[mythtv-users] Very simple user guide for Myth?

A. F. Cano afc at shibaya.lonestar.org
Thu Jan 15 00:56:04 UTC 2009


On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 03:54:05PM +0000, xavier hervy wrote:
> Richard Thomas wrote:
> > I was also searching for something similar. Though I've not had a great 
> > deal of problem picking it up as I've gone along, a user manual is 
> > always good for picking up things that you've missed or when things are 
> > just not quite intuitive. I think such a thing would be very helpful to 
> > MythTV adoption, particularly with the switchover coming in February. If 
> > there's not an effort already in place, this might also be something I'd 
> > be willing to expend some effort on (if I can ever find the time).
> >
> > Rich
> >   
> 
> It is quite hard to do an easy manual as a lot of thing are configurable.
> "Feature 1 is available In menu 1 if option 1 and 2 have been enable 
> unless option 3 is enable too, the you will be able to access to it by 
> pressing k in menu 2" sort of things.
> I suppose a manual could be done for the default settings...
> Xavier

Just a few days ago, I started playing with mythtv seriously, as I now
have a usb hybrid tuner (analog/hdtv).  I was quite stymied not just by
the lack of documentation on the tuner itself (OnAir Creator - I seem to
be the only Linux user of such device besides the few developers that
implemented the support for it) but also the fact that the importer's
web site (www.autumnwave.com) is totally windows-centric.

Coming at it from the linux/kde/computer user's perspective, as opposed
to the one interested in a dedicated settop box, the first thing I did
after installing the debian package, was to type "mythtv" in a konsole
window.  The first surprise is that it took over the whole desktop and
then it failed.  Next a said: Ok, time for "man mythtv", but there are
no manual pages, I read the README files that came with the debian
package but there was not much useful there.

Since then, I have learned a lot, but it has not been easy.  Things as
simple as a minimal list of things that need to be done would have
helped.  I had to fight it off with mysql for quite a while until a
connection could be established. Then, mythtv-setup kept complaining that
there was no channel information after attempting to connect to a for-pay
channel listing service and suggesting that I would have to enter all kinds
of information by hand.  I had no idea what I had to enter and mythtv kept
crashing with cryptic messages.  It turns out the last cryptic message
that caused a crash "GetEntryAt(-1) failed."  was actually caused by
incorrect ownership and group permissions on the video directory.  Once
that was solved I had no more crashes, but I learned purely by chance (nowhere
that I found it is said explicitely) or error messages, that the backend
server needs to be started (and stopped if you want to use mythtv-setup), that
the proper way (at least for people that use mythtv not as a dedicated
settop box) to start it is to run mythfrontend as a small window, and I had
to do the configuration from mythfrontend itself - once you see how many
general configuration items you can fine tune to your taste it's really nice,
but the default behavior is very different from what a regular computer user
would expect in a desktop environment.  

Maybe a README.FIRST file, in a very prominent place, or a standard man page
with something like the following information would be helpful to those
that are new to mythtv:

Mandatory configuration before mythtv is useable:
o configure and test mysql, and give a detailed list of steps.
o run mythtv-setup and touch upon the items that must be configured in a
  way that is not possible programatically.

The overall architecture:
o Mythtv consists of various executables: mythtv-setup, mythtv-backend,
  mythfrontend, mythtv, and what needs to be run and in what order to
  have a working system
o What keyboard commands do what.  Purely by chance, when I couldn't get
  a signal lock did I learn from a screen message that I could change channels
  with up/down arrows.  Now I realize that this referred to remote controls,
  but I tried the cursor keys and they worked.  Now I realize that if you
  think of the keyboard as a remote, things are likely to work - ie: when you
  would press ok or enter on a remote, pressing enter on the keyboard does
  the appropriate thing.  The remote that came with my tuner doesn't work yet.
  I'm still investigating that.

I'm still going over the voluminous documentation.  It's likely that all the
answers are there somewhere, but it would have reduced the frustration
greatly to have (say) a man page with the critical points needed to get going.

I point all this out to document the thinking of a beginner coming at mythtv
from the computer desktop end, not the HTPC end.  Mythtv is a pretty amazing
piece of work and I look forward to learning it and using it for a long time
to come.  To all the developers:  THANK YOU!!!

A.



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list