Yeraze's Domain 3.0

It’s been pretty much 1 month since MythTV 2.0 went into production at my house.  With a full month of usage, I figured it time for a post-mortem.  Also, last night was the first major "reconfiguration" I’ve had to do, so I thought I’ld share the details on that.

I’m still running the same R5E50 distro that I installed, and it’s been working beautifully.  I’ve pretty much had to make 0 changes to it, and haven’t had any trouble with it.  A few things I’ve managed to work out:

1. A new version of the Xinelibs was released that fixed a strange audio lag problem in DVD playback.  It didn’t happen when ripping DVD’s tho, so it wasn’t much of a problem.
2. I setup "MoBlock" and FTP, just because I could.
3. I found that I could FTP videos up into the /myth/gallery directory and then watch them with the "Image Gallery" viewer.  It uses MPlayer, so any format that it supports is fair game.
4. I’ve ripped a few CD’s and listened to them on the MythTV.  It rips them as Ogg Vorbis (rather than MP3 or M4A) , and playback is great.  I wish the interface was a little better, seems something like ITune’s CoverFlow would be perfect here.
5. I was using the mythpowerbutton script to kick in the DPMS features of the video card.  When the DPMS enabled, the screen would blank and my automatic Signal Switcher would flip back to regular TV.  Unfortunately, it was also flipping at random during showings, which was extremely annoying.  I found the problem was that in using the ‘xset dpms force off’ command, I was inadvertently re-enabling the DPMS screensaver timeout.  I simply modified the script to include a ‘xset -dpms’ after the ‘force on’ and the problem went away.

I’ve been recording several shows every day.  It includes kids shows for Rhianna (Spongebob, Mickey Mouse, etc), dramas for Laura (House, Scrubs), and SciFi for me (Star Trek Voyager, Enterprise, Battlestar Galactica).  I’ve also got some Anime scattered in there, and I’ve recorded a few movies off of various channels (Nothing Pay-Per-View, strictly the TBS "Edited for Television" variety).  Everything’s been working great, and the commercial flagging means I haven’t really watched a commercial on TV in weeks.  It’s refreshing (and time-saving) to watch an episode of Voyager in 45 minutes.  However, the commercial flagging isn’t perfect:  It relies heavily on station logo’s to determine what’s going on, which it usually does a great job of, but some channels (Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, my Anime source, is the worst) tend to fade the logo in and out seemingly at random throughout the show, leading to short 30s clips being removed from the middle of the show.  It’s easy to work around, tho, so I don’t mind it so much.

Last night, however, was the first "Major Reconfiguration" I’ve had to do.  I used Time Warner Cable, which was recently bought by ComCast.  As part of the merger, all our channels were being rearranged, and last night was the "Target Date" for the change. I waited until the last minute, hoping the MythTV would work it out by itself, and then realized I was on my own here.  I noticed that the MythTV showed "NO DATA" for every channel that was being moved, and when I checked my subscription on Zap2it (the source for TV listings on MythTV) the channels that are moving were simply missing from the lineup.  I deleted the listing and recreated it, and got the new channel layout.  The next problem was how to get this into MythTV.

Well, I had tinkered with this a little bit before, so I logged into the system and ran ‘mythfilldatabase’, the command to force downloads of listings.  It downloaded the new TV listings and filled in all the "NO DATA" areas, but still left the channels in their old Locations (Channel 16 was still listed as Disney & showing Mickey Mouse, when it’s actually CSPAN in the new layout).  After a bit of digging, I ran ‘mythfilldatabase –refresh-all –do-channel-updates’.  That took a while to run, but when it was complete it had completely rearranged all the channels and their logos, and shifted the recording schedules to the new channels as well!  I checked it this morning and it’s recording just fine.

So hopefully I won’t have to tinker with it anymore for quite some time.  Given how well it worked, I’m tempted to make the ‘–refresh-all –do-channel-updates’ command a weekly crontab job or something, just to handle future rearrangings.  But given how rarely it happens, I’ll probably just leave it on manual.  As for now, the system is working perfectly and better than I could have hoped.  Now I’ve just got to get that 2nd tuner

Update: 3/21/2007
I also just used the information shown on CodeBlog to get cute little sounds when I click buttons on the Remote.  I know, it’s kinda silly, but it does help a bit in telling "Yes I hit a button and the system is just thinking a bit".  Initially I had some strangeness with getting remote sounds but no TV sounds, which pretty much defeats the whole point.  After a bit of digging, the same guy had a good post on switching from OSS to Alsa, which fixed my problem. (eg. Switching the Audio Device from /dev/dsp to ALSA:default, and the mixer from /dev/mixer to default)
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