So a few days have gone by and I’ve been able to use the MythTV for a few little things. The case I’m using is in pretty bad shape and the CPU fans aren’t working quite right, so I’m not able to leave it running 24/7 yet. Nonetheless, I have managed to get it to do a few neat things.

The first thing was the first night I had it working, Tuesday. I configured it, via the MythWeb interface, to record Eureka at 8 and Nip/Tuck at 9. I checked it a few times during the night and it seemed to be working just fine. It recorded Eureka just fine, and while it recorded Nip/Tuck it did Commercial Flagging on Eureka. Once Nip/Tuck was done, it moved on to flagging commercials in that. I now see why people say that you need a hefty CPU for that, as it was processing roughly 30fps on my system. So essentially a 1-hour recording takes 1-hour to flag. Luckily this is optional, so I’m not too concerned about it.

The next day I powered it back up and, again via the Web Interface, opened up MythBurn. I configured it to burn the two shows onto a DVD, with Animated Menus and Chapter Menus, and let it rip. The web interface is amazingly simple. You just select a background image, music for the menu, the type of border for the images, and click “Go”. It will transcode the recordings, eliminating commercials if they’ve been flagged, and place a Chapter Marker at the beginning of every commercial break. It will also requantize the movies to make them fit on the DVD. So my 2 MPEG files which came to 4.5G were trimmed by a factor of “1.07″ to make them fit on the DVD. It’s a useless number, and computed automatically (and invisibly unless you check the logs) for you. It took approximately 2 hours to transcode the 2 hours of shows, build the menus, and create the ISO & burn it to disk. Also, since this was all done via the Web Interface I was able to check it from work by simply configuring my router to allow that traffic.

Read on for the rest…

[tag:htpc][tag:mythtv][tag:hardware][tag:linux]

Once that was done, I moved on to testing other features. I viewed the
program listings and picked an episode of King of the Hill and selected
it for recording. Instead of “Record this Showing” however, I selected
“Record this show at any time on this channel”. On FX, the show airs 4
times a day, twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon. The trick
is that the two episodes in the morning are repeats of the same two
episodes shown the previous afternoon. MythTV wasn’t fooled tho, and
recognized the morning episodes as duplicates. It scheduled the two in
the morning on the first day for recording, and then the two in the
afternoon for the future.

The next feature was “StreamTV“. This is a feature similar to the SlingBox,
allowing you to stream your media over the internet to wherever you
are. I selected one of the episodes of King Of the Hill and went with
the RealPlayer defaults and viola, Cartoons at the Desktop.
However, I really don’t have the upload bandwidth on my Cable Line to
support that, so I killed it and tried it again with lower settings.
With the web interface you can control the video bitrate, audio
bitrate, frames per second, and a few other options to really trim down
the bandwidth. Eventually I found settings that seemed to work and the
show was completely watchable.

Eventually I powered it down
until I could get home. When I got home, I quickly grabbed the DVD I
burned earlier and dropped it in my DVD player in the living room.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The main menu, which is quite impressive
I must add, came up and showed the two episodes. However, attempting to
play one of the two episodes would lock up my DVD player,
requiring me to eject & reinsert the DVD. I thought, “Well, this
DVD player does suck” so I took it to the other el-cheapo “Apex” $20
special in the bedroom. This time, when I selected an episode from the
menu the DVD player showed “Finished” and just sat there. Using the
Chapter Advance functions I could start the shows but the menus were
non-functional. Attempting to play the DVD in my windows computer
crashed Windows Media Player. So it seemed that MythBurn needed some
work.

Work which had already been done to be precise. I dug around the KnoppMyth Forums (registration required, sorry) and found This Post
detailing the problem.  The problem seems to be that some of the
arguments to one of the (many) programs required to make the menus are
out-of-order, and simply rearranging those arguments fixes it.  I
applied the fix and rebuild the DVD, and I’m happy to say that it works perfectly. (See the details for an explanation of the fix).  This fix has already been integrated into R5D1 so it shouldn’t be an issue on newer systems.

So I’ve ordered 2 CPU Fans and a HTPC Case which should be here next week.  Now I just need to find a remote and I’ll be on my way to getting this working.

Here’s the fix, credit to “phlpittsny” for figuring it out.

OK … I have been reading about this problem for a while now and believe I have the fix.

The problem: Chapter menus do NOT work and you get an error message in the mythburn log that reads something like:

Code:
cat: /myth/mythburn/temp/tempdvdauthor2.xml_1menu: No such file or directory

After a little debugging, it comes down to this … mythtvburn.sh (the main script which in my case is in /myth/mythburn) calls the script createscenemenu.sh (which is in /myth/mythburn/scripts). It calls it with the arguments in the WRONG ORDER.

The result is that one of the arguments, named ‘submenus’ in the script is the wrong value, so createscenemenu.sh thinks it is NOT supposed to create chapter menus.

The fix for my version (which was the one that came with R5C7) was to edit mythtvburn.sh. Around line 539 you should see the line:

Code:
${scripts}/createscenemenu.sh $myfolder $videonumber $page $totalframes $file $myxml $framerate $pageresolution $highlightimage $submenus ${cutflags[$idx]} $aspectRatio

(this is actually one looooooooong line … not two as above Very Happy)
The problem is the $aspectRatio should be passed just after $pageresolution, not at the end of the list. Soooo… this line SHOULD look like this:

Code:
${scripts}/createscenemenu.sh $myfolder $videonumber $page $totalframes $file $myxml $framerate
 $pageresolution $aspectRatio $highlightimage $submenus ${cutflags[$idx]}

This is the change I made and it worked for me. Good Luck!!

P.S. I am now trying to work on why the main menu does not take me to either the movie or the chapter menu when I work on it. Actually, this DOES work in one of my CD players, but not in the other. The xml file sent to dvdauthor is somewhat complex and I am trying to simplify it to make it a little dumber, but more reliable. I’ll let you all know here if it works.
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