[mythtv] New user experiences and questions

Isaac Richards mythtv-dev@snowman.net
Thu, 7 Nov 2002 15:29:50 -0500


On Thursday 07 November 2002 02:33 pm, Andrew Dodd wrote:
> First of all:
> On a RH 7.3 box, MythTV was pretty easy to install.  Just had to dig up
> the qt-devel and qt-MySQL RPMs, and deal with all the xmltv dependencies.
>
> MythTV seems to be working fine, except for a number of gotchas and
> issues:
>
> There does not appear to be any way to have MythTV record in the
> background (i.e. without the GUI running) - While it's great for dedicated
> PVR machines, it makes it much less useful for people who want to run it
> on a machine used for other things.  (I don't think I even have X running
> more than 50% of the time).  Is there any way to do this?  (i.e. have a
> daemon that starts up at boot and records stuff in the background without
> any GUI.)

Not currently, no.

> Similarly, mythfrontend doesn't seem to have any method for exiting other
> than killing the app or control-C from whatever xterm it was started from.
> If there is a way, I'd love to know, as I didn't see any in the
> documentation.

There isn't.

> Also, even though in the setup program I chose NOT to associate any of my
> Hauppauge WinCast-TV's inputs other than composite with the "default"
> source, mythtv probes all inputs at startup and automatically selects the
> tuner input, not Composite1.  As a result, if I schedule a recording, it
> just records static.  (I'm using a VCR as my tuner because of the fact
> that the VCR is stereo and the audio when using the tuner has a
> high-pitched whine that gives me splitting headaches.  How do I fix this?
> I've looked in tv.cpp and it appears to get input info from the database -
> I tried hardcoding the input name to Composite1 and it didn't do anything.
<snip>
> The commented out line is where I tried forcing the input to Composite1.
>
> How do I stop the program from defaulting to the tuner?  It makes viewing
> with mythtv a minor annoyance, but it's a showstopper for unattended
> recording.

If you could figure out why SwitchToInput() isn't working for you, then it 
should record fine -- if hardcoding it like that didn't work, then something 
else is wrong.  That all seems to be working just fine for me and others, 
though.  

There isn't a way to specify the starting input, yet, though adding that is on 
my todo list already.

> Last, the database of recorded shows should be updated at the BEGINNING of
> a recording, not at the end.  If the machine crashes or loses power before
> recording finishes, MythTV forgets that it ever recorded the show and the
> MPEG file containing it becomes orphaned.  Passing the filename as a
> commandline argument to mythtv doesn't play it.  (Related question:  How
> to I play recorded files that aren't in the database?)

I have it updating at the end because I don't want partial recordings in my 
database, and I don't want things showing up in the UI before they've 
finished recording.  It'd be a simple matter to write up a little wrapper 
program like the 'mythv' program to play single files, but I've never spent 
the time to do it.

Isaac