Eric,
As usual, its not I that need to re-read the comments.
Never has a difference of opinion pissed me off. I might get frustrated with trying to explain my side, but never pissed off. I welcome differences of opinion, they're what get things moving forward.
We don't have to agree on strategic decisions, but you have to accept that if someone is interested in this that and the other, and they want to add some code in their spare time and it doesn't impact the rest of the code base then I'm not going to stop them. And that alone doesn't represent a "strategic decision". I see little point in continuing a discussion/argument about the validity of its inclusion (I've just re-read our original email chain on transcoding, and it amazes me just how hard this simple point was to explain, not sure you ever got it). I'm specifically thinking transcoding here (an optional feature, that can be entirely disabled), which was specifically added at the request of a large number of users, far more than ever said it was a bad idea (which numbers 1), OSS being very democratic after all.
Ultimately what pisses me (and many others) off though usually boils down to the following:
1. When people put forward a rational argument for something and you don't agree (or maybe you do, know one is sure), all too often you deviate on to completely unrelated topics. This is simply infuriating as it make it nearly impossible to discuss things.
2. When people try to point out that the topics you're raising are not relevant to the discussion at hand, you usually continue with the same rhetoric like a stuck record. Again, infuriating, as its impossible to discuss things and make progress.
3. This is by far the worst one, for me personally, when agreeing with you on a topic, you seem to completely ignore the fact an agreement has been reached. And you continue to bang on and argue about the point. This makes 1 and 2 into minor annoyances by comparison.
Case in point, this GPLv2 argument. Time and time again, in many different places I've made it absolutely clear that I have NO problem with v2. Personally I've never released (that I can remember) anything under v3. I'm generally not a big fan of the v3 license, from a pragmatic point of view (though I do understand its philosophy).
Maybe these comments are ambiguous, or not explicit enough, but for me they're pretty clear!
"Neither of us have a particular issue with changing the license ..." - referring to Andreas and myself.
"However I can say that this process is being investigated. But it's not the sort of thing that would happen overnight..."
And from another forum:
"Generally speaking, it's not a bad idea." - that's possibly a bit vague, though in context its less so
And from IRC:
"personally I'm not that bothered (I'd be happy releasing as GPLv2)" - this was actually a private discussion, most of the public comments I've found need a whole thread to be put in context.
And our (Eric and myself) personal email correspondence:
"I've certainly got no problems with releasing my own code under GPLv2, personally I'm not all that enamoured with v3"
Whenever I've been approached, at least in the last 12-18 months, I've always made it very clear that I (and Andreas) have no issue with v2, but that the barrier is in getting agreement to move to v2. And to somewhat answer Ronald's earlier point about not doing it all myself, do you know how many of those people that are so keen to move us to v2 and have knowledge of my opinion have said "hey, well if you feel like that, why don't I take the time to contact everyone and look into the potential of a migration?" I'll give you a hint, its slightly less than 1!.
And to move onto another such topic, TS v MKV. Time and time again I agreed with you and time and time again you went on and on about how I was completely wrong and shouldn't use MKV for streaming. Hell, I've not used MKV for streaming/recording for a LONG time!
From our own personal email correspondence, I made this comment specifically in reply to your points about the topic:
"I think the arguments you put forward are perfectly valid ones."
"[I] see that it would benefit TVH to support BOTH formats"
"I have in fact been arguing for the inclusion of your TS support" - my attempt to drive home the point to you, which you still manage to miss.
But ultimately actions speak louder than words. TS support was re-introduced, this was done with my full backing (and strong recommendation on the basis of the feedback I got from you and many others) and as I've mentioned I ONLY use TS recording these days. And it was done in a nice clean way that allowed the potential to include other containers should it be desirable.
With regard to your specifics about the state of master, these are perfectly valid questions, and to answer in short here:
1. DVB-T (a bit, but not much since the original testing for the new DVB code)
2. DVB-S (every day)
3. DVB-C/ATSC never
4. IPTV, mainly HTTP input from TVH server, but also occasional RTP/UDP input from canned mux samples. This is my primary mechanism for testing things. There are however known deficiencies in setup of single stream entries (its too cumbersome).
5. XBMC (every day), though I'm no longer using pvr.hts. People kept complaining, so I rewrote it for the sheer hell of it, and my version (IMHO) works much better.
6. Only for testing.
7. I probably have about 7-8 regularly scheduled shows a week. With the occasional random movie throw in here and there. Though I was using master over Xmas where I was recording about around 5-10 shows a day for a few weeks. All recordings are TS, I haven't used MKV recording in around 18 months.
8. I watch less Live TV than I used to. However we discovered a bug in pvr.hts which completely broken timeshift in XBMC. This is fixed in pvr.tvh and timeshift is much better. That being said there are still playback issues, but at the moment we're unsure whether these are XBMC or TVH. And the implementation was always a bit of a hack and an interim solution.
However, that being said while the general stability is very good (last few days excepted), there are several features currently missing (that used to exist) that really do make it difficult to create a release:
1. Analogue TV, just not got around to re-adding into the new framework and I have limited personal interest.
2. Idle scanning. This is problematic for several reasons, and as soon as time permits is near the top of my list.
3. IPTV single stream entry. The changes make IPTV useful for a much wider audience, but they do unfortunately make adding streams containing a single channel more cumbersome. This is relatively trivial to fix, just needs time.
4. Bound to be more.
Well I think that's enough for now!
Adam
