 votes. Sure, this could increase in the next few days, but will it ever get to a number that would make it worth their while to offer the service to individual subscribers? 1000, say? Even 1000 sounds low, frankly.

probably not. im not hugely aware of the US situation but in australia, the community guide is possibly because we really don't have a huge amount of tv stations. free to air television is largely centralized. for each state we have the city broadcast - covering say sydney and its surrounds - and only a few regionals. i'd guess and say that there would be less than 100 tv station frequencies for the whole country (maybe 200). Of these ~100 frequencies there are only 5 tv stations (abc, sbs, 7, 9, and 10)... and there is only slight variations in the broadcasted programs between States and between the city and regionals.

By this i mean .. that on channel 10 each night at 6pm, the same simpsons ep is shown country wide. This makes the community guide possible.

On top of this we have a choice of only 2 pay systems. foxtel and optus something. I believe that the broadcasted programs on each of those is consistent state wide. There's only 7 states in australia (heretofor NT is a state ok.. ACT doesn't count) - therefore not much variation in broadcasted programs.

i get the feeling that the US has considerably more variation in broadcasting.. and many more regional stations / affiliates. Therefore your national guide is way more complicated.

Having said that its possible here.. im sure its still a considerable amount of work..My massive thanks to the people who put the effort into populating it. i'd pay for it if asked.

I've always been slightly jealous of zap2it. Until recently, australians have had a dreadful time with EPG. Hopefully you guys will be fine.. seems like that they probably can sell a lot of ads cause you never actually visit their site. but if they shut it down.. surely someone else will create a pay service.

I should have known. The last couple of times I renewed my zap2it subscription they didn't require any surveys. Hopefully somebody will come up with an alternative before Sept 1st. I had to do a search to find out what happened to that paid service Lxmsuite.com. Apparently they didn't last too long. Not surprising when you consider who would pay for a service when they can get it for free.

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Backend R5E50
P4 1.3 - 384MB, 250GB HD, HD5000AV, PVR150 non MCE
Frontend R5E50
EPIA M1000 - 512MB, 40GB HD, Streamzap
KnoppMyth Folding Team Stats

The problem I saw with LXMSuite was that their added value wasn't what people cared about. Their custom-made themes were ok, but IMO they were outshined by some public domain themes.

I think they should have tapped into the desire of nontechnical people to give back to the project by letting guide payments count toward development work. Maybe commercial guide subscribers could have their names (or aliases) mentioned as funders of code contributions. Maybe they would be able to vote on what feature they'd like the developers to work on next. (Note: This doesn't eliminate developer freedom - it just allows a chance for their payments to lead to improvements in MythTV and KnoppMyth.)

Thoughts?

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KnoppMyth R5.5
MythiC Dragon v2.0
Join the KnoppMyth Frappr!

I thought they did that... if you subscribed you got some number of "bounty points" or some such thing, and you could then use them to vote for what add-on or improvement you wanted to see worked on.

EDIT: Here's their "services" page courtesy of the Wayback machine (since their domain is now owned by GoDaddy):

http://web.archive.org/web/200505180150 ... rvices.htm

LxMSuite didn't have enough "subscribers". I subscribed, I thought it was a good idea. Based on the statement, my personal option is that the MythTV community isn't the problem. MythTV has always played nice with Zap2It. As far as I'm aware, MythTV is the only program that follows the "next suggested grab time".

Since options were available in MythTV to randomized the time that grabbing occurs, KnoppMyth has enforced them.

Those of us that have used MythTV for some time, recall a time before Direct Data. I suspect that using XMLTV will once again become the norm. However, what I'd like to see is a viable commercial option that is supported by the community.

Certain things cannot happen without community support. I don't think 5 bucks a month is too much to ask for guide data. Do you?

I would gladly pay $5 a month for guide service. I've said as much on the zap2it forums as well. While I have almost no programming skills outside of the web / database environments, I would be happy to assist any effort to create a new guide data retrieval system any way I can.

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Running Knoppmyth R5F27 since 09/12/07

Hardware Specs

I agree with that. I think $5/mo is a reasonable price to pay for listings. Even with the occasional hiccup, I thought Zap2It listings would be worth paying a reoccuring monthly fee.

Here is some explaination from the Zap2It forum. This was posted by labsadmin:


Note that last point... However, that second to last point leaves the door open for ideas. What about Zap2It mirroring the data to other servers to reduce their load? Something along the lines of the way the NTP pool works?

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

NO, $5 a month would work well.

I hope this would open an opportunity to an OpenSource friendly company to try where LxMsuite failed, like others mention LxM had to compete with free.