[mythtv-users] Unable to record from EPG

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 13:33:56 -0400, you wrote:

>Hi
>
>I am new to MythTV but am somewhat familiar with Linux, Mysql and Perl. 
>I have setup the MythTV (Ver .28) master back end on Ubuntu 16.04 server 
>with a Hauppage WinTV-quadHD tuner card. I have a dedicated drive for 
>storing recordings separately from the system disk. The front end is 
>currently running on a Mac Mini.
>
>I am able to view channels, selecting them from the EPG. If I am 
>watching a channel and select record (R) the program is recorded to the 
>storage drive. If I select a program to record in the future from the 
>EPG the recording never happens. I have looked at the record table in 
>the mythconverg database and the recording times are 4hrs later than the 
>times shown in the EPG? I have updated the starttime, startade, endtime, 
>enddate in the record table to match the actual airtime of the program 
>but this does not seem to be  the issue as no recording is created.
>
>I have been searching the internet for solutions to this problem but am 
>not finding much that is relevant. Any ideas where I should start?
>
>Thanks!
>
>Alan

All times in the mythvconverg database are stored in UTC time, so the
recording rules you are looking at are likely valid, as your email
headers are showing a UTC offset of "-0400".

To see what is going wrong with a recording, you will need to turn on
a higher logging level for recordings.  To do that, you need to add
the "-v record" option to the mythbackend command line.  In Ubuntu
16.04+, the way to do that is to create a file here:

/etc/mythtv/additional.args

and put inside it an environment variable setting for
"ADDITIONAL_ARGs=".  So in your case, the file should contain:

ADDITIONAL_ARGS=-v record

It is best to do a "chown mythtv:mythtv" on the
/etc/mythtv/additional.args file to ensure it will be readable.

The additional.args file is read by the systemd unit that runs
mythbackend as an environment file:

root at lith:/lib/systemd/system# cat mythtv-backend.service
[Unit]
Description=MythTV Backend
Documentation=https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythbackend
After=mysql.service network.target

[Service]
User=mythtv
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/mythtv/additional.args
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mythbackend --quiet --syslog local7
$ADDITIONAL_ARGS
StartLimitBurst=10
StartLimitInterval=10m
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=1

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target