[oldtvwatcher]

I hate reading tons of text, while in the same time code could have been written. The spirit of oss is: if you want sth not there work on it.

Says the most abrasive developer on the Kodi team. And you say shit like this despite the fact that you know full well I am not a coder, from past times I've told you this (and there is always my signature line, which quite frankly is there just for you). Most of your users aren't coders, either, and I am sure you know that as well. But hey, might as well poke the bear, it's easier than actually doing anything useful.

The most abrasive developer? Care to elaborate on your metrics? I want to see how far I won against koying or martijn or that evil negge from above? :-)

You are the only one that consistantly tries to just annoy me by responding with some kind of "send code" response even though you know I'm incapable of doing that. I don't read negge as deliberately attempting to be annoying, if anything I think he is genuinely trying to be helpful. I think maybe he just doesn't grasp that users and developers don't think alike, and that what makes perfect sense to a developer may be so much noise to a user, and that you're never going to turn users into coders or developers if they're not already predisposed to that sort of thing (which most of your users are not). I can't remember the last time martijn replied to anything I wrote (maybe he has the good sense to leave me alone when a reply would not be helpful) so I can't comment on that, and koying is apparently under the charming delusion that he can teach users "etiquette" and that they will actually follow it (maybe that will happen about the same time Kodi developers start being nice to users). He also doesn't like to read a lot of text so I figure eventually he'll stop reading my posts and try to teach "etiquette" to someone else, and will probably be equally unsuccessful (if you want to train something to do what you like, get a dog). But it seems you just never miss an opportunity to deliberately try to annoy me, and that seems to be the entire point of the posts you make. Therefore, from my point of view, you are the most annoying.

I suppose you are aware that a few months ago one of your number went on Reddit and spilled the beans about the fact that you guys don't even get along with each other, and he actually apologized for some of the responses he'd made to people. It sounded to me like working on Kodi isn't a fun thing because good developers have a difficult time dealing with the toxicity of the atmosphere created by a small number of developers. You would probably have a lot more good developers if you guys could just be nice to each other, let alone to users. This, I suspect, is the hidden cost of having such bad attitudes toward users; eventually you start treating each other the same way and while there's probably an "inner clique" that gets along well enough to accomplish something, you totally scare away anyone new that could make a contribution to Kodi, or that might actually want to become a coder or developer. I really find it ironic that koying would try to teach me etiquette when I suspect some of the Kodi developers could benefit from some kind of therapy or training to help them get along with each other, and with users, and maybe with the world in general. Admittedly I probably could too, since apparently some of my posts seem to come off as being more abrasive than I intended them, but then again I'm not working together with a group of people on a major software project (and at my age, I never will).

Of all the software I use, there are only two projects where I have this love/hate thing with them because the software is clearly the only thing available in its class, and in most of what it tries to do it does it very well, but when it falls down at some point the developers treat feature requests (or bug reports they don't want to deal with, so they transform them into feature requests) as major annoyances, and sometimes attack the user that brings up the issue. And in both cases, it has come out that the developers don't always get along with each other. The funny thing is that I have never seen this happen in forums devoted to Windows-only or OS X-only software (it probably does happen somewhere, I've just never personally seen it on those platforms), and I think it's because nobody has any inflated expectations for users of those OS's. I don't understand why some people think that in 2016, if you manage to install Ubuntu that means you are a coder (or want to be), or some kind of Linux expert. This is not 1996 and we are not using Slackware (a Linux distribution I have read is incredibly difficult for those who aren't Linux experts). It really doesn't take a lot of intelligence to install Ubuntu and make it work anymore, and it's a lot faster (and less expensive) to install Linux than Windows. So, there are a lot of us "just plain users" that are running Linux on one or more of our machines now.

(Sorry, koying, I wasn't replying to you, so no problem if you skipped this post entirely due to the length. I understand that you think users should follow a certain etiquette, but you don't speak for everyone, and if you don't like reading long posts then just don't).

[fritsch]

Thx for that update on your metrics, seems they are counter proportial to the reputation.

