[mythtv-users] low family acceptance factor; need advice

[Gordon McCrae]

On 06/01/10 17:33, Aaron wrote:
> OK, I moved to Myth not long ago from the MCE camp. I like Linux and
> can get around quite well; but... the wife and kids are not so
> impressed.  The wife loves the commercial skip process and personally
> so do I, but for everything else we are kinda at a loss. Nothing
> really feels stable to us, the front end will randomly crash (if you
> stop the TV it sometimes just exits to the desktop). This isn't a big
> deal for me, i'll just grab the mouse, but it's not acceptable to the
> wife or kids (they only want to use the remote). I listen to music a
> lot, and as many have seen on this list, the music section of Myth
> leaves a lot to be desired. Movies for the kids, just isn't working
> like I want, I want a movie db, not a list of files. I need it as
> simple as possible for the kids and wife to just click on the movie
> they want, maybe this is a over site on my behalf, but it seemed to be
> a lot of work to just get it to display just movies.
>
> Next we tried XBMC for our front end, it's great, but it also has it's
> issues...  I have XBMC set to load Myth TV through their native
> settings. Watching TV works, but commercials show. What do i need to
> set in Myth to make the commercials go away, or does that only work
> when using Mythfrontend?
>
> My next step is going back to Win7 MCE, but I still want to use Myth
> TV. So I'm thinking of moving Mythbackend to a dedicated server in my
> server room, and using it's uPNP abilities to allow MCE to watch TV,
> live TV will be done via a Aver"pos"media tuner; that might or might
> not work depending on the day, and how it feels.
>
> Am I going about this in the wrong way? I need a high WAF, KAF, FAF
> rating, and I think it's negative right now...(on all fronts).
>
> BTW just for reference, I switched to Myth because moving to Win7
> screwed up my Firewire recording, but I can't get that stable in Myth
> either (maybe 1 out of 10 recordings works)
>
> Tuner Hardware:
> HDHR, Avermedia PCIe Combo, FiOS QIP-6200 STB
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>
>   
You should really look at the errors to see why mythfrontend is
crashing, but as a simple work-around; change the way you run mythfrontend.

I have the following in my /etc/inittab:

# The default runlevel is defined here
id:3:initdefault:

# MythTV
TV:3:respawn:/bin/su - mythtv -c startx

Which causes the system to login as mythtv at startup, and continue
logging in any time it crashes.

You need to pair this with a .xinitrc file in /home/mythtv folder with
the following:

{
xset s off
xset -dpms
mythfrontend
} > .xinitrc.log 2>&1

This gives the added benefit of logging any errors to xinitrc.log,
change the redirection to ">>" to get it to keep adding to the log and
you should be able to see the crash errors.

A note of exactly what hardware, OS, and MythTV versions you're running
might shed more light on the problem, also let us know if you're running
a dedicated backend / frontend, or a combined one.

Cheers
Gordon