2006-11-06, 06:15 AM
This used to be a fantastic program that I could reliably use to manage my television watching, but over the past several releases, it has deteriorated to the point where I can't even use it now. It doesn't record properly anymore, the fast forward, rewind and pause buttons completely don't work, and it crashes constantly. What happened? I think too much time is being put into useless "features" such as the PC Client, and not enough time is being spent on testing the product before it's released. Thanks to the well established policy of not hosting older versions, I can't even go back to the .96 series, that at least reliably recorded programs. Because of this program, I spent a lot of money on PVR equipment which is mostly useless without this program.
My complaints summarized:
1) If the recording service isn't restarted at least once a day, it may not record shows, or claim that all of the tuners are in use. The log says something about writing to protected memory. My VCR never caused me to miss my favorite show due to a programmer error.
2) The fast forward/rewind/pause buttons don't do anything on the MVP anymore. They used to work fine. Now, if you try to use them, the whole thing locks up and crashes.
3) Periodically, the program will claim that there are no tuners available, when there clearly are. I have 3 tuners, and there is nothing worth recording at 9 am.
4) The MVP interface seems to crash a lot, and periodically has a very noticeable lag between button press and response.
My setup is: Dedicated GBPVR server with a PVR500 and PVR350, currently GBPVR 98.13, and 2 MVP clients. The server runs nothing else but a VNC server. It is an AMD 1800+ with 512MB RAM.
There was another PVR software that I tried once, and it worked great, I don't remember what it was called, but I do remember that it was unreasonably expensive. It had a great MVP interface, and 0 lag time. I think it was something like $150 though, and that seems a bit much. If I can't find one of the older versions of this program that actually worked around my computer, I might just have to shell out the cash for the superior program.
My complaints summarized:
1) If the recording service isn't restarted at least once a day, it may not record shows, or claim that all of the tuners are in use. The log says something about writing to protected memory. My VCR never caused me to miss my favorite show due to a programmer error.
2) The fast forward/rewind/pause buttons don't do anything on the MVP anymore. They used to work fine. Now, if you try to use them, the whole thing locks up and crashes.
3) Periodically, the program will claim that there are no tuners available, when there clearly are. I have 3 tuners, and there is nothing worth recording at 9 am.
4) The MVP interface seems to crash a lot, and periodically has a very noticeable lag between button press and response.
My setup is: Dedicated GBPVR server with a PVR500 and PVR350, currently GBPVR 98.13, and 2 MVP clients. The server runs nothing else but a VNC server. It is an AMD 1800+ with 512MB RAM.
There was another PVR software that I tried once, and it worked great, I don't remember what it was called, but I do remember that it was unreasonably expensive. It had a great MVP interface, and 0 lag time. I think it was something like $150 though, and that seems a bit much. If I can't find one of the older versions of this program that actually worked around my computer, I might just have to shell out the cash for the superior program.