I recently did a major systems upgrade at home, moving multiple systems from FC2 and FC3 up to FC5.  One of those systems holds my mythtv backend server while another is my wireless connected laptop running the MythTV frontend.  Obviously, the front and backends got updated too, along with the appropriate (re: ivtv) drivers in the server.  So far my impression of the new version is not so good.  After a week of use, I thought it was time to make some notes on what I've found.

Background

I'm running FC5 on both the front and backend systems, updated to the latest releases as of last week (2006-09-09, I believe).  The backend was installed using yum and atrpms's mythtv-suite the day after 0.20 was released.  I do not have the mythweb updates yet, but I don't use MythWeb so I didn't think it would be necessary.  The front end was installed using the following RPMs, also installed using yum and ATrpms repository:

mjhammel(tty1)$ rpm -qa | grep mythtv

mythtv-theme-abstract-0.20040910-3.at

mythtv-theme-ProjectGrayhem-1.7-2.at

mythtv-theme-photo-4-7.at

mythtv-theme-Retro-0.20051208-2.at

mythtv-0.20-133.fc5.at

mythtv-themes-0.20-133.fc5.at

mythtv-frontend-0.20-133.fc5.at

mythtv-theme-sleek-0.35-3.at

mythtv-theme-visor-0.16.2-6.at

mythtv-theme-purplegalaxy-0.20031214-4.at

mythtv-theme-MediaCenter-0.17-5.at

On the backend I don't run much of anything other than gnome and MythTV (front and backends, typically).  I have installed BOINC on all my servers but this didn't cause MythTV 0.19 any grief so I'm not sure it should be causing v0.20 any problems either.  It is a possibility, of course. 

My laptop frontend is running with 512MB of memory with a intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor running at 1.50GHz.

Crashes

The first  problem is that watching TV will crash the frontend if you stop watching and try to start again.  This happens every time.   The frontend just dies.  Since I primarily use MythTV to listen to TV or watch videos while I work, this tends to be pretty annoying.  It's possible this is a FC5 issue. But my gut instinct is this is a MythTV issue since none of my other regularly used applications have had problems with crashes.

I've also had multiple crashes after changing appearance configurations, such as changing font sizes or choosing a different theme.   

update: 2006-09-24

The problem here turns out to be a bug (probably) in MesaGL. I was getting the following message when the front end crashed:

mythfrontend: ../../../src/mesa/glapi/glapi.c:341: _glapi_get_dispatch: Assertion `api != ((void *)0)' failed.

I googled this and found a page discussing the issue .  Turns out if I disable opengl sync and make sure I"m using the Qt painter then the crashes go away.  The painter option is set in the Setup/Appearances/Theme page while the OpenGL Sync is disabled under the Setup/TV Settings/Playback/General Playback window.  Updating these has fixed all the crashes.

Speed

The frontend on my laptop is very slow to start.  It can, at times, take 30 seconds or longer to get to the main menu.  I thought this might be related to new wireless drivers but throughput for remote X applications (run with and without ssh tunnels) is fine and so is general web browsing.   Maybe it's a database problem.  It's probably not an issue with the new OpenGL themes because I'm not using those.  FWIW, those took even longer to render because I don't have hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers installed.  I have an i910GM graphics subsystem which I think has GL support, but I don't have it running.  I don't do gaming so I have never really needed it previously.

The other very slow startup is with watching TV.  The hard drive light on my laptop flashes quite a bit now when I start TV.  That didn't happen quite so much with 0.19.  I'm swapping a lot now at startup.  I'm curious what changed to cause that.

The video player seems to be wrought with throughput problems over the wireless too.  I know, I know:  why am I trying to use wireless?  Well, with 0.19 it worked quite well.  I had almost no frame drop or sync problems.  The videos ran smoothly, even while I did computationally intensive work like process images in gimp (large images, for a book).  The only time the wireless got bogged down was when OpenOffice tried to save large files (with large images embedded in it) while I was watching TV or videos.  But with 0.20 I can be watching videos and doing nothing else and I still get frequent pauses.  This probably isn't related to MythTV, though.  It's the video player, or some filesystem (or other OS subsystem) issue more than likely.  I'm just not sure what to tweak.  Maybe it's just the wireless driver.  I just don't know at this point. 

One possible reason for the startup slowness for the main menu may be the extra fonts (hundres of them) that XFS is now managing on my laptop.  I put them on the laptop by mistake (they belong on my development server instead) and so X also takes a little extra time to start up (and so does GIMP on my laptop).  I'll remove those and see if it helps.

Update:  I removed the extra fonts.  Initial startup might be a bit faster, but most themes are still really slow.  The fastest (and most stable) theme appears to be Sleek. 

Theme Problems

Themes are pretty broken.  The default theme works okay, but any of the others I installed on my laptop frontend seem to have problems.  For example, I have no text in the video gallery using the MediaCenter theme:

And some themes don't display menus at all (which makes it hard to back out of these unless you remember what you're doing).  This is the Retro theme:

Audio

While this is probably xine's fault, not MythTV's, it's still annoying.  TheVideo player (xine) plays audio at a very low leve compared to watching TV.  I have all the audio set the same way I did with 0.19 (which was configured to use Xine too).  But audio was always a little low on this laptop anyway.  At least now TV is loud and clear.  So I guess I should look at this as an improvement and not really a problem.

Other weirdness

At one point, while going through the channel guide, I got channel ids and the channel schedules out of sync.  I'm not sure how I did it and it only happened once so far.  I was in the process of adjusting my channel favorites and some how I think I hit the Home or End keys or something.  The channel names were not what I expected – they almost looked like they came from a different channel guide for a different city.  And the channel didn't match with their schedules.  For example, what should have been pbs was the schedule for one of the local hispanic channels.

Summary

This is just a first set of impressions.  I'll post more as I think of it.  I'm still playing with 0.20, though I'd rather just use it for now.  FC2 and 0.19 on my laptop ran pretty flawlessly (except for low sound).  So right now I'm less than happy with how the upgrade has gone.  But I know it will get better.