[mythtv-users] Easier way to reset live tv start channel?

Ronald Frazier ron at ronfrazier.net
Mon Jan 2 15:11:35 UTC 2012


Every now and then someone in our house will be watching live tv when
the signal gets screwed up (ie: bad signal sent by the cable company).
For instance, right now, PBS has been screwed up for a half hour. The
problem is, when the channel goes bad, it kicks you out of live tv.
When you then go to re-enter live tv, it tries to resume the last
channel, but since that channel is broken it just kicks you out to the
menu again in about 5 seconds. In the mean time, the frontend is
unresponsive, so you can't change the channel to try and select a new
one before it kicks you out.

The only solution I've found to this is to go into mythweb, edit the
settings table, and change the host-specific value for DefaultChanid
(which, of course, requires knowing a valid value for another channels
chanid), and then restarting the frontend. This is doable for me
(though not exactly convenient), but is obviously out of the question
for my wife when I'm not around.

Does anyone have a better way to deal with this problem (and no,
avoiding live tv isn't a valid answer)? About the only thing I can
think of is to create a new menu entry in my menu theme (I use a
custom menu theme, so that's not an issue) which executes an external
script that modifies the database settings table directly and then
restarts the frontend. Not very elegant, but is there another option?

-- 
Ron Frazier


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