Is MythTV going to be involved in google's summer of code in any way?

I'd really think it would push recognition of this project to students out there alongside other OSS projects. Furthermore, it would just make the project's todo list smaller!

I've never heard of Google's summer of code, but I don't see how it could help MythTv in any significant way. The MythTv devs (who are not on this forum, by the way) are grappling with some of the thorniest problems you can imagine. Video has always been difficult to do well on a computer. Making a system like Myth perform with the endless variety of hardware out there is a boggling task. It requires resources beyond the computer itself and it does not "scale" well. You can't fix a MythTv problem 10 times faster by throwing 10 programmers at it.

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I don't think it would hurt to include it, you never know what kind of a cool idea someone might come up with for a new plugin or something interesting, and if they managed to fix a few bug then even better.

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Xsecrets

Looking at some of the other organisations present I think it code only benefit the community as a whole if not only to promote the product MythTV.

http://code.google.com/soc/

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Girkers

Thanks for adding the url, which I had missed. MythTV can benefit surely, as its base desktop KDE is benefitting from it.

As for MythTV being a "video program" and not easy to develop for, I'd like to point out that last year, Google's summer of code gave Mono a project of a video editor made in C# from scratch. Not only was it a success, but the project, Diva, continues to programmed for on google's payroll.

If the opportunities are available then will they (students/coders) come.

Lastly, a wierd cool feature has to be approved by mentors of MythTV before they are worked on or even merged into any tree, as it has always been here. All that lies here is google giving incentives via money for students to dig in to MythTV!

Let's get Isaac's attention here as he needs to write a proposal to Google by May 1st!!

Isaac, if you see this, here is the mentor faq: http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html

there are certainly some possibilities, take a look at http://video.google.com/. It shouldn't be that hard to have it so mythtv users could browse google's video site and view/order video's. I'm sure google would like the attention.
but maybe it's more of a thing for mythtv, not knoppmyth

Hey,

I've tried to stir the pot a bit on the google forums for mythtv, with no response (from the forums). I would love to see some google(esq) ideas comeinto mythtv. I've suggested this before on the mythtv offical forum (with no response again). Mythtv+google video seams like such a pratical thing for me. From our standpoint, to even get flash support into mythbrowser (I think the google player is based on flash) would be a real benfit. I think from a google stand point, there could be some real benfits for such a platform. If not for research purposes, only.

In the end, if all that the community got out of easier method for creating plugins, i'd be preety happy.

prosonik

please post links to these forums. I'll post in them too!

Hey,

The forum that i found (From the link on the bottom of the site) was:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Google-Video?lnk=li

However, as usually, it's a Usenet newsgroup, filled with people promoting there own stupid videos, and there isn't a whole lot of good conversation around extending google videos. I'll have a look around, and see if there is some better google dev sites.. I've thought about it some more, and if there is a google-api for google videos, we might be able to do something ourselves. But I'd sure like to see some official google-dev time going into myth.

Speaking of that, to be the take the conversation a different way, does anybody think that a fork of mythtv is in the not so distant future? I love the work that's being put into mythtv itself. The work on the tv part is brilliant. However, as far as extending myth, i don't think enough has been done to provide an easy way to create plugings. I know the argument, "Well, the menu is based on XML, so you can do whatever you want". But that doesn't all work, and it's not the best solution. Take a look at the mythburn ui, etc. It doesn't follow the same "Feel" of the rest of the mythv. Mythstream is similar. Both a great plugins, but I think they could be better (and more wife friendly), if they'd follow the ui. But I don't blame the devs of the plugins. To be proficient with mythtv, and to do a plug in, you really have to C or C++ , and that scares allot of us part-time geeks away. If there was some work done to extend the UI into Python, I think you'd have allot more plug ins created. That's not even hitting on the fact, that I'm still haven't seen really good documentation for the backend. (I haven't checked the wiki recently, I will)

From time to time i look at freevo, and the path they took to plug-ins, using python, like http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/doc/DevelopPlugins, I think there would more community support going into myth, actually making it a "myth-convergence" box, if there was a better understanding of the "nuts and bolts" of myth, and an easier way to access and extend it's functionality.

Anyways, That's my two cent rant.

prosonik

Not a bad suggestion. Being a Perl hacker, I would like to see Perl.

The problem I see with this is that every different language you add nearly doubles the support "costs". I am not sure Isaac and the rest of us have enough time to keep up with the bug list at the moment, let alone the extra bugs from interactions between the Perl/Python interpreter and the frontend's many threaded objects.

Valid point about Freevo. Just had a look then, and there are a lot of extra plugins now. (it didn't even have a plugin architecture last time I used it!)

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added discussion page directly on MythTV's wiki. It's in current news:discussion.

link here: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Ta ... ent_events

Please get some traffic going there to get attention of MythTV's developers.

MythTV is part of Google's Summer of Code 2006!
http://code.google.com/soc/mythtv/about.html

And here is what Isaac is asking for help on:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/SoC2006

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Girkers

I am sure google would love to be able to sell their videos this way. Since microsoft is trying to dip into the Media Center PC, maybe google will prop up MythTV as an alternative. Especially if a Windows Frontend comes around. I would love the idea, and Know i would buy some videos from it.