Mythtv – Page 2 – Made by Mikal

Introducing the online MythTV book

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 19, 2009
Post category:Mythtv

When parts of the first edition of the MythTV book became out of date, I decided to take the book online and ask others to help me improve it and bring it up to date. There is a blog for announcements, at http://mythtvbook.com/blog and if you're interested in helping out, please visit the Help Wanted page. This book does not aim to be a complete reference to MythTV or a guide for how to develop plug-in modules for MythTV. Although we include a brief overview of the major features of MythTV, we explore only those parts of MythTV that are relevant to the projects in this book, which will include all the parts of MythTV that an average user will be interested in. It will also give you an excellent grounding for further projects with MythTV as well. This book is intended as a hobbyist's project guide, providing suggestions about what sort of projects you could take on and how we went about implementing our own versions of those projects. Instead of including exhaustive coverage of features that few people use, we'll provide pointers to how to find out about those features, and we'll cover the 80 percent of MythTV's…

MythBuntu 8.10 just made me sad

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 25, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

I figured it was time to give MythBuntu a try, so I set up a MythBuntu 8.10 instance in VirtualBox today. That was a mistake. I'm not 100% sure I understand how it happened, but MythBuntu somehow managed to delete my entire mythconverg MySQL database instance. Not pleased. I've restored it from last night's backup, but now I'll need to recover recordings which happened today, assuming I can be bothered. I'm writing this just as a warning to others -- if you're playing with MythBuntu, backup your MySQL instance if its not a test one.

The state of Blu Ray on Linux / MythTV

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 14, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

The DVD drive in one of my MythTV machines has given up the ghost. I have to go to Fry's tomorrow to replace a dead hard disk, so I'll pick up a new drive while I am at it. I am surprised to discover that Blu Ray drives are now just $90. I wonder what the state of Blu Ray playback on Linux is like at the moment. How's the MythTV support? Time to find out.

Wanted: someone to edit / review some MythTV stuff for me

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 18, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

I'm looking for someone with solid MythTV experience and a good grasp of the English language to help me out with a project. All I can promise in return is glory, and that will be proportional to the eventual success of the project. If you're interested in spending some time (probably around 40 hours or so, spread over a couple of months) on such a project drop me a line.

irtrans remote control stops working

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 13, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

I've been using a Zalman HD160B media center case for quite some time, and I love it. It came with an irtrans based LCD and remote control built into the case, which has always worked nicely as well. Until yesterday when the remote stopped working. When I run the irserver command in a terminal so I can see the output, I get this: # ./irserver -codedump -debug_code -loglevel 4 /dev/ttyUSB0 Name : Version: D5.03.08 FW SNo : 18780 Capab : Power On; FW Cap : 3964953 USB SNo: Node : /dev/ttyUSB0 IRServer Version 5.7.08 [ 0]: D5.03.08 SN: 18780 Remote zalman compiled: 1 Timings - 45 Commands Total: 1 Remotes - 1 Timings - 45 Commands 0 CCF Data - 0 CCF RAW - 0 CCF Error No joy. Rebooting the machine, replacing all the batteries, and restarting the server all did nothing. The server still doesn't see events from the remote. I'm not sure how to determine if this is a receiver hardware problem or not -- I'm kinda out of other ideas. Suggestions welcome. Update: of course, disassembling the PC and reseating all the cables fixed the problem. I wonder if it is temperature related?

MythNetTV release 6

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 4, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

New things in this release: Better testing: r114: Unit tests for video.py r148: Updated unit test now that we create more tables r151: Start work on syndication unit tests r153: Unit test for bad syndication dates, as well as more flexibility in db connections needed for this unit test r157: Nicer unit test failure output, and refactor GetVideoDir() into the utility module r181: Slightly improve syndication unit tests r183: Add flag parsing to unit tests, and fix some more flag name changes Better documentation: r117: Added a man page for video.py -- I'm not 100% happy with its name though Bug fixes: r114: Fixed a bug where the new filename for video transcode could be the same as the input filename, resulting in video corruption. This was found with one of the new video.py unit tests r116: The logic for the --prompt flag was the wrong way around. Fixed. r119: Nicer download status messages r121: Handle 404s in feed updates better r129: Slight tweak to SVN submit script r131: More accurate tracking of proxy usage (update during download, instead of just at the end) r137: Proxy budget being exceeded doesn't count as a failed download attempt r143: Subscribe now renables…

