Fun with LIRC
I have successfully updated my bedroom MythTV frontend part way.I did an upgrade using YUM and now running Fedora 14. I did not update MythTV yet since the server is running v.23 and have to update it first. All went well except having to fiddle with updating the NVIDIA driver by hand.
While I was tinkering, I set up LIRC to control the TV and Cable box as well as MythTV. The TV did not have a remote with it and it turns out Olivia's codes are a bit weird. The remote that came with the Comcast STB worked, but not well. The universal remote I was using with Myth had the same issues but did not work with the STB. I wanted to have only one remote control everything, so what I did was set the universal remote to a code that nothing was using (RCA I think) and had LIRC send commands to the TV and STB using irexec and some irsend scripts. I use a home brew transmitter and old Packard Bell receiver.. I was having a lot of issues with errors that seemed to be coming from problems with the serial port. I ended up switching to the earlier mentioned test machine and that seemed to clear most of it up.
Now what I have is:
Remote
V
LIRC
V V V
MythTv - STB - TV
Ex. when I send Volume Up, LIRC receives it then sends the proper codes out to the TV.
A bit of a hassle, and a slight delay in each action, but the function is so much better with only one remote!
By the way, I was able to pull the hard drive and simply switch machines, even though one was Intel and one AMD. Ever try and do this with WinXP??????? (big pain!!)
Comments - Edit - Delete
Comcast, Schedules Direct, and MythTV
My MythTV is set up with 2 tuner cards, one is connected to my main cable box, and the other was connected straight to the basic cable. I have LIRC control the cable box. Not long ago, Comcast issued digital set top boxes (STB) for all its services, even basic cable. I then had to add the STB and have LIRC control it as well.On Schedules Direct I had 2 listing, basic, and digital. Comcast has now added more channels on the STB that are above and beyond Basic (like SyFi and Sprout, but not BBC or movie channels if you have a digital package) so I wanted to be able to tune them as well on MythTV. I set both inputs to use the digital listing since Schedules Direct only lets you have each linup once, and deleted the unavailable channels from the STB input. On the next run of mythfilldatabase, the channels were added back. Since I don't want Myth to try to record on a tuner / channel that doesn't exist, I wanted a way to automaticly clear the channels. I read in a forum where somone ran a cron job to do this for over the air channels they could not receive, but I am trying something different. I found that when mythfilldatabase ran, the "finetune" field was set to "NULL" on the new channels. All I needed to do is delete any channels that matched this. In mythtv-setup there is a setting for "mythfilldatabase program" that I set to a batch file "mythfilldatabase.sh" which contains:
#!/bin/sh
mythfilldatabase
mysql -u XXXX -pXXXX -e"delete from mythconverg.channel where finetune is NULL;"
XXXX are username and password
This way every time MythTV automaticly runs the command, it will clear the new channels on it's own.
Of course, I will not have new channels that I may want added, but I can check for them on my own and run mythfilldatabase manually.
NOTE: if you use MythWeb, finetune will show as a blank (NULL) the first time making the new channels easy to find, but if you save changes, it will set it to "0"
I am going to let this run a few days and see how it goes!
One side benefit is since there is only on listing to download, mythfilldatabase runs in less time using cached data for the second tuner.
Comments - Edit - Delete
MythTV Menus Disapeared!
I have been in the process of setting up a new MythTV frone end and having lots of little issues. I go through this every time, all the little tweaks I need to work with my hardware drive me nuts! I am going to be adding important things here as they come up.I just rebooted the system and all the menus were gone! Just a blank background. I navigated by "feel" to the settings and the screen came up. I tried changing from OpenGL to QT, changed theme, no good. Started googling, nothing looked familiar. I finally realized I had unplugged the monitor the night before. Opened nvidia-settings, rescanned monitors, saved and that fixed it.
Now a bit more explanation. I have an nvidia 8400gs card connected to a 61" RCA DLP using DVI. First time I have used this card and this type of set up. I had a small LCD monitor hoked up as well while installing since the RCA cuts off the menus, and switched when finished. I disabled the LCD and every thing was OK. Last night I unplugged the LCD from the AC since I was done with it. Today I powered down to look at mounting a new hard drive and when I powered back up, no menus on Myth. I looked in nvidia-settings and the monitor was still listed. Rescanned and still there, Completely disconnected and rescanned, GONE! Saved xorg.conf, rebooted, changed all settings back, and now it is ok.
Apparently nvidia was trying to be too smart for it's own good. I had hoped to leave the LCD enabled for future use, but I guess I will just have to reset things if I do.
Now I know, and knowing is half the battle! (To keep from pulling what hair I have left!)
Comments - Edit - Delete