[mythtv-users] Advice on v31 installation?

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2021 18:30:19 +0100
    > From: Paul Harrison <mythtv at mythqml.net>

    > I would suggest if your remote IR device/hardware has devinput drivers 
    > that work (most do these days) and you only want to receive from your IR 
    > device then don't bother with lirc since devinput is much simpler to 
    > setup and in many cases just works.

An interesting point!  I've seen all the complaints about how LIRC seems
broken these days.  I haven't actually figured out anything about
remotes; for testing I was planning on driving from a keyboard & mouse.

(In my old installation, I'd gotten in the habit of basically not using
the frontend and just playing raw video files from the command line with
mpv; maybe in the new one I'll go back to using the frontend for real.
I'll have to see what I have for remote receivers; the old myth used the
receiver from a PVR-250 and their remote transmitter.  One thing I've
noticed is that streams recorded "by hand" from a Ceton are unplayable
with mpv/mplayer before Ubuntu 20.04, but 20.04 seems to be okay with
them.  Poor support for H.264 transport streams?  Even very old mpv/
mplayer versions were fine with MPEG-TS, but whatever comes with (IIRC)
18.04 and certainly 14.04 choked on the Ceton's streams.)

Speaking of which, does Mythweb still work?  That's been my 100% way of
scheduling for many years now, and I keep seeing rumors of it going away
because it's not maintained.  But being able to manipulate schedules on
-any- machine, without worrying about compatible frontend versions, is
very convenient.

And I'm still wondering whether it's safe not to create a brand-new SD
acct to avoid accidentally blowing away my existing lineup; does the
grabber ask to create a new one once I give it my username/pw?  (The SD
website says not to create new lineups via the web interface if using
the XMLTV grabber, so I don't have any experience with that yet.)

(And of course still wondering why we have both JSON and SQLite XMLTV
grabbers and if there's any way to decide between them.  Is either one
faster/smaller/better maintained/the way of the future/easier to set up?)

P.S.  One thing I recall from very old installations is that they were
somewhat promiscuous about finding other backends on the network and
upgrading any DB they find, and I definitely don't want v31 to even try;
my old one is too old for it to upgrade and I'll have to upgrade it with
some intermediate ancient version in schroot or something, I'm guessing.
I'm thinking the safe way to proceed there is to use iptables on my old
backend to just reject any packets from my new backend; that should (I'd
think!) absolutely prevent any misfire from attempting to upgrade the
old DB in-place, as opposed to from some backup file I explicitly hand
to the new installation.

Thanks again!