[oldtvwatcher]

General comment to anyone who has waded this far into this thread - I'm sorry it has gone so far off the rails. I don't take full blame for this but in retrospect I kind of wish I'd never said anything at all. I would suggest that anyone who really wants to discuss the original topic start a new thread that doesn't contain all the baggage in this one, not that I think you'll get any further since the developers clearly don't want to add this capability at this point in time. Which is really all that they needed to say to start with.

As for me, I've said all I have to say. I really don't enjoy getting into fights with developers (or anyone), so I'm done here.

[Kib]

Sorry to see you go, you were a valuable contributor to the Kodi open source project.

[negge]

@xbmclinuxuser: the debug logs are sanitized of any private information such as usernames and passwords. There have been some oversights in this regard in the past, in fact your tvheadend credentials can leak under specific circumstances. That doesn't mean you can't report bugs though, just create the ticket, then say that you'll send the log to anyone who gives them their e-mail address. You can even find the e-mail addresses to registered developers right there on track (in the "cc" field).

I realize that tvheadend must feel complicated because the fact is that it very much is. It's probably the most powerful PVR software available regardless of platform (some may argue that vdr is similarly advanced, maybe that's true). It supports crazy features like using tuners from remote servers using SAT>IP, using arbitrary input video streams as TV channels by transcoding them, EPG data from a raw socket (which means you can get EPG data into it no matter in what format it's in, eventually), transcoding output using different profiles for different users etc. It is very difficult to make powerful software user friendly, and even more so "noob friendly".

Just look at Photoshop - there's no way a person unfamiliar with it can use it for anything remotely productive without a lot of guides etc. Unfortunately tvheadend is just a niche project so there isn't as much documentation available, plus it has changed significantly over the years so some of the available documentation has become out of date.

Anyway, ignore @fritsch, he doesn't like users, ignore @Martijn, he doesn't like people who bark at developers. If you ever get around to it, file the ticket and send the log to sam.stenvall@kodi.tv.

[fritsch]

@negge ?

[oldtvwatcher]

@xbmclinuxuser: the debug logs are sanitized of any private information such as usernames and passwords. There have been some oversights in this regard in the past, in fact your tvheadend credentials can leak under specific circumstances. That doesn't mean you can't report bugs though, just create the ticket, then say that you'll send the log to anyone who gives them their e-mail address. You can even find the e-mail addresses to registered developers right there on track (in the "cc" field).

I realize that tvheadend must feel complicated because the fact is that it very much is. It's probably the most powerful PVR software available regardless of platform (some may argue that vdr is similarly advanced, maybe that's true). It supports crazy features like using tuners from remote servers using SAT>IP, using arbitrary input video streams as TV channels by transcoding them, EPG data from a raw socket (which means you can get EPG data into it no matter in what format it's in, eventually), transcoding output using different profiles for different users etc. It is very difficult to make powerful software user friendly, and even more so "noob friendly".

Just look at Photoshop - there's no way a person unfamiliar with it can use it for anything remotely productive without a lot of guides etc. Unfortunately tvheadend is just a niche project so there isn't as much documentation available, plus it has changed significantly over the years so some of the available documentation has become out of date.

Anyway, ignore @fritsch, he doesn't like users, ignore @Martijn, he doesn't like people who bark at developers. If you ever get around to it, file the ticket and send the log to sam.stenvall@kodi.tv.

Thank you, negge. As you might have guessed I am not the type of person who has a spare system sitting around to try things on, and whenever I have to install anything new (operating system or applications software) and it's something I use regularly it always scares the hell out of me, because I've had too many experiences where a new install has broken things that previously worked and that I have come to depend on. The only reason I even got into the situation of trying to install Ubuntu 16.04 and the Kodi Krypton beta was because Ubuntu pushed an update to the "Hardware Enablement Stack", whatever that is, and on one HTPC it broke everything (though on another one it went fine, and on my TVHeadEnd servers it went fine). So on that one I tried installing Ubuntu 16.04 and the Krypton last Krypton alpha (this happened literally hours before the beta came out, I have probably been saying beta when I meant alpha because I just now remembered that detail) and that's when I ran into the problem that Kodi simply wouldn't start at all after I added the second backend in, among other issues. So I wound up dropping back to 14.04 and was finally able to figure out how to put Isengard back using the repository at https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archiv...u/kodi-old but I literally wasted an entire day on that. I'm sure someone more versed in Linux would have handled that differently but to be honest I was kind of panicking, thinking that HTPC might never work right again. It might have been different if I had planned to do an upgrade that day, but I hadn't.

