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I put a bunch of shows from our MythTV box in Ireland, and want to copy them onto a Series2 TiVo in the US.

I got TiVo Desktop, paid $25 to make it TiVo Desktop Plus, and configured it the way I was told. But no matter what tricks I play, I can’t get it to actually start copying stuff—well, usually. I did “Add Video…” and picked a folder named “tivo-transfer” with two test mpeg show files in it. Once, and I’ve not yet figured out why, the Now Playing list showed “tivo-transfer” (with the description of the first show in that folder) in progress. Hmm. Meanwhile, the non-Plus approach of making it get a file from the “My TiVo Recordings” folder and selecting it on the TiVo itself worked.

For the moment, I just went into the TiVo Desktop -> Preferences and made it use the ‘tivo-transfer’ directory, then on the TiVo selected a bunch. It’s started transferring stuff (though it’d sure be handy if the “Transfer Status” display of TiVo Desktop, which shows files you’re getting from the TiVo, would also show transfers going from a PC back to the TiVo).

I submitted this stuff as a Feedback message on the TiVo website, but I’ve no idea if I’ll actually hear back. In that message I offered to help beta-test any development version they may have going which avoids this.

I’ve also tried the previous 2.6.2 version, but at least under Vista that blew chunks and wasn’t willing to get started.

Also looked at their support page, but no golden answers.

I’ve searched but found I never actually noted the equipment I’m using for our small under-the-TV MythTV box. I’ve got more than one reason to note it:

• Shuttle SN45GV2 Barebone PC, Socket A (uses an AMD CPU instead of Intel)
• AMD Sempron 2600+ 1.833 GHz processor
• Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM 512MB memory

We’re having some trouble with it, and I’m not yet sure if it’s the Hauppauge PVR-350 card or if the system’s motherboard is failing. For a good year I’ve found the system’s Ethernet port is unreliable; for a while I was using a USB wireless dongle, and then switched to a Linksys USB200M adapter (which sucks, crappy little plastic door thingy keeps the cable in—until your 1 year-old bends it til it snaps off, at which point no matter what effort and tape you use, you’ll not get the thing to stay connected). But in the past few months we’ve found sound dropping out, so there’s no sound watching live TV and some recordings are missing their sound. (Permanently.) I’ve restarted the NTL Pace box but it makes no difference. Only a system reboot actually corrects it.

Some friends on the MythTV-Ireland mailing list suggest perhaps the motherboard’s dying. Since sound on the system (aplay KDE_Error.wav) still works I’m suspicious of the Hauppauge card.

I’m just making this post so I’ve got the specs of the Shuttle box and its processor written down somewhere other than obscure email archives. Just in case. Next possible step: take the PVR-350 card out of the Shuttle box and see if it works differently in my desktop PC. Problem is time to do anything like that.

We’re up early, just the guys. A squirmy four month-old Eoin is in my arms, protesting the fact that his dad’s just not made to breast feed him. Since his mom will be up shortly, I won’t grab any from the freezer. On the TV I’m watching Jon Stewart.

Patrick, age five, comes downstairs in his new Spiderman robe and plants himself down on the couch. “Can I watch something?”

“This is almost done.” I hear a sigh of resignation, the muttering of this is so boring hidden by closed lips. After Jon’s Moment of Zen, I make the MythTV box go to the set of children’s shows it’s been recording.

Seeing the first appearing on the list, I ask, “How about Bob the Builder?”

His answer surprises me: “I don’t like Bob any more.”

“What?! Why?”

“Bob’s stupid. He’s only for babies.”

“Why do you say that?” I ask with genuine curiosity. I already know the answer, but still, you have to ask.

“My friend at school says it too.”

No surprise. A short list of names quickly takes form in my head. “Which friend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well I still like Bob,” I inform him, and press the button on the remote to make it start to play. I’m sitting in the chair still trying to hold on to fuss-monster Eoin. A few minutes pass, and out of the corner of my eye I can see Patrick watching the TV with me.

As the show continues, Eoin adds his own baby-speak commentary to the current episode of Bob. “Eoin, please, I’m trying to watch Bob the Builder.” By admonishing his little brother I seem to have given Patrick some sort of signal to share his opinion.

“Actually, I do like Bob,” he admits suddenly. Then he carefully qualifies that statement when I look over at him, a look of surprise appearing on my face. “But only a little bit.”

Small victories like this are all I can hope to get. We’re entering a new phase in our parenting: we now have to roll with the punches as these darling classmates attempt to change Patrick’s own mind.

Sure, he’ll be unconsciously fighting this sort of thing for the rest of his life. How to help strengthen his inner confidence when he likes certain music, believes something is wrong, or disagrees with what someone said? I don’t want him to care what people think of his clothes. I want him to try lots of books, music, sports, activities, food, everything. Then he can decide what’s good from his own experience, not what everyone else is telling him.

