Selecting a distribution

If you want a nice simple guide to follow, and you don't mind downloading lots, follow the Fedora Myth(TV)ology guide. I see little point in replicating this content, so instead I'd recommend more or less following this guide if you want to use FedoraCore. Beware that you will be using the ATrpms source, which provides updates for functionality for many packages, not just security updates, so you will probably be doing 100Mb of "destabilising" update traffic a month.

I'm using Ubuntu now. If you prefer the Debian system, it's worth changing.

Live TV hangs when playing on a TV

This is probably an ivtv DMA issue - see IvTvNotes for a description of a fix

The display is bigger than the screen size when watching on a TV

You can use the Settings | TV | Appearance menu to force set a resolution and an offset, which lets you align the GUI and TV size with your actual TV screen. This can be tedious, but it's probably worth doing.

Remote control

See LircNotes.

Playback only frontend

With a TV in the lounge, now I want to be able to watch the videos from my room. I installed mythtv-frontend on my machine, but received "unable to connect to database" when running mythfrontend or mythtvsetup. A quick edit of /usr/share/mythtv/mysql.txt fixed this one.

Then you need to give your database remote access:

% mysql -u root -p
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mythconverg.* TO 'mythtv'@'remotehost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'

You will probably have to set MasterServerIP to the IP of the backend machine instead of 127.0.0.1 (which you can do from the setup program) and you have to also make sure that the BackendServerIP is set to the IP of the backend - if you do this from the remote machine you may still have problems because it is written to the db along with the host you ran it from. Edit the settings table in the mythconverg database if you need to:

mysql> select * from settings WHERE value = 'BackendServerIP';
+-----------------+------------+---------------------+
| value           | data       | hostname            |
+-----------------+------------+---------------------+
| BackendServerIP | 10.69.1.20 | brian.ellusions.tla |
| BackendServerIP | 127.0.0.1  | lounge              |
+-----------------+------------+---------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> UPDATE settings SET data='10.69.1.20' WHERE value='BackendServerIP' AND hostname='lounge';

This is all in the howto, of course, but I only found it afterwards.

Frontend plays audio but no video

You are having an Xv problem. Another video program, possible one Xine based, has used Xv and hasn't "reset" the stuff that Myth is expecting to be set. Xine doesn't clean up after itself - but is not required to according to the Xv API. Previously it (and most other programs) did, so Myth was written to expect a "clean slate."

This is fixed in the CVS version of MythTv, but in the meantime, you can use xvattr ( apt-get install xvattr if necessary), then xvattr -a XV_AUTOPAINT_COLORKEY -v 1 to fix it.

Thanks to Michael T. Dean on the mythtv-users mailing list for nailing this one!

Frontend doesn't run full screen under GNOME (Fedora Core 2)

FC2 shipped with a broken Qt. The 3.3.3 update fixes this problem. Another great suggestion, and indeed the one I've selected myself, is 'use BlackBox on your MythTv frontend; you don't need GNOME running!'

Hamilton, NewZealand channels

Christchurch, NewZealand channels

NewPlymouth?, NewZealand channels (May also work for Hawkes Bay)

Tokoroa?, NewZealand channels, using xmlTVNZ.exe under mono.

Using the TV listings from OnTV - see below.

New Zealand TV listings

1. Get the OnTV listings (you probably want to cron this weekly). If the link is broken, try an alternate Source
2. Rename your channel IDs "One", "2", "3", "C4" and "Prime" using mythtvsetup
3. Run mythfilldatabase to import: mythfilldatabase --file 1 7 listings.xml
   The parameters for --file are sourceid (usually 1, check the database for this if 1 doesn't work); number of days; filename.

Alternative Method - Neater, but requires recompilation of MythTV

1. Get tv_grab_nz_ontv, and save it as /usr/local/bin/tv_grab_nz_ontv. Make it executable by running chmod +x /usr/local/bin/tv_grab_nz_ontv
2. get mythtv-0.19-ontv.patch. From the MythTV source directory, patch it by running patch -p1 < /path/to/mythtv-0.19-ontv.patch
3. Compile MythTV as usual.
4. Run mythtv-setup and select "New Zealand" as the XMLTV listings grabber.

Alternative source:

• Get Mr Geek's listings. I normally use OnTV, so to get mrgeek's listings into my channels, I run this script over them first:

sed -i 's/TV1.mr.geek.nz/One/g' getlist.html
sed -i 's/TV2.mr.geek.nz/2/g' getlist.html
sed -i 's/TV3.mr.geek.nz/3/g' getlist.html
sed -i 's/C4.mr.geek.nz/C4/g' getlist.html
sed -i 's/Prime.mr.geek.nz/Prime/g' getlist.html

If you're still confused, Go here.

• Alternatively, if you have access to a Microsoft Windows based web server, try xmlTVNZ. Create a scheduled task that drops an XML file into the web server directory, and follow the instructions for OnTV, replacing the OnTV url with the URL of the file on your server. xmlTVNZ provides excellent listings, making use of genre colours in MythTV's EPG. Unfortunately, this program is not free (open source) software, however there it is freeware.

Note: This has been tested and works under Mono, no need for the windows web server. The xmlTVNZ app is written in c#, so just get mono on your system xmltvnz.exe will work. (or mono xmltvnz.exe). Nice one mono ! (on debian apt-get mono mono-utils)

I want DivX's of my TV shows

nuvexport.

Mythbackend wont start from the init script

I have found this problem under ubuntu hoary, apparently the start-stop-daemon runs the backend as myth but doesn't use myth's envioronment settings (not sure if this is what it's meant to do or not). adding HOME=/home/mythtv to the top of the init script appears to solve this problem.

Ubuntu installation

Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://deb.thehunter.ws/ breezy mythtv-stable

Load in the GPG key: gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 3BC2083F gpg --export --armor 3BC2083F | sudo apt-key add -

apt-get install mythtv mythplugins myththemes

CategoryNotes