[mythtv-users] Help with the new theme download requirements for the git Master branch

[Greg Oliver]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:09 PM, John Nissley <jnissley at nissley.org> wrote:
> * On Mon Dec 20, 2010 at 12:58:48PM -0600, John Nissley wrote:
>> There seems to be a new method for getting non standard themes to be
>> available for a front end.  Before all I did is compile and they were
>> there.  now there is a theme chooser but every time a try to install one
>> of the themes I get an error about it not existing on the master backend.
>>
>> Can someone please point me to documentation that can help me with this?
>
> Look in the backend logs, it sounds like your master backend either
> does not have access to the internet or the user running mythbackend
> doesn't have write access under ~/.mythtv/
>
> When the frontend goes to install a downloadable theme, the frontend
> actually tells the backend to download the theme package from the
> download site.  Then the frontend downloads the file from the backend.
> It is done this way so that you don't have to re-download the theme
> package multiple times to install it on multiple frontends.  Once the
> master backend downloads the theme package once, it gets put in a
> disk-based cache (using Qt's QNetworkDiskCache).  So if you install the
> same theme on another frontend, that frontend gets the theme from the
> cache on the master backend rather than having to download it from the
> download site again.  The default size of the QNetworkDiskCache is
> 50 MegaBytes max, so under normal usage, the theme would still be in
> the cache when you went around to your other frontends to instal the
> theme.  There aren't a lot of places in the code using the
> MythDownloadManager and QNetworkDiskCache currently, so the 50MB
> default is enough for this usage scenario.
>
> --
> Chris Pinkham
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Thank you for the response but I must be doing something wrong.  I checked
> my master backend logs when I was trying to download one of the themes and
> I did not see any activity in the logs related to downloading anything.
> My backend is run as root and I do see that the arclight theme is in the
> cache directory on my master backend but the frontends can not seem to get
> the theme from the cache.  I do not see anything in the logs when I try to
> download a theme.  The interesting thing is that I can do a refresh
> downloadable themes and get all the themes to populate on the screen but
> when I select one can not get it to download.  My master backend has access
> to the internet because I can ping yahoo.com and get a response.

It has been a while, but on my current .24 box, I had to add a "Temp"
Storage Group to my backend as the logfile told me it could not be
found.  Once I added that Storage Group, the theme downloads worked.
Before I added that, the status bar would just bounce back and forth
endlessly and I would have to kill the frontend.

This is all with a fixes branch from a while ago, of course it could
all be different now.

-Greg