Accomplishing this is so incredibly difficult that most of us only succeed in small steps. It’s always going to be hard to keep your own thoughts, even as you’re still finding them and developing them. The reality that he’d be going through this so soon is the single biggest shock to me. He’ll grow from these experiences, of course, and I know he’s strong in his heart and will—and mind. All we can do is show him disagreement with others is okay.

The boy watching Bob the Builder across from me has smiles playing on the corners of his mouth. He is back to himself again, if only for a moment. And he knows I agree with him.

It’s apparently still safe to like Bob the Builder—a little bit.

Over the weekend we got to watch a full movie with Patrick for the first time: Star Wars! In the past he hasn’t wanted to see them because at some point he came to the belief that all movies are scary. But someone from his class, I think, convinced him to want to see this.

And, finally, a movie sounded really good in our livingroom!

For a really long time now we’ve been using a Cambridge Soundworks DTT 3500 Digital 5.1 Surround Speaker System to make TV and movies sound better in our livingroom. It worked pretty well, overall, even making the sound from our MythTV PVR system go out through it.

When I had to replace our 8 year-old dead TV, I was hooking up everything and found the Cambridge Soundworks box wasn’t actually usable anymore. The new Samsung LE40R74BD television (absolutely gorgeous) had a single red/white pair of RCA plugs for audio out, and no way to feed sound via the optical or coax inputs needed for the surround sound system. Hmm.

So after a while I finally got a sound receiver to connect everything. The Sony STR-DG700 receiver can do everything. (Continuing a past habit with TVs, cars, and other things, we bought the floor demo model at a discount.) Well, it can do just about everything—the DVD input can only come in via digital coax, not optical. And, the Sony guy is ordering us the proper remote for it because they couldn’t find it anywhere.

I reused the Cambridge speakers for this receiver, since I felt they would work perfectly fine for what we need. The temptation for the expensive Bose speakers was there a little, and then there’s the uber-expensive Bowers & Wilkins speakers available up in Blackrock. But after the TV and then convincing myself to get the receiver, it’d sure be cool to not buy anything else.

The five little black Cambridge speakers did a fine job. The DVD player’s digital coax line went into the receiver and made the sounds of movies jump out at us. It was wonderful, even if there was a missing piece: the biggest part of the speaker set is the subwoofer which gives the happy thundering sounds and dramatic effect. But ours wasn’t working—the receiver has a Pre-Amp Out plug for the subwoofer, which a little reading helped me understand: the subwoofer’s supposed to have its own amp, its own way to take the sound and give it some oomf. Since I was no longer using the DTT3500’s black box of buttons and dials, there was no amp for the subwoofer anymore.

I asked around and looked at some sites and called some shops, but it seems like buying a single subwoofer isn’t a cheap exercise. They were hundreds of Euros, mostly. Not worth it to me for the single device. Natural thought progression tossed my brain back into the Bose-is-so-cool arena. But wait…

Maybe we can make the receiver give its output to the Cambridge box so it could do the work for the subwoofer? Yes!

I discovered that there is one optical output on the Sony receiver: MD/TAPE. I plugged an optical cable into that, and put the other end into the Cambridge box. Plugged its subwoofer into the subwoofer contacts, and played Star Wars.

Oh my. That’ll work for a while.

I recently figured out how to make it possible to install the mythfrontend client on other systems in our house rather than just on the TV in the livingroom. e.g., I can watch the news in a window here upstairs in my office while I’m working (cough).

The fundamental step I had to take was running mythtvsetup and change both the host and Master Server IP addresses to be their real address (192.168.20.23) instead of 127.0.0.1 as had been laid out in the instructions.

I followed the instructions at

http://www.bus.ualberta.ca/yma/mythtv/Mythtv.htm

for fixing remote permissions which boiled down to

% mysql -u root -p rootpw_for_mysql
mysql> use mysql;
mysql> SELECT Host, User, Select_priv, Insert_priv, Update_priv, Delete
_priv FROM user;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* to mythtv@”%” IDENTIFIED by ‘mythtv’
WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> SELECT Host, User, Select_priv, Insert_priv, Update_priv, Delete
_priv FROM user;
mysql> exit

With that, the SuSE 10.2 desktop system I’m using now could use the various mythtv* packages, just pointing it at the .23 backend server. Not everything works…going into Watch Video doesn’t work, but presumably because I’ve got to tweak a setting somewhere. Likewise, I have to have music mounted as /video/music if I try to choose Listen to Music. But watching recordings and live TV works just fine.

Of course looking now, I see that Jarod Wilson’s Tips’n'Tricks to his awesome HOWTO on installing MythTV makes mention of all of this. Oops.

B

Justin Mason has just launched a new mailing list for folks using MythTV in Ireland. Everyone can come out of the dark corners of the bogs and start putting together our collective experience to make really good alternatives to Sky+ or the other commercial products that’re out there.

