as days pass by

I've spent a while trying to get Elisa to work on the computer attached to my TV (a PPC Mac Mini running Ubuntu). Video was slow and jerky, and there was a strange white bar graphical glitch. Anyway, after fighting all day with it, compiling the latest version of Elisa and so forth, I eventually gave up and installed MythTV. And it works perfectly. I don't really want MythTV. I prefer GStreamer-based applications, because I think GStreamer is the way forward, and Myth does a mountain of stuff that I don't want, like watching live television; all I want to do, for the moment, is watch recorded video files. I like Elisa's interface more than Myth's. I'm more able to write Elisa plugins than I am for Myth. Still, Myth (using VLC as the playback program) works fine, and Elisa doesn't, and I don't think Elisa will get better; it seems that the problem might be the open source ATI drivers, which aren't (apparently) as good as the closed source ones. I can't run the closed source drivers, though, because they don't exist for powerpc, which is what the Mac Mini is (even ignoring that I don't want to run them because they're closed source). So MythTV it is. There is probably a lesson here.