Some teething troubles

I have 3 nights worth of transcoding* stacked up and they've all failed due to looking for mythtranscode in the wrong place (/bin to be precise). Possibly a fault casued by using the old mythconverg database** on a new server. I go investigate...

Some swearing and configuring later:

Ok, now it's just being weird. I fire up mythtv-setup and change the transcoder program from mythtranscode to /usr/bin/mythtranscode. Requeue a transcode job (conveniently the System Status menu lets you requeue a job if you hit OK/Enter/Space with the job in question highlighted)** and wait for it to start. It fails, this time with the cryptic 'Exit Status: 252' message. Googling around tells me that removing the path from the brogram name fixes this. So I go and change the transcoder program setting to mythtranscode again. Suddenly it all works.

The same weirdness happened with the missing mythcommflag. If I manage to find a way of repeating the weirdness I shall attemt to investigate and file a bug, but for now, all I can say is WTF?

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* MythTV defaults to just dumping the mpeg stream from the DVB-T cards to disk, which takes up about 2 GB/hour, but it can be set up to, either automatically or on demand, transcode and compress the video date into much more compact .nuv format files. I use a low quality setting to compress vidoe to about 300MB/hour.
** My pet hate with mythtv, working out whether an item on screen responds to M, I, OK or something else entirely. It's mostly intuitive, in the same way programming a VCR is mostly intuitive. The 5 year old in me can just about manage, but a lot of what can be done is 'hidden'. I found Sarah switching between 'Watch Recordings' and 'Delete Recordings' and scrolling like crazy because she hadn't found the 'I' menu option to delete recordings from 'Watch Recordings'. I'm not sure there's an easy answer to this kind of usability problem.