Hello All,
Disclaimer: I should disclose that I am a little annoyed at Dianemo. They have stopped responding to my emails (15 days without ANY response to 4 emails, and 24 days with no response to a specific request).. I wonder how quickly that will change with this post?. That said, I don't mean to rant (well maybe a little), and I figure some of this info may be useful to others.
Why did I buy Dianemo?
Basically I have had problems with MythTV crashes in the past, and thought I would try and take some of the hassle out of LMCE and try out the Dianemo solution - which as I understood it had a newer version of Myth, and was less buggy.
What I was not aware of is that, while the Dianemo solution claims to be more stable, it has had a bunch of things cut out of the standard LMCE distro that I was not aware of (and that were not disclosed). After highlighting these - I was told they could be 'configured for me' but as you can see from the below - a bunch of them never worked... Including MythTV frontend which was a showstopper.
Things that didn't work out of the box but we got to work eventually
- Squeezebox server (was not installed on initial install)
- Mouse pointers - not visible in UI2 (for gyration/mouse navigation on UI2)
- Temporary License keys incorrect - re issued
- Permanent License key never issued - box stopped working for a few days
- Mythweb
Things that
never worked (after almost 1 month of requests for support. There was lots of communication to begin - though no progress - but it fell right off in the end)
- Watching TV (MythTV) via an MD (or hybrid). Backend works (playing TV from the Ubuntu desktop works fine), but the front end crashes after about 20 seconds
- uPNP (asked for this to be enabled. never was)
- Gyration 3101 never worked. Apparently this is unsupported. I was advised that they should be able to get this working but it was never fixed (again, repeated requests made)
- NAS fileshare access (after manually detecting file shares, neither LMCE file structure or 'just make the content public' worked
- Media tagging (via amazon / imdb). This is flat broken in Dianemo. TVDB also not there of course
- Media tagging (via the advertised update http://192.168.80.1/mediadb). URL never worked (not found)
- Denon 4306 AMP. Not detected
- EEEbox b202 (When I paid for my copy, this was advertised to work - though I was later advised it is no longer supported and it has been removed from the Dianemo thread)
Other considerations
- Auto-detect is turned off for most things. This is apparently to improve stability, but does mean more manual configuration is required... Assuming you know how, which you probably don't - so you'll have to wait for Dianemo to remote access in
- Mouse/Cross Hairs cursor must be enabled via config changes - turned off by default. I never got this to work on the MD - on the hybrid only
There was a bunch of other stuff I never tried (USBUIRT, zwave etc) because I never got it to a point where I could use it.
I should also mention that I am currently running the LMCE 0810 Final (not Dianemo) and it has resolved _all_ of the problems listed above... Including MythTV which seems much more stable than I remember from the Beta!
I think that covers most of it. Andrew has always been very helpful on the forums, but my experience with Dianemo was pretty terrible all said. Curious if anyone else has had issue like this?
Cheers
WR.