MythTV Reloaded – Day 20
So, there was one more enhancement that I decided to make to the frontend before putting it back into service. While I was looking into getting the suspend function mapped to a button on my remote, I ran across this page on the MythTV wiki. While the command shown for suspending the PC didn’t work for me, I did like the idea of adding an entry on the main MythTV menu for putting the computer to sleep. That way, if for whatever reason the frontend was being controlled by a keyboard or remotely, it would still be possible to put the system to sleep easily without the remote. I was able to follow the instructions pretty much as written but changing my theme for the one in the example. The only thing that was different was that I needed to make a second entry for the button icon. When the icon is highlighted the icon was supposed to stretch to fill a slightly bigger box but without this second entry there was no stretching. As a result, all of the icons shown after were offset from their tile outline by about 5-10% and it looked pretty bad. So I found the place to put the second entry (an exact copy of the first entry, just in a different spot in the code), restarted the frontend app and away I went. Everything looks great, and I have a new sleep icon.
So, now I think that I’m really ready to put the system into use. Until then, enjoy. I know I will.
Interesting set of articles,
Interesting set of articles, but most people won’t have the patience to spend 20days setting up MythTV. And you had previous experience! The whole “MythTV is hard to setup” stereotype is unfortunately confirmed.
While I agree that this build
While I agree that this build did end up being unnecessarily long, there are a few things to take into consideration.
1) I only spent 30 min to an hour working on this at a time so it took a lot longer to do than necessary. I blame Netflix.
2) I updated four systems in this upgrade process and three of the four were smooth installs.
3) Most of my time was spent with the IR receiver although there were some hiccups with graphics drivers. The graphics issue is something that could have been avoided easily if I had gone with recommended hardware for MythTV (i.e. anything Nvidia based). The remote issue isn’t specific to MythTV – there was a major change to how the Linux kernel and LIRC handle remote control inputs and the same would have been the case with any other application that uses a remote, like Sage TV if anyone still uses that under Linux. Now that I know what I’m doing, I could do it again in about 5 minutes. Once I write up the details here, everyone else will be able to do that as well. Also, I ran into problems with this because the IR receiver in the Antec Fusion 430 Black is non-standard and any regular IR receiver (USB based or otherwise) should be much easier to work with.
4) There were a number of enhancements that I made to my MythTV configuration this time around that are not necessary to get MythTV up and running like getting the LCD to show useful information, configuring a couple of buttons to run scripts, etc.
5) The update process should have taken a week or less (which is pretty good considering it was 4 systems) if I hadn’t run into a couple of hurdles from the OS (not MythTV).
6) I go through all of this (and detail how to work around it eventually) so that you don’t have to. Once I get a few mini-guides written up you should be able to get a MythTV install up and running in a day. And if you hit road blocks, this is a good place to ask questions. I tried to make not of all of the issues that I ran into in this build and probably made it seem more difficult than it actually was. If it was more a matter of putting MythTV on top of an already operational setup then it would be a matter of about an hour (or less) to get up and running.
I agree with you that this build log re-enforced the “MythTV is hard to setup” stereotype but the only problem that I ran into that I can actually attribute to MythTV was the firewall issue that I had when trying to get my Windows build to connect to the backend. The rest were all OS issues. I know that in most instances, users are likely coming from Windows and would thus need to install Linux to get MythTV running and consider that part of the process, but I want to make the distinction there.
Thanks for the feedback.