MythTV is very pretty and featureful, but has always struck me as a project that cares more about making it further so than trying to create a robust, bug-free core. Today I came across the sort of bug that exemplifies this.

I decided to record the film “Unknown”, starring Liam Neeson as a man who wakes from a coma to discover his life has been stolen. Here we have the film in the programme listing view:

Coincidentally, the MythTV front-end also lists time periods where it does not have any listings data as “Unknown”. The MythTV frontend rightly prevents the user from attempting to record these blocks.

Why is this an issue? It turns out that the MythTV front-end prevents you from recording any entry entitled “Unknown”, making it impossible to schedule recording of the aforementioned film. Clicking on the entry does nothing. Bringing up the menu does give you the option to record, but fails to schedule it.

The only way I found to schedule the recording was to do it from the HTML interface. Bad news for non-computer savvy Liam Neeson fans.

Just for the record, the front-end version was a 13/01/2013 build of the 0.26-fixes branch.

Updated 14/01/2013: Someone else apparently noticed around the same time.