mythtv

I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

Now on the the WD I'd had to set the jumper on the back to limit the drive to SATA I (150Gbit/s) in order for my old Asus/Nvidia socket 754 motherboard to recognise it. It runs quiet and cool and should I need to replace it it'd probably be a bigger power supply, a new case, and PCI Express graphics card. This would be expensive and overkill when the Nvidia FX5200 graphics card is perfectly adequate for displaying digital TV. I digress.

The new samsung disk requires one to use their software (ES-Tool, well hidden on their website and the kind of thing that expects you not to need a manual) to adjust drive settings. The problem is the computer needs to be able to detect the disk before the software can adjust the settings, but when the problem is the computer can't detect the disk in the first place there's a bit of a problem. The software in question is a dos-based bootable CD. I try using the the much newer PC in my room, that can't boot the CD, something to do with an out of memory error. This might be something to do with said PC being a modern multi-core multi-GPU 64-bit machine. It can, however, communicate with the disk so I know it works. My trusty Dell Precision is similarly too old to cope with the new disk.

Finally I get both the disk and the setup software running on my mum's desktop, which appears to finally have a feature that's made it really useful. It's an early EMT-64 capable 3Ghz P4, not as fast or as economical or as stable as anything else in the house but today the damn thing redeemed itself. I, on the other hand, need a small dose of public ridicule for not checking how to set the drive to 150Gbit/s before ordering it.

Having complained lots, it is very quiet, draws very little power, and and is more than quick enough to serve as a repository for myth recordings, however it'll be obsolete by the time I can tell you whether I think mine's reliable.

At some point in the past, cable boxes were simple things that just changed channel, now they have a whole host of different states like on demand that can really confuse mythtv.

I've set up channel 109 (which is On Demand Preview on the Virgin box) to put the box into on-demand mode, giving mythtv a way of knowing the cable box is doing something other than displaying one of the conventional channels. It relies on users using channel 109 to switch to On-Demand mode, so isn't perfect, but it seems to work.

Getting out of most of the other states the box could be in can be done by sending the TV then Select buttons, and whilst it'll kick users off of on demand without warning, it means that mythtv gets to record what it wants.

Changing the hostname of anything that's been near mythtv is a pain in the ass. There's a howto using an offline copy of the data that I probably should have followed, but I didn't so after giving myself a world of problems, I'm going to try and work with the data online with phpMyAdmin. Seriously hardcore users could go with an interactive mysql session, but it's not amazing for browsing data quickly. Watch out for name collisions though, lucifer, my new backend used to run as a frontend, so using the method above I'd have to do the following 3 way swap.

To set your video timer first you need a reliable clock. Done that. The Debian PIII of usefulness syncs it's clock off of pool.ntp.org. The Ubuntu box does the same, falling back on the Debian box if we lose the Virgin* connection.