One thing that I’ve not missed in quite a while is vendor lock-in. Now as many in the open source community know, you get that lock in from windows, as well from software like quicken that makes older versions obsolete with something for this new tax year. Thus you end up in a continual cycle of upgrading. Needless to say I don’t think many of miss that, oh wait I’m on Gentoo….I’m continually upgrading for minor changes * bonks self *. Hey at least you can be happy knowing that OpenOffice rarely gets updated so the longest package to compile in the entire tree (and without a doubt largest) won’t happen but once a year if you are lucky. I would call that restraint.

Oddly enough though I found a application that has some of the same kind of features in Linux. Overall its actually a great set of utilities but the lock in of how to do certain things is nagging at me. In this case its some of the utilities of Mythtv. I’ve been using it for a little while now, and find it great to record a program that will be viewed at a later time or say while the parents are traveling to record it for them and let them view it when they get back, which they will get the chance to do in about a week. Hopefully, they’ll enjoy the experience, as from watching the video’s on my laptop the quality from the hauppauge pvr-350 card is great. I’ve not actually hooked it up to a tv yet, some minor complications with that like figuring out what room to put it in and figuring out the running of a Ethernet cable for it. Course I will be moving fairly soon, so those points might be moot. It did take me a year to get Mythtv setup in the first place, so you can see where that goes with a time frame.

Getting back to Mythtv, recording has been great and extremely simple. Playing from myth has not, and of course because of that tagging commercials properly hasn’t either. Unfortunately, my experience thus far with the tagging has left much to be desired, but really if you think about it figuring out where a commercial is automatically is not an easy task to even begin thinking about. Why bring it up if it ultimately isn’t a problem, well mostly because it leads into the first one. The Lock in begins with the transcoding you have to do to remove commercials. You can’t create a easy job to take the flagged commercial times and use transcode or mencoder to take them out quite easily. That’d be silly and some might say logical. Instead for the easy automated way, you get to use the transcoder that was written for Mythtv Now you might say its easier to do it with myths, however it removes a choice you have in the process, and as many have said, Gentoo is about choice.

If during your setup you choose to recode to mpeg4, you then have to deal with a custom .nuv format that you need avidemux or nuvexport to handle it to a bit more of a generic format. We thus have a very long drawn out process for what happens after the recording unfortunately at the expense of choice and in some ways I feel the ease of use. I transcode manually currently to other formats in part because I used to be a encoder and I’m picky about how things will turn out. Especially if its something I plan on keeping. However, once I have a good generic setting I’m sure I can automate the two step process to encode. Which is another annoyance for me. I’m used to running a single command that would do the first pass and then the second pass of encoding, however I learned the hard way that in fact you have to do both manually. I just wonder how common it is for people to run the first pass without the second fairly soon if not right after.

Now, there are many reasons that they could, did and would do the things that they did which still have solid reasons behind them. I just however wish that there was some ways around some of the annoyances. I guess I should prepare for the well you can do this and this and this and work around it.