[clug] mythtv

[Michael Cohen]

Nicolas,
   Thats unusual that you got a 24'' monitor because you could not get the tv
out to work. In my experience an nivida card with tvout is less than $60 and
works very well. (Stay away from ATI like the plague - their drivers are really
low quality and the current binary drivers have many bugs related to xv
playback in tv out - they can be made to work but with great effort. Nvidia
cards work out of the box and are very high quality.).

   You can have a look at the mythtv logs and that might give you a clue as to
whats happening - please post relevant logs. The new mythtv always records even
when watching live tv, but that file will get expired very quickly.  I found
behaviour similar to what you describe if you have a substandard antenea- what
happens is that the backend schedules the recording, and sends off a recording
task - but that task is unable to tune the program and fails to record. This
leads to issues like seeing the recording in the menu and then myth not being
able to find the file.

   As to autologin, the simplest way (dont know if its the best) is to use
/etc/inittab like this:

   1:12345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear --autologin myth tty1
   
   This will log user myth automatically to console 1 - to get X add this in
/home/myth/.bashrc:

case `tty` in
        /dev/tty1)
                STARTX=`grep nox /proc/cmdline`
                if [ "$STARTX" == "" ]; then
                        while true;
                        do
                                /usr/bin/X11/startx > /dev/null 2>&1
                        done
                fi
        ;;
esac

This allows you to put nox in the grub prompt to stop myth from starting. And
you can login to any vc without starting X.

   Then I use a simple window manager like fluxbox. Add a simple file in myth's
home directory called fluxstartup.sh which contains:

## This stops screen saver ( i dont like it because my tv turns off then)
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
xset s off

## I want to see whats happening with the mythfrontend (error messages etc)
rm .xsession-errors
mythfrontend  2>&1 > .xsession-errors
sleep 1

## When mythfrontend exits - I want to log out (Im not sure this is needed).
killall x-window-manager

exit 0

Once thats in killall -HUP init .... forces init to reread inittab and you
should be logged in.

Hope this helps, (you dont need gdm/xdm whatever so you should probably disable
or uninstall them so they dont interfer with this).

Michael.

On Sun, Feb 18, 2007 at 12:40:20PM +1100, Nicolas Cherbuin wrote:
> Dear CLUGers,
> 
> I am still recovering from a MythTV upgrade that Leigh and Paul kindly
> tried very hard to resolve for me. One critical recent step was to abandon
> to try and get my Shuttle on board radeon TV out to work and use instead
> the VGA output and buy a 24" monitor. The image is now good but I have a
> couple of issues to fix.
> 
> When I am viewing a program I can tell mythtv to record it and when I exit
> I can view it and go back to watching tv after that. Although it seems
> that if I don't record it the normal myth file that enables replay, etc.
> stays in the recordings folder. This used not to be the case but I think
> that this is a normal new behaviour. The main problem is when I schedule a
> recording. The program is not recorded but there is a field in the
> database pointing to the program but showing that it is empty. In
> addition, when this happens I cannot watch tv again without rebooting
> because Myth tells me that all the inputs are already in use. I thought
> that it might be a permission problem so I changed all permission of the
> myth data folder to mythtv:mythtv. It did not fix my problem.   Logging
> out or restarting Mythbackend is not enough, I have to reboot. Any ideas?
> 
> Not directly related but very annoying, I have tried to auto-login (in
> Ubuntu edgy). I have used gdmsetup but although I can tick autologin there
> is no user in the pulldown menu to choose the user. In the next tab
> however mythtv is selected as an available user. I have googled but not
> found a way around this. I have tried to edit the gdm.config-custom and
> put: AutomaticLogin=mythtv but this causes the default Ubuntu login window
> to crash (fortunately the gnome login window then takes over and I can
> still login).
> 
> Any help is appreciated
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Nic
> 
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