4. Financial Support for Open Source Applications
I disagree entirely. The money the members pay should be used to reduce the price even further instead of using it for other open source applications. The problems I have are:
a. Who decides which open source application and how much?
b. If the exec of SD insists on overcharging us and using the "extra" money for other OSS, then it should be for MythTV or derivatives like plugins. Or the money should be used to improve the SD service (see 6. below)
c. Supporting other OSS is not why I pay SD - I want listings faster, better, easier. I don't pay NVIDIA because I want better genealogy software.
d. The lower the price for SD, the larger and faster the adoption rate. Having to pay a yearly fee is a detraction for MythTV when we already pay for hardware, cable/satellite subscriptions, etc.
This brings up a related point - The financial information should be a lot more transparent, barring what is required to be kept confidential by the licensing agreement. Everything else including total income, assets, profit, etc. should be posted publicly on SD quarterly. You want our trust? Make it transparent. We can look at the source code, we should be able to look at the books. Think of SD as a coop, owned and run by it's members.
6. Self-hosting
This is a great idea because we can start to enrich the data.
For example:a. After each daily sync, our MythTV systems could voluntarily send back an anonymous list of what we have scheduled to record for the next two weeks. This could then be added as a "MythTV ranking" to each show as in "%75 of SD users are going to record this show". That would be great information for finding shows and we could setup recording schedules based on it, for example, any documentary that reaches a %35 viewer level, would be recorded automatically.
b. If a show doesn't have a description, we could enter one via the Mythweb interface, which would then be uploaded into SD's database and sent down to others. It could be filtered for bad words, or disabled at the receiving end, or veted somehow perhaps wiki style or misleading/foul/add based descriptions would get the user banned from SD.
c. Because SD knows which lineups we are using, it knows where we are and which provider we are using. That might be useful for creating user groups or perhaps getting the users of the same provider together to get a problem solved. Power in numbers!
d. Given SD gets pinged by our MythTV servers everyday, SD know our most recent external IP address. We could voluntarily add our IP to a list and the MythTV systems could start to talk to each other. If you missed a recording for whatever reason, perhaps you could have it transcoded and streamed to your box overnight, if you both have the same provider. That would be legal right? You both paid for the content. Or you could define "Mythfriends" and add their tuner as if it was one of yours and visa versa. That would allow Mythfriends with access to different line-ups, say one person has satellite, the other has cable and another has over-the-air to all use each other's tuner to catch shows. Or perhaps if SD goes down, you could use other known Mythfriends using your same provider to send you the schedule. Mythfriends could automatically be added as a VoIP route if you have Asterisk running on your box. Mythfriend systems could keep each other updated on the status of the other's sytem - are you watching TV, what is recording, diskspace left, temperature, etc. You could send messages via the mythvosd method. You could "sync" your video collections slowly over many days during slow times to another Mythfriend - add a video to a "sync" directory and it gets slowly copied over to the other's video collection and visa versa (or pictures too) - great for keeping a home and cabin system in sync and backups.
e. SD could start to buy content and send it to us, most likely using all the MythTV boxes in a bit torrent setup. Or send us free content, for example, trailers.
Cheers, TugBoat.
)