[mythtv-users] Error: MythTV is using all inputs but there are no active recordings?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 03/26/2012 11:58 PM, Tapani Tarvainen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 09:30:58PM -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> Glad to see you got things working (when you realized there were
>> permissions issues accessing the capture devices), but I thought I'd
>> respond to some of the points in here
> Thank you for very helpful comments. A few points:
>
>> The only supported place to add shows to MythTV is in the Video
>> Library. MythTV Recordings section is for recordings done by MythTV.
> OK. In particular this means there's no (supported) way of
> merging two backends (combining their recordings),
> other than moving recordings from one into Video library
> of the other, if I understand correctly.

Right.  But, again, there's little reason with current MythTV not to put 
recordings (TV and/or movies) into Video Library.  MythVideo used to be 
good primarily for movies and non-TV video, but now it (or, technically 
the Video Library, since it was moved into MythTV core) excels at 
handling TV.  I think more than anything, we just need to get more 
people to give it a try, again, and see that it's not your father's 
MythVideo.

A friend of mine who uses MythTV wanted to add some videos to Watch 
Recordings so his kids' shows were all together (whether they were the 
ones he recorded or ones he'd bought on DVD).  I explained the idea and 
reasoning behind going the other way--moving his recordings of kids' 
shows to Video Library along with the DVD rips--and he tried it out and 
has several times mentioned how much better this works than Watch 
Recordings did.  And it allows him to organize the videos in hierarchies 
(by disabling flat view) however he likes and switch between "groups" 
without MENU|Change Group Filter by just using the arrows to navigate.  
He's now convinced that Video Library is the place for long-term 
archival of videos, and especially for large libraries of video.  (And 
he's still moving new recordings over to Video Library--basically 
anything he plans to keep rather than watch and delete.)  I would be 
doing the same, but I don't archive anything--just watch and delete.

>> Note, also, that since the Video Library is an excellent
>> location to archive shows long term
> [...]
>> I think most people move recordings using
>> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythvidexport.py .
> Thanks. I'll take a look at that.
>
>> The database backup is something configured by your distro.  The
>> reason MythTV doesn't do it internally (as it has all the code it
>> needs to do it internally--and has for a few versions, now), is
>> because performing a database backup while MythTV is busy doing
>> something else may break that something else (generally due to I/O
>> or database locking issues causing, for example, us to be unable to
>> write all the data for a recording).
> Yes, I noticed that in the mythconverg_backup.pl script comments
> (and remembered again why I don't like mysql)

Hehe, understood.  :)

>> That said, if your weekly job isn't causing issues, then chances are
>> a daily job won't cause issues--unless it happens to be triggered at
>> an especially-busy time on one of those other days.  If you know
>> when your cron.daily is run and you know it's not a busy recording
>> time, you'll probably be ok doing a daily backup.
> Yes (in Ubuntu it runs cron.daily at 6:25 in the morning,
> which is pretty safe time for me).
> But if I get around to setting up automatic shutdown/wakeup,
> doing db backup during shutdown (after stopping the backend)
> would probably be the safest way.

Yeah, that's exactly what I do for automatic backups--my shut down 
script creates one after shutting down the master backend.  (That said, 
I haven't actually set up auto shut down, so I still do some manual 
backups when I know it's safe, since I go longer between shut downs than 
I care to go between backups.)

Mike