[mythtv-users] mytharchive on a frontend

[David Kramer]

I'm going to start with the immediate technical problem, then end with a
meta/procedural question at the end, which will hopefully obviate the
need for the technical solution.  Please bear with me.

I have a Myth backend/frontend machine in the office (FC6, Athlon XP
2400_, PVR-350), and I have my laptop connected over .g wireless (Suse
10.0, Thinkpad T42).  What I would like to do is be able to run
mytharchive on my laptop to burn recordings on my backend to DVD, to
reduce the burdens of ffmpeg,etc from my server.

I have the front end/back end/mytharchive/etc installed on the laptop.
When I try to select recordings to burn on the screen with the disk size
progress meter, it doesn't show the bar getting bigger when I add
content (though it shows the sizes of the individual recordings).   When
I try to burn the disk, I get the following:
2007-03-05 22:46:36
------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/scripts/mythburn.py", line 3600, in ?
    processJob(job)
  File "/usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/scripts/mythburn.py", line 3378,
in processJob
    preProcessFile(node,folder)
  File "/usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/scripts/mythburn.py", line 1076,
in preProcessFile
    mediafile = os.path.join(recordingpath,
file.attributes["filename"].value)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpath.py", line 62, in join
    elif path == '' or path.endswith('/'):
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'endswith'
2007-03-05 22:46:36
------------------------------------------------------------

I am guessing the problem is caused by one of two things:
1) There's some setup field I haven't set that I need to
2) mythburn expects to be running on the same machine as mythbackend.

Am I right?  Which one?


Now for the "process" question:

My server has an AMD  XP 2400+, but it's also a mail server, web server,
Subversion server, ....  The load recording programs isn't horrible
because I have a PVR-350 with a hardware encoder, and only the one card
(for nowa).  I am getting quite a bit of "ivtv0: All encoder VBI stream
buffers are full. Dropping data/ivtv0: Cause: the application is not
reading fast enough.", but I'll ask about that in a future message.

I need to watch programs on my laptop, not the mythbackend box, because
it's in a an inconvenient place to watch TV.  I'm trying to use
mytharchive to burn programs to DVD that I've recorded, then I can watch
them downstairs on the DVD player.  I also don't want to watch the
programming on the laptop, because I'm usually working on the laptop
while watching the recordings.

I find when I try to use mytharchive to copy programs onto a DVD to
watch elsewhere, on occasion it locks up my server completely.  I'm
pretty sure this only happens when it's also recording at the same time,
so I assume it's a processing power thing.  Is that reasonable, or is
there likely some other issue?

Can anyone think of another viewing option?

Thanks in advance.