[mythtv] New user experiences and questions

[Andrew Dodd]

First of all:
On a RH 7.3 box, MythTV was pretty easy to install.  Just had to dig up 
the qt-devel and qt-MySQL RPMs, and deal with all the xmltv dependencies.

MythTV seems to be working fine, except for a number of gotchas and 
issues:

There does not appear to be any way to have MythTV record in the 
background (i.e. without the GUI running) - While it's great for dedicated 
PVR machines, it makes it much less useful for people who want to run it 
on a machine used for other things.  (I don't think I even have X running 
more than 50% of the time).  Is there any way to do this?  (i.e. have a 
daemon that starts up at boot and records stuff in the background without 
any GUI.)

Similarly, mythfrontend doesn't seem to have any method for exiting other 
than killing the app or control-C from whatever xterm it was started from.  
If there is a way, I'd love to know, as I didn't see any in the 
documentation.

Also, even though in the setup program I chose NOT to associate any of my 
Hauppauge WinCast-TV's inputs other than composite with the "default" 
source, mythtv probes all inputs at startup and automatically selects the 
tuner input, not Composite1.  As a result, if I schedule a recording, it 
just records static.  (I'm using a VCR as my tuner because of the fact 
that the VCR is stereo and the audio when using the tuner has a 
high-pitched whine that gives me splitting headaches.  How do I fix this?  
I've looked in tv.cpp and it appears to get input info from the database - 
I tried hardcoding the input name to Composite1 and it didn't do anything.

e.g. in tv.cpp (Release 0.6), starting at line 901:
    QString inputname = "";
    QString chanstr = "";

    if (query.isActive() && query.numRowsAffected() > 0)
    {
        query.next();

        chanstr = query.value(0).toString();
        inputname = query.value(1).toString();
    }

//    inputname = "Composite1";
    channel->SwitchToInput(inputname);
    channel->SetChannelByString(chanstr);

The commented out line is where I tried forcing the input to Composite1.

How do I stop the program from defaulting to the tuner?  It makes viewing 
with mythtv a minor annoyance, but it's a showstopper for unattended 
recording.

Last, the database of recorded shows should be updated at the BEGINNING of 
a recording, not at the end.  If the machine crashes or loses power before 
recording finishes, MythTV forgets that it ever recorded the show and the 
MPEG file containing it becomes orphaned.  Passing the filename as a 
commandline argument to mythtv doesn't play it.  (Related question:  How 
to I play recorded files that aren't in the database?)

Andy