[mythtv-users] Upgrade Madness

[Martin Compton]

On 12/5/21 10:25 PM, Martin Compton wrote:
> On 12/5/21 7:51 AM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> On Sun, 05 Dec 2021 22:11:08 +1300, you wrote:
>>
>>> Today I tried a few things to see if I could get IR blasting to work
>>> on my MCE hardware, but no luck so far.  At the moment, I seem to have
>>> screwed up my IR drivers enough that I will have to wait for a gap in
>>> the recording schedule so that I can reboot the MythTV box. But by
>>> chance I ran across a post that mentioned a utility I had never heard
>>> of: ir-ctl.  This says that it can send to an IR transmitter directly
>>> without needing to use lirc and irsend.  On Ubuntu, it is installed as
>>> part of the v4l-utils package.  So that looks like a good option, if
>>> it works.  I hope to try it out later tonight after I have rebooted.
>> ir-ctl works for sending with my MCE hardware.  I put my transmitter
>> facing my receiver and was able to do commands like this:
>>
>> ir-ctl -k /lib/udev/rc_keymaps/rc6_mce.toml -K KEY_DVD
>>
>> and see the corresponding data from "ircat mythtv" in another window.
>>
>> So it looks like all you will need to do is convert to the standard
>> devinput setup used for the new lirc version with MCE receivers, the
>> same as many others of us here on this list.  Then you can easily
>> change your STB channel change script to use ir-ctl instead of irsend.
>> You will have to convert your STB keycode file into .toml format,
>> which is easy - just look at the /lib/udev/rc_keymaps files and you
>> can see the required format.  It is not too different from the old
>> format, just some added double quotes and = characters and some header
>> lines.
>> _______________________________________________
>>
> Excellent find.  I had to deal with a bad memory stick, so I am just 
> now starting to look at Lirc and ir-ctl, and the .toml file format.

I ended up sticking with Lirc.  It was surprisingly simple to setup the 
mceusb transceiver (driver "default", lircd_conf= "mceusb.lircd.conf", 
insert "lirc" into the rc protocols).  I think I spent more time reading 
about Lirc/kernel changes than I did actually configuring it.

I was able to restore the v30 database and upgrade the schema when I ran 
mythtv-setup.  I did have a slight problem in that the new server has a 
new name /and/ IP address.  The name change was easy enough using 
"mythconverg_restore.pl --change_hostname ...", but I had to manually 
change 5 references to the old server IP address in the settings table.

The change to using the xmltv sqlite grabber was mostly smooth.  I am 
glad I had already done the channel setup.  So all I had to do was 
configure the video source.  The interface on that left me wondering if 
I had done it right, as I was running mythtv-setup as root and the 
interface wasn't clear to me.  But running mythfilldatabase as the user 
mythtv works as expected.

A lot of little things to tweak, but the system is doing the important 
stuff, and I was able to keep my database.  I really wanted to keep that 
as it knows everything I've recorded since 2013.  The backup/restore 
wiki was sufficient to get the job done, with the exception of the IP 
address change.

I haven't tinkered with the MythFrontend playback settings yet.  It will 
be interesting to see how the integrated graphics work with different 
options.  It seems to do 4kp60 just fine using ffmpeg, though.

Thanks to all who work on MythTV!  After having to use the Spectrum 
remote and guide w/o a DVR, I realize how much my TV watching depends on 
using MythTV, and how much better the Schedules Direct guide is than 
spectrum's.
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