Prof Yaffle, I don't know why you choose to read everything I write in the worst possible way. I am NOT angry at this project. I am, however, a little put off by the way you respond to people. Even your comment, "If you don't like the software, you're free to use something else" is wrong on a couple of levels. I DO like TVHeadEnd, and honestly there is nothing else like TVHeadEnd so I have no idea what you think I'd use if I didn't like it. Installing from a PPA does not make one a developer; there are pages aimed at rank newbies that show how to install from a PPA. That said, if I did have one complaint about TVHeadEnd it would be that they don't update the stable version more often. All the new development seems to go into the unstable version. But that's a moot point in this discussion because the unstable packaged versions don't (yet) include transcoding either.
> If you don't like the software, you're free to use something else; if you don't like the responses I've offered in terms of trying to endlessly help people on this forum then you're also free to add your own. Your response wasnot 'trying to help clarify', it was a directed complaint at the developer(s) of this software, "is it too much to ask (that you spend even more of your spare time getting this all polished to my satisfaction and) included in the standard builds". Yes, actually, it is
You say "if you don't like the responses I've offered in terms of trying to endlessly help people on this forum then you're also free to add your own", which is exactly what I did. But then you complain about my specific comment, adding words to what I said (the part YOU added in parenthesis) to make it sound like I was deliberately trying to be a jerk, but in fact those are YOUR words, not part of what I said. Are you really the kind of person that goes out of their way to make someone else look bad by putting words in their mouth that they never said in the first place? As I already explained to you, you didn't say in your original post that the transcoding feature "is relatively new, still has bugs, is being worked on but it's not perfect" (note I do NOT add words when I quote you; I'd appreciate the same courtesy) and that makes all the difference, because I would have never said "Would it really be asking too much to include this in the standard builds?" had I known that it's not yet ready.
By the way, just so we are on the same page here, when I say "standard builds" I'm including all builds that can be installed from a PPA, stable or unstable alike, as long as you don't have to compile it. Compiling software is a really daunting process for many users, myself included. Adding a PPA to add a repository is FAR easier. To go back to my car analogy (admittedly imperfect), if being told to compile something is like being told to rebuild an engine, adding a PPA is like being told to pour a can of fuel injector cleaner in the gas tank. It takes someone with considerable skills to do the former, but almost anyone with a brain and a little information can do the latter.
The reason people are using unstable builds (and probably the reason OpenElec uses them, though I can't speak for them) is that there has been a lot of hardware support added in the unstable versions that is not in the most recent stable version. Recently much work has been done on various DVB implementations, and it is much appreciated, but since that support isn't in the stable version, people who have that hardware are pretty much forced to use an unstable version. Personally, if a new stable version were released sometime soon (with at least the hardware support in the current unstable), I would use that and not even attempt to run an unstable version, as long as it worked with my tuners.