Watch what you want, when you want.

We have our MythTV box set up to record a bunch of things, but I just realized there’s a distinct set in there of things that are all within a day of their original airing in the US:

• NBC Nightly News on CNBC each night at 11:30pm (live feed for what’s on in the US on the East Coast)
• ABC World News Tonight on BBC News 24 at 1:30am
• CBS News on Sky News each night at 1:30am and 3:30am (we record the latter)
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart at a variety of times on More4
• The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on CNBC at 10:00pm
• Late Night with Conan O’Brien on CNBC at 10:45pm

If we’re in need for a US-centric news fix, we’re all set.

Using to MythTV 0.20 under FC3 appears to be going well so far.

After the “smart upgrade” and a reboot, I found that mythfrontend wasn’t coming up. It failed to start, as did mythbackend, because of

2006-09-14 15:14:10.068 Connected to database ‘mythconverg’ at host: localhost
2006-09-14 15:14:10.070 Upgrading to schema version 1136
2006-09-14 15:14:10.071 DB Error (Performing database upgrade):
Query was: ALTER TABLE program ADD listingsource INT NOT NULL default ‘0′;
Error was: Driver error was [2/1060]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to execute query
Database error was:
Duplicate column name ‘listingsource’

new version: 1136
2006-09-14 15:14:10.072 Database Schema upgrade FAILED, unlocking.
2006-09-14 15:14:10.072 Couldn’t upgrade database to new schema

Even though my full dump of mysql before doing all of this doesn’t actually have ‘listingsource’ in the program table it emitted. Weird.

To fix it, I had to do

mysql -umysql -p mysql mythconverg
> alter table program drop listingsource;
> quit;

and then make mythbackend do its stuff in front of me so I knew it’d actually succeeded:

sudo mythbackend

Once that was happy having done a bunch of upgrades to schema versions incrementing to 1160, it finally calmed after emitting

2006-09-14 15:20:19.384 AutoExpire: Required Free Space: 2.1 GB w/freq: 10 min
2006-09-14 15:20:21.298 Reschedule requested for id -1.
2006-09-14 15:20:21.795 Scheduled 260 items in 0.5 = 0.15 match + 0.35 place
2006-09-14 15:20:21.801 Seem to be woken up by USER

With that, I did a Ctrl-C and restarted it with

sudo /sbin/service mythbackend restart

Now it’s up and humming. Almost happy; bugs include:

• the preview play of recorded shows has a very blue-tinted color now
• mythmusic fails cuz libmythmusic.so can’t resolve mm_support (possibly cuz of libexif and the fact I’m running FC3 vs FC5, supposedly)

Otherwise, so far so good. Others are having some trouble with this new version, though, so I wouldn’t jump on it yet.

I did an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -u on our MythTV box to update it to the latest and greatest. After doing the upgrade, though, we were no longer able to watch live TV. I read through the release notes and found the LiveTV part had changed drastically. (Hmm, is it about here you’re wondering why I upgraded everything before reading what was changing?)

The LiveTV change makes it possible to watch something for a while, hit record, and have it save everything you’ve seen so far.

The fix to let us again watch live TV through our MythTV box was to run mythtvsetup and look under Capture cards and modify the single /dev/video0 entry that’s in there to have a Default Input value of S-Video 0.

When I first set up the box, I’d set up two inputs, one from the “regular” cable (Tuner 0) and one from the NTL Digital Cable box (S-Video 0). The intent was to make the MythTV record shows off the regular cable so we could watch whatever we wanted from the digital cable (no channels changing out from under us). I found the quality of what was being recorded for regular cable wasn’t the greatest, so I finally ditched the idea and stuck to just recording programs off digital cable. (Hmm, perhaps I should give Tuner 0 a try with the new version?) I deleted the Tuner 0 input connection, leaving just S-Video 0.

So it appears the new way of capturing live TV in a style that can be retroactively recorded has closed the part of MythTV that would iterate through input connections if the default doesn’t work. Instead, it will throw you right back at the initial screen for the UI. (Actually, this change is more of a workaround; still need to look at the diffs and figure out the real fix to the code to make it stop throwing us back out.)

Having changed it from the old Tuner 0 to S-Video 0, I restarted mythtvbackend, then mythtvfrontend. Voila, we can again watch live TV and pause it when the phone rings or someone comes to the door. Or to avoid commercials by pausing til we know they’re done (commercials are considerably less frequent in Ireland/UK television than in the US, but they’re still there). Thanks, MythTV!

Thanks to a mention in one of Adam Curry’s podcasts, I learned that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is carried on the More4 channel in the UK. Our digital cable company in Ireland added the channel in December.

So now our MythTV box can happily grab it at 9:30pm each night for our enjoyment later. Only recently I discovered a pieced-together weekend The Daily Show: Global Edition airing once a week on CNN. While that was a great first step, this is now so much cooler.