[mythtv-users] export/import of selected MythTV data

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Wed Aug 5 04:47:10 UTC 2015


On Tue, 04 Aug 2015 19:26:24 -0600, you wrote:

>On Monday, August 03, 2015 07:13:20 PM Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> On Sun, 02 Aug 2015 12:34:01 -0600, you wrote:
>> >I am preparing to upgrade my MythTV 0.21 FE/BE to new hardware and
>> >software, put off by the need to overcome the 0.24-ish upgrading cutoff
>> >for older versions.
>> >
>> >I did look into making a Ubuntu VM and upgrading my database to to the
>> >intermediate version in order to upgrade it to the latest version but I
>> >really do not have much in the way of content to carry over - I can
>> >convert what I have on the old box (down to under 50 recordings now) to
>> >videos or make a note to re-record them. I don't have anything invested
>> >in the other media areas like MythMusic so it seems like building a
>> >fresh FE/BE is the best route for me.
>> 
>> I would have thought that using a VM to upgrade the database would be
>> much easier than trying to manually upgrade just a couple of tables.
>> Upgrading the database is not insanely difficult or anything like
>> that, as long as you read the release notes for each of the versions
>> on the way between your current version and the latest.  And in a VM,
>> you can just roll back anything that does not work and try again, as
>> long as you have enough disk space to keep the previous version or are
>> using the option that VMs like VirtualBox have to only save the
>> changes to disk on shutdown, so you can abandon any changes that did
>> not work.
>
>I would have too, because that's what the consensus seems to be. And I've 
>tried it, in a KVM in Fedora 20, with Ubuntu 10.04 and MythTV 0.24-2 (I 
>think). 
>
>Now I don't know if it's worked because after picking Upgrade a couple 
>times, and a delay, I'm given to a screen that's probably the new 
>MythFrontend but it's heavily corrupted. I can make out a MythTV logo and 
>"Main Menu" at the top, repeated, along with the graphics and text below it 
>repeated. I can press [Esc] and barely make out the "Do you want to go 
>back?" prompt. Eventually I can get out, answer a couple prompts for 
>starting the backend and doing a mythfilldatabase.
>
>Does this mean it worked?

Are you using mythtv-setup to do the upgrade?  Do you have MythMusic
or other frontend only plugins installed?

Using mythtv-setup to do database upgrades is the recommended way, as
it normally gives a little more control over the process.  An
automatic backup is done first, which can take a while if your
database is large like mine, and then the upgrade itself can take a
while.  If the disk access indicator on the VM has stopped, then it is
likely that the upgrade has finished, but you need to check the log
files in /var/log/mythtv to be sure.  I normally run tail -f <log file
name> from a terminal while doing an upgrade to keep track of
progress.  If you have ssh access to the VM you could try using that
to see if you can access the logs, as a terminal on the VM would
likely also be unreadable due to the video corruption.

If you have MythMusic installed, or other frontend only plugins, then
you need to also run mythfrontend after mythtv-setup to get their
databases upgraded.  If you run mythfrontend first to do the upgrade
with MythMusic installed, then I found you can get a deadlock
situation - but I am not sure what MythTV version that happened on.

If you are getting screen corruption in the VM display, then that is
likely due to MythTV using full screen mode.  But if so, it should
also have happened when you first started mythfrontend after
installing MythTV but before you replaced the database with the one
you are upgrading.  So did you actually start mythtv-setup and
mythfrontend on their default database?  If not, I would roll back the
VM and try that first, and see if you can fix the video corruption
problem before attempting the database upgrade.  Try changing the VM's
video settings - maybe it needs more video memory allocated.  I am
unfamiliar with KVM, so I can not help with exact settings.  I think
it is also recommended that you change the theme in the default
database to the same one in the database you are upgrading.  That gets
the theme cached so that process does not interfere with the database
upgrade process.


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