My system:
Ubuntu 7.04 (Xubuntu Feisty Fawn)
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2400+
MythTV 0.20.2
Please note I do google searches to learn the following tricks. Hopeful my tips will reduce a couple of your searches.
After converting my website server to Gentoo I decided to change my MythTV system to Gentoo. I found this to be very difficult but I ran into a lot less road blocks thanks to the well written Gentoo Docs. I had a basic MythTV system in about 2 days. And back to normal after 3 weeks worth of emerging packages. Everything is running faster and smooher. Be prepared to recompile the kernal a lot and keep backups.
I created a pretty simple menu system for my home MythTv. Basicly the first menu lists the common items and the More... menu list the settings and media managers.
For my latest MythTV system I really was just looking to play with Ubuntu 7.04. I found this to be the easiest setup yet. I mainly choose this because I didn't have to add software repositories and hopefully the upgrades and maintenance will be easier.
[Update 2007-09-05] I was able to do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade with no issues for the MythTV 0.20.2 upgrade.
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Comment out any lines that start with deb cdrom.
I've had great luck with these. I'm splitting my cable 4 ways to TV, Cable Box and 2 capture cards. The signal looked fine on digital cable box until I split it 4 ways with a regular splitter. First thing I noticed was the digital channels would not come in then the lower 100 channels had snow effect. After adding a bi-directional adjustable 8db gain power splitter everything back to normal. Please note this didn't increase the quality but stopped degrading the quality when splitting it.
After a lot of frustration over 2 weeks I found out that the transmitter function of lirc_serial is broken in Ubuntu 7.04. If you have this working let me know using the below form. Lucky I had a spare box which I setup with Gentoo and installed a functional lirc transmitter.
[Update 2008-08-20]
I have switched to mc2xml. The below zap2xml code should still work but I am not testing it any more. Follow directions from here: http://mc2xml.110mb.com/
I created a ~/mc2xml folder. I disabled mythfilldatabase from mythfrontend/setup/general. I run below as a Cron Job every morning.
#!/bin/bash cd ~/mc2xml ~/mc2xml/mc2xml -L -f mythfilldatabase --file 1 ./xmltv.xml
Old Code
[Update 2007-09-10]
Get free tv listings by going here: http://zap2xml.110mb.com/
I created a ~/zap2xml folder. I disabled mythfilldatabase from
mythfrontend/setup/general. I run below as a Cron Job every morning.
#!/bin/bash cd ~/zap2xml ~/zap2xml/zap2xml.pl -u email -p password -d 14 mythfilldatabase --file 4 -1 ./xmltv.xml[Update 2007-09-27]
Here's my new and improved multi-source zap2xml.pl. It works for multi-source listings
and uses the new xtvd.xml format. MythTV now correctly schedules "new recordings only"
shows and the rerun flag only marks a show not listed as live and/or new.
mythupdate.sh
Please keep in mind that zap2xml.pl script is a hacked system for getting tv data. If it stops working then you'll just have to wait for a fix to be posted at zap2xml.110mb.com. The latest fix was for xtvd.xml file format. It also required editing the ~/.xml2zaprc file.
run: apt-get install libdvdread3
then run: sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
I have a WinTV and a PVR-500 and after each reboot they would get a different /dev/video? mapping. I discovered that my cards were getting reassigned after each reboot. To fix this I setup a udev rule to alias the card io calls. In mythtv-setup I replaced /dev/video0 with /dev/video-pvr500-1 as video address. I had type in the "/dev/video-pvr500-1" value!
Use udevinfo -a -p $(udevinfo -q path -p /class/video4linux/video0) to get the SYSFS{subsystem_device} and SYSFS{subsystem_vendor} values. Do this for each video source.
My udevinfo output.
My /etc/udev/rules.d/11-video.rules file
[Please note how I handled the vbi device.]
My Dell USB Remote acts like a multimedia keyboard. You can use the following to setup a multimedia keyboard. Most buttons worked fine such as the numbers and arrows. Use xev to get key values of the non-working buttons like the volume and media buttons. For MythTV I started with F13 and worked my way up. Then used MythFrontend / Setup / Edit Keys to setup the new defined buttons.
My .xmodmap file.
run xmodmap ~/.xmodmap
[ToDo: Channel UP/Down don't work.]
Open File manager
Edit/Preferences/Advanced Tab.
Click configure under Volume Manager.
Select the Multimedia tab.
Unclick all tabs.
After a while I was unable to eject dvds and used the following to disable sleep for dvd drive.
Add "hdparm -S 253 /dev/dvd" to /etc/rc.local
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/options
add lines to bottom:
#fix cdrom eject
options cdrom lockdoor=0