> If you want it, you have three options: > 1) Write the code yourself
Perhaps a better way to say that is to have a FAQ sent to the mail list every month that includes a section about "how you can help MythTV". Not everyone who uses mythtv is a developer or Linux guru (but it sure helps), but nearly *anyone* can contribute something at some level. For example: - translations - documentation - artwork and themes - promotion and advocacy online (Marketing? Recruitment?) - usability testing and UI design/layout - bug hunting - dreaming up new features and providing non-developer feedback to developers Eventually, some portion of these people are likely to express interest in becoming developers Also, I think that there could be countless potential graduate school programming projects that revolve around enhancing or extending mythtv functionality. Just as Linux has become the reference implementation of "UNIX" for nearly all new APIs and code, I believe MythTV could become a reference implementation for video archiving, searching, replay, storage, and all sorts of amazing things we haven't though of yet like automatic voice recognition and transcribing to text or subtitles, text search of subtitles, dynamic subtitle translation, video pattern matching, interactive video experiences, audio and video annotation (a la MST3k?), Video content compression/summarization to cut out "unnecessary" frames or even scenes, ... How about a mythphone PIP session while watching LiveTV? There are lots of great ideas. Just because a suggester isn't able to implement them at this time doesn't mean they should be discarded. > 2) Pay somone else to write the code Now that's an interesting idea... I've seen a lot of websites where people could offer a bounty for adding features, but they seem to have had mixed results. What about if developers or groups of developers responded to feature requests that no other developers have the urge to tackle (for whatever valid reasons) by offering to implement said feature once they receive a set level of donations towards that goal? A few example projects that I would be personally willing to donate $20,$40 or more towards are: - Implement mythburn into main mythtv code - Port of mythtv to Cygwin with full frontend functionality - provide a self-contained mythtv for windows package/installer - integrate nuvexport as an "advanced transcode" - have mythburn use nuvexport to downsample or transcode any recordings to DVD format Most mythtv users have already spent a bundle on their system, and would really like some way to say "thanks" - this would be one way that is a win-win scenario :) > 3) Buy windows software that does it. Personally, I don't want to encourage people to go back to windows. Linux has some (very) rough edges, but they're getting smoother all the time because of people who get really annoyed/motivated about something and choose to fix it. I like to think of free software as a form of philanthropy - people find something that they can enhance and everyone else benefits from their work. > Isaac and crew ask nothing from you, so stop asking them for something. I've only seen a few opensource projects that weren't looking for more developers or beta testers. Where are feature requests supposed to come from, anyway? ;) -Ross
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