Category: Mythtv

Incorrect channel numbers in MythTV

We’ve had a HDHomeRun for a while now, and I’m very happy with it. One wart however was that Catherine was complaining that tuning for Go! didn’t work (an extra Win TV channel we get in this area). It was odd — it appeared in the channel guide, but recordings would end up recording ABC1 instead, and we couldn’t tune to the channel in the live TV interface either.

I fired up the channel editor in mythtv-setup, and the problem was actually pretty easy to solve… The channel scan had assigned channel number 2 to Go!, which is the same channel number as ABC1. It had also gotten the channel number for Win TV wrong, but we hadn’t noticed that because that wasn’t overlapping with another channel. The channel numbers seem arbitrary, given the database is also storing frequency and demultiplexing information, so the fix was as simple as just giving the various WIN channels the correct numbers (or I suspect any number that was unique) in mythtv-setup.

MythTV Chapter Ready: The Hard Way: Installing MythTV From Source

The Hard Way: Installing MythTV From Source is now ready. In fact, its been ready for quite a while, but I have been trying to blog about the finished chapters in the right order, so it has been trapped in the queue. This chapter discusses how to compile MythTV from source code, which is useful if you’ve either had problems with a packaged version of MythTV, or want more control than you’ll get from packages.

The awesome Michael Carden did the review for this chapter once again.

How I plan on handling Ubuntu and Mythbuntu 9.04

Ubuntu and Mythbuntu 9.04 have recently been released, and this makes some of the current content for the online MythTV book out of date. The way I plan on handling this is to keep going with the current version 8.10 content, and then update chapters to 9.04 later. This way I don’t delay the overall book because of the new release, and people who haven’t upgraded still have relevant content. For those using 9.04, the current content should be “close enough” to get you going. Please comment on this post if you see problems which are new to 9.04 so I can make a note of them.

MythTV Chapter Ready: The Hard Way: Installing Ubuntu

The next chapter, The Hard Way: Installing Ubuntu is now ready. This chapter took a lot longer than I wanted because I was distracted by some stuff in my personal life, but I am hoping that the authoring process is now back on track. This chapter covers how to install Ubuntu so that you can setup your own MythTV system exactly how you’d like it. That’s also the way to go if you’re using an existing Ubuntu system and just adding MythTV to it.

Thanks to Michael Carden for yet another excellent chapter review.

MythTV Chapter Ready: The Easy Way: Installing MythBuntu

The The Easy Way: Installing MythBuntu chapter is now ready. This chapter provides an overview of a basic MythBuntu installation, which is something which wasn’t covered at all in Practical MythTV, as MythBuntu wasn’t ready at the time. MythBuntu provides a simple installation and configuration option for those people who want to build a new MythTV system from scratch, and want to hide the normal Ubuntu install.

Thanks to Michael Carden and Jost Stewart for their reviews of this chapter, as well as Paul Wayper for his comments.

MythTV Chapter Ready: Selecting Hardware

The Selecting Hardware chapter is now ready. This chapter details the benefits of starting small, how to select the right hardware for a MythTV system if you’re building one from scratch, and what the authors use for their MythTV systems.

This chapter was originally written by Stewart Smith, and this version was reviewed by Josh Stewart. Thanks as well to Julien Goodwin and Michael Carden for their helpful comments.

MythNetTV release 7

This release is smaller than the last one, but has some bug fixes which folk might find handy. New things in this release:

    Better testing:

  • r232: Simple script to create the unit testing database
    New features:

  • r210: Allow users to override the default bittorrent upload rate
  • r212: Provide more sync information when running in verbose mode
  • r216: Add the markunread command
  • r218: Make only one download attempt for a given show per 24 hour period
  • r220: Change download interval to one hour, update last attempt time more frequently
  • r222: Add –oldestfirst and –newestfirst flags, which alter NextDownloads behavior
  • r224: Add flag which forces downloads to run, even if they’ve failed recently
  • r226: Don’t mark a bittorrent download as complete just because the torrent file has been completely downloaded
  • r234: Use reasonable defaults for mysql configuration if no config file can be found
  • r236: Use reasonable defaults for mysql configuration if no config file can be found
  • r238: Use reasonable defaults for mysql configuration if no config file can be found
    Bug fixes:

  • r206: Make the output of “video.py length” more friendly
  • r208: Release man pages as well
  • r214: Fix a bug introduced in r210 which broke bittorrent downloads
  • r228: Fix a typo in the recordings_tool help text
  • r230: Fix a typo in the recordings_tool help text
  • r240: Reduce size of proxy name in the usage table to deal with key length limitations in MySQL
  • r242: The schema for the channel table changed in MythTV 0.21
  • r244: Fix typo
  • r246: Suppress repeated warnings of DB default use
  • r248: Bug fixes for linux.conf.au 2009 talk
  • r250: Include test runner script in release, prepare ChangeLog for release

Please grab your copy here.

MythTV Chapter Ready: Introduction

The Introduction chapter of the online MythTV book is now ready. This chapter covers the definition of a personal video recorder (PVR), the components of such a system, the various alternatives that are available, why MythTV might be the right choice, and briefly explains the MythTV version number scheme.

Thanks to Michael Carden for doing a review on this chapter.