Admittedly I've had the problem of Kodi crashing during startup with Isengard under Ubuntu 14.04 also, but only sometimes, and usually only if the system has been running a while without a reboot. It usually starts on the second try. I don't imagine a report on Isengard would help you anyway.

My plan all along has been to stick with Ubuntu 14.04 until either I get new hardware or 16.04 has been out for quite some time. Normally I'm much more willing to update Kodi, but only after I try it on my desktop system to make sure nothing I depend on is broken. In this case that might not have saved me because the Krypton beta runs great under OS X, using both backends with no problem at all. It's only under Ubuntu that everything goes pear shaped. It's funny because that's just the opposite of how it was a few versions back; back then the Ubuntu version was very stable but the OS X version was always crashing at startup (even back when I only had one backend).

Regarding TVHeadEnd, as you may imagine I had an AWFUL time setting up TVHeadEnd initially. It has been what I can best describe as a long and painful experience, and during the first few months it was totally unreliable, but it was really the only thing that worked at all with our hardware. There were times I wouldn't have wished it on my worst enemy. However little by little I've ironed out most of the kinks, or found workarounds to the ones that remain. I can understand why a lot of users have trouble figuring it out, even ones that are much more technically astute than I. I had enough trouble grasping some of the concepts in TVHeadEnd 3.9, and now they are up to 4.0 stable and 4.1 beta and they keep throwing in new fields, dropdowns, and checkboxes, sometimes with little or no documentation of what those do. Your comparison to Photoshop (another program I could never use) is quite apt, but there are books upon books and web pages upon web pages that explain everything if you know how to search effectively. Whereas for TVHeadEnd there is still no really good beginners guide that I know of, at least not one written for the average user. So when people talk about things like SAT>IP, I don't even know if my version of TVHeadEnd (4.0.9, the most recent stable version) supports it, but beyond that I'm still having a hard time visualizing how it's used and under what circumstances it would be beneficial. Every time I think I have it figured out someone says I'm wrong.

One of the other reasons I run two backends, besides ones I've already mentioned, is because I'm always afraid that one of these days I'm going to unintentionally do something to screw it up royally and until I get it back up at least I can watch and record stuff using the other one.

What I will do is save your email address in a note on my system, along with a link to your post, and maybe after Krypton comes out of beta I might be willing to try it again, though probably still under 14.04. I really wish that one of the following were true in Ubuntu, that either you could install two different versions of the same software side-by-side and switch back and forth easily (without doing super Linux stuff to make it happen), so you could try a new version without losing your current one until you know the new one works, OR that Ubuntu software came in install packages (like Windows .exe files or OS X .dmg files) so that you could save your older versions and go back to one if a new version causes problems. I have read that Ubuntu 16.04 supports something called "snappy" (I think) packages that will be self contained install files, but they will only be usable in Ubuntu 16.04 and up, and you guys don't offer Kodi that way (yet?). I know that a lot of the problems I have stem from running Linux, but I absolutely won't run Windows due to security concerns, and a Mac seems like severe overkill for a HTPC (and even Mac Minis are pretty pricey these days).

All I will say about developers is that it's easy to tell which ones don't like users very much, or are much too easily offended. Back before the Internet there was a network of BBS's (remember those?), I think it was Fidonet, that had two rules: Don't annoy others, and don't be easily annoyed, and I always thought those were pretty good even if not always followed. Nowadays some people are much too quick to point out when they think someone else is being annoying, but they let themselves be much too easily annoyed.

Anyway thank you for your response, I do appreciate it very much!