Please help me test trunk

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 25, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

I'm getting ready to do another MythNetTV release, as I've fixed quite a few things recently. I'd appreciate people testing the new code before I do an official release. You can get the current code like this: svn co http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/svn That will create a directory called mythnettv, with a subdirectory named trunk, which is the latest development version of the code. You should probably create that directory somewhere where you don't mind a new directory being created. This release has lots of small changes, which are listed in the ChangeLog which will be downloaded with the code. Thanks.

Couldn’t determine the video directory?

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 15, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

A couple of people have contacted me in the last couple of days with an error where MythNetTV can't determine the directory to put videos in. The error would look something like this: Importing data/tekzilla--0050--tehbunniez--hd.h264.mp4 Traceback (most recent call last): File "./mythnettv", line 453, in main(sys.argv) File "./mythnettv", line 212, in main mythnettvcore.DownloadAndImport(db, guid, out=out) File "/home/mythbox/Scripts/mythnettv/mythnettvcore.py", line 92, in DownloadAndImport prog.Import(out=out) File "/home/mythbox/Scripts/mythnettv/program.py", line 472, in Import raise FilenameException(self.db, 'Could not determine the video ' program.FilenameException: Could not determine the video directory for this machine. Please report this to mythnettv@stillhq.com The stack trace is mostly irrelevant. The problem here is that MythNetTV couldn't decide what directory to put the video in once downloaded. Please execute the following SQL statements against your MythTV database: select * from storagegroup where groupname="MythNetTV"; select * from storagegroup where groupname="Default"; select * from settings where value="RecordFilePrefix"; This will dump all of the possible places MythNetTV will look for a video directory. Once you've dumped this information, perform some simple checks: Is there anything listed at all? If not, you need to configure storage groups with the MythTV user interface Is there anything listed with the hostname that MythNetTV is running on? If not, you…

MythNetTV release 5

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 31, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

New things in this release: There is now a users mailing list at http://lists.stillhq.com/listinfo.cgi/mythnettv-stillhq.com Moved to a public SVN server at http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/svn/ Added the 'justone' syntax to the download command Another try at using gflags. This means that all the command lines have changed slightly. Moved the core of MythTV out of the user interface file. Started writing unit tests Changed user output code so that it doesn't insist on writing to stdout. You can now write to other file descriptors, which makes things like unit tests much easier to write. Added video/msvideo to the enclosure whitelist Added HTTP download progress information Added a flag which turns off the prompts for markread (--noprompt) Patches from Thomas Mashos Search ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt, /usr/share/mythtv/mysql.txt and /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt in that order for MySQL connection information A manpage setup.py video.py now has a simple command line interface to let you query it Fix update of inactive programs bug per http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5580005&postcount=4 Better DB error handling Included a COPYING file with the right version of the GPL (it was missing before) Fixed a bug where programs would be downloaded more than once (found with a unit test!) Started raising exceptions instead of just sys.exit(1). This should make life easier…

Please help me test trunk

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 25, 2008
Post category:Mythtv

I'm preparing a new release of MythNetTV, and would like some help testing the code, as I have re-factored how the user interface works and there is some risk that I have broken things in the process. You can get the code like this: svn co http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/svn That will create a directory called mythnettv, with a subdirectory named trunk, which is the latest development version of the code. You should probably create that directory somewhere where you don't mind a new directory being created. The biggest change is that the command line syntax has changed slightly -- the dashes have been removed from the commands. Therefore, to update your list of feeds, you now use: mythnettv update Instead of: mythnettv --update And so on. This was done so that I could add "real" flags, which are used to change default values like where the database configuration is read from, as well as what the default location for the temporary data directory is. "Real" flags which are currently supported are: --datadirdefault: The default location of the data directory (default: 'data') --db_host: The name of the host the MySQL database is on, don't define if you want to parse ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt instead (default:…