Mythtv – Page 8 – Made by Mikal

MythArchive, best failure mode ever!

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 15, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

So, you're creating a native archive with MythArchive. You've never run it before, so you just give it a go. It can't write data files to the place the videos are at, so what is it's failure mode? Well, how about trying to change permissions on every file on the machine? Lovely. 2006-10-13 22:32:23.025 Options - createiso: 0, doburn: 1, mediatype: 3, erasedvdrw: 0 2006-10-13 22:32:23.026 savedirectory: / 2006-10-13 22:32:23.026 Saving files to : / 2006-10-13 22:32:23.077 Archiving Christmas (/share/Movies/dvd/Christmas.avi), do delete: 1 2006-10-13 22:32:23.108 Creating xml file for Christmas 2006-10-13 22:32:23.170 Created videometadata element for Christmas 2006-10-13 22:32:23.204 MythNativeWizard: Failed to open file for writing - /Christmas/Christmas.avi.xml 2006-10-13 22:32:23.204 Archiving Easter (/share/Movies/dvd/Easter.avi), do delete: 1 2006-10-13 22:32:23.204 Creating xml file for Easter 2006-10-13 22:32:23.205 Created videometadata element for Easter 2006-10-13 22:32:23.206 MythNativeWizard: Failed to open file for writing - /Easter/Easter.avi.xml 2006-10-13 22:32:23.206 Archiving Thanksgiving (/share/Movies/dvd/Thanksgiving.avi), do delete: 1 2006-10-13 22:32:23.207 Creating xml file for Thanksgiving 2006-10-13 22:32:23.207 Created videometadata element for Thanksgiving 2006-10-13 22:32:23.208 MythNativeWizard: Failed to open file for writing - /Thanksgiving/Thanksgiving.avi.xml chmod: changing permissions of `/': Operation not permitted chmod: changing permissions of `/lost+found': Operation not permitted chmod: changing permissions of `/var': Operation not permitted chmod: changing…

This is why I went to MythTV

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 10, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

TiVo implements punishment mode for buying their product. Nice.

Updated nuvexport patch

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 9, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

To get nuvexport working with MythTV User Jobs as a transcoder, I needed to further modify my nuvexport patch to handle the fact that there is no controlling terminal for user jobs. Here is the new patch: Index: export/ffmpeg.pm =================================================================== --- export/ffmpeg.pm (revision 242) +++ export/ffmpeg.pm (working copy) @@ -70,11 +70,11 @@ # Audio only? $self->{'audioonly'} = $audioonly; # Gather the supported codecs - my $data = `$ffmpeg -formats 2>/dev/null`; + my $data = `$ffmpeg -formats 2>&1`; my ($formats) = $data =~ /(?:^|\n\s*)File\sformats:\s*\n(.+?\n)\s*\n/s; my ($codecs) = $data =~ /(?:^|\n\s*)Codecs:\s*\n(.+?\n)\s*\n/s; if ($formats) { - while ($formats =~ /^\s(..)\s(\S+)\s*$/mg) { + while ($formats =~ /^\s(.{2})\s(\S+).*$/mg) { $self->formats'}{$2} = $1; } } @@ -286,7 +286,7 @@ push @tmpfiles, "/tmp/fifodir_$$", "/tmp/fifodir_$$/audout", "/tmp/fifodir_$$/vidout"; # Execute ffmpeg - print "Starting ffmpeg.\n" unless ($DEBUG); + print "Starting ffmpeg: $ffmpeg\n" unless ($DEBUG); ($ffmpeg_pid, $ffmpeg_h) = fork_command("$ffmpeg 2>&1"); $children{$ffmpeg_pid} = 'ffmpeg' if ($ffmpeg_pid); Index: export/ffmpeg/PSP.pm =================================================================== --- export/ffmpeg/PSP.pm (revision 242) +++ export/ffmpeg/PSP.pm (working copy) @@ -170,7 +170,8 @@ $self->{'ffmpeg_xtra'} = ' -b ' . $self->{'v_bitrate'} .' -bufsize 65535' .' -ab 32 -acodec aac' - ." -f psp -title $safe_title"; + ." -f psp -title $safe_title" + .' -ar 24000'; # Execute the parent method $self->SUPER::export($episode, '.MP4'); Index: nuv_export/shared_utils.pm ===================================================================…

I got MythBurn working!

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 24, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

It took a few hours, but I have MythBurn (a web interface for creating DVDs with MythTV) finally working. The problem was that the mjpegtools shipped with Ubuntu Dapper crashes with an invalid free(). Compiling from source fixed that. Update: I might have lied. I now have troubles getting Xine to playback the DVD when I mount the ISO image through a loop back. I don't have any DVD media handy, so I will have to wait a couple of days until I can do more testing. The symptom I see is that the intro MythTV screen plays, and then Xine freezes before displaying the menu.

On freely available guide data

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 18, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

One of the flaws with Microsoft's Media Center flavour of Windows XP when it was released in Australia, was that it suffered from the same inherent flaw as every other PVR option in Australia. No guide data. It really says something about Australia's television networks that they don't want to help people with even vaguely modern computing setups watch their content -- it's a situation which reminds me a lot of the RIAA's stand over tactics, and I think it's equally doomed. That's one of the joys of my MythTV setup in the US -- the guide data is trivially available in return for doing a simple four or five question survey every three months or so. What could be easier than that? Well, when I was using a TiVo in Australia the OzTiVo folk had a solution to these problems, and were working with the XMLTV / MythTV people to make it more generic. I hadn't been paying much attention to it until today when I was randomly surfing on the topic, but it's interesting to see that they also now provide instructions for how to import their guide data into a Windows Media Center PC. It's cool to…

MythTV frontend on an xbox

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 12, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

Surprisingly easy. Xebian, and pre-compiled packages make me smile. Time spent building the whole thing -- about an hour. Children now quiet after Australian DVD player broke in the US -- two.

Compiling MythTV 0.19 for Ubuntu Dapper

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 27, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

I've been finding that MythTV is really unreliable after dist-upgrading from Breezy to Dapper. In fact, it's been crashing six or seven times a day, which has been really annoying. I figured I though therefore bight the bullet and upgrade to the latest stable version of MythTV. I was previously running a SVN snapshot because it fixed a couple of bugs I was having when I first installed Myth. Installation was pretty easy. First, grab the one or two libraries you're missing and that the configure script doesn't necessarily detect the dependency for properly: sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev \ libqt3-mt-dev libqt4-dev mesa-common-dev qt3-apps-dev libglu1-mesa fftw3 \ fftw3-dev libsdl1.2-dev festival festival-dev libdvdread3 libdvdread3-dev And then the usual configure, make, make install in the mythtv and mythplugins directories.

Let’s talk about Myth baby, let’s talk about you and me

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 17, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

With apologies to everyone who is reminded of the Salt and Pepa song this title was inspired by, although it's damn hard to find lyric sites which don't do evil things like redirecting you to a page you can't escape from with the back button, or pop up ads. How mid-nineties! Since I moved to the US, I've been using MythTV instead of my previous TiVo setup, and I am mighty happy. I thought that perhaps I should write some of that experience up, so here we go... Let's start my talking about the TV capture card I picked. I purchased a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 Personal Video Recorder from Amazon for a little over $100 US. I picked this card because of the hardware MPEG encoder, the hardware decoder, and the remote control. Perhaps in hindsight I should have gone for the WinTV 500, which has two tuners for simultaneous recording but no remote, but I don't generally need to record more than one thing at once -- especially given how often things are repeated over here. I can't find a link to the WinTV 500 at the moment, but here is one to the WinTV PVR 500 media…