Tuesday, 27 November 2007

IR Blaster to Change Channel on any Set Top Box

Switching to DirectTV required me to look for an alternative solution to change channels because their USB port did not seem to work. So I bought an IR Blaster and started to create a LIRC driver that will use the IR Blaster device to send the change channel command like a regular remote would do. This is a complete, I hope, instructions on how to setup IR Blaster on a SuSE 10.x box (I installed it on 10.2 and 10.3 without any problems). These instructions are based on the excellent howto from jds-myth. I just made it a little bit simpler for SuSE users but with some minor adjustments it should also work for Fedora. Here I will just highlight the steps to make it work but on my company's article page I will also have the necessary code available. The only thing you have to do is to find the correct configuration file ledxmit.conf for the set-top box remote and adjust the driver name inside the change_channel.sh script. I use here RC24.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:06 PM in MythTV

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Tuesday, 4 September 2007

Don't buy a Netgear VPN111 USB Wireless Adapter

As said in a previous blog entry about setting up a new MythTV environment I wanted to lay a long ethernet cable through the house to avoid having the troubles with my wireless MythTV network. That said I started setting up the new box last Saturday and when I was finished I could not test it until I had the ethernet cable. I installed the 64-bit OpenSuSE because I did not need the wireless USB adapter anymore which required a 32-bit OS (Netgear does not want to create 64-bit drivers). But th  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:35 AM in MythTV

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Thursday, 30 August 2007

MythTV: a new era has started

Since a while the mailing lists of MythTV was flooded after the main source for the TV lineups listings announced that it terminates the free delivery of the lineup data. Because there are no more listings starting September this year MythTV was updated to support a new data delivery model which requires the users to pay for lineup data even though it is a very small fee around $5 per month for now. The added bonus of skipping commercials makes this worthwhile and I am going to sign up as soon as I have the new MythTV version up and running.

I w  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:36 AM in MythTV

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Sunday, 17 June 2007

Remove Records without a Media File on MythTV

Due to an accident with my LVM setup I lost all the recordings. Now my MythTV frontend shows all these recordings even though I cannot watch anymore. Because I don't have them anymore I want to re-record them but for that I need to delete them but with re-record option. Even when working on the MythTV backend server performing a delete of a single recording takes around 10 to 15 seconds. Having around 400 recordings that would take forever. So I was looking for a way to automate this so that I can do that unattended. Unfortunately MythTV website and wiki does not explain the DB structure a  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:40 PM in MythTV

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Thursday, 14 June 2007

Corrupt Jump Table

I experienced some strange behavior with some of the MythTV recordings. All the recordings were unable to jump ahead or to skip a commercial but after a reboot of the backend server the problem went away. Any attempt to fix the shows failed and even an upgrade did not do the trick. In addition bringing that issue to the MythTV user lists did not help either. Nevertheless another message contained a hint on how to fix the problem. The commercial flagging tool contains an option to rebuild the seek table. The --rebuildkeep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:37 PM in MythTV

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Wednesday, 13 June 2007

MythTV on OpenSuSE through Pacman and Yast

As much as I like APT I don't like the way it automatically updates the system. At least with Yast I can control it by knowing what is going to be upgraded and can pick and choose the parts I want. Up to know I did install MythTV through APT but with problems to have APT installed on OpenSuSE 10.2 I started to look for an alternative and found it on Pacman even though there are other alternative installation repositories out there that do the job as well.

OpenSuSE's website have a page that provides a li  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:50 PM in MythTV

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Wednesday, 20 December 2006

MythTV Frontend on XBox

In previous blog I was hoping that I could convert the XBox to a Linux server and then install MythTV frontend because I have no other use for the old XBox. Unfortunately this is not that easy because M$ clamped down so that one cannot install Linux. Luckily for us they made a whole lot of mistakes in their security system so that one can install linux on it but it is not that simple as it may seem. Last night I watched a p  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:13 PM in MythTV

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Thursday, 5 October 2006

NDISWrapper Woes

After getting no response from the NDIS Wrapper Mailing List I started to investigate the problem of the failing drivers on my own. It turned out the script in question is a PERL script and I had no experience with it whatsoever. Nevertheless I was desperate enough to tackle it myself.

After a while I started to understand PERL enough to print out some debugging statements and to test it. Trying out several things I finally figured out that 1.24 had a bug in it for USB adapters. I could fix the first problem avoiding a Segmentation Fault when I loaded the module with modprobe  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 2:33 PM in MythTV

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Wednesday, 4 October 2006

Change Channels in MythTV for Motorola DCT2XXX Set Top Box

Setting up MythTV 0.20 from scratch I ran into a little problem with the automatic Channel Changing and saw that I did not cover it well in my previous blog about this. So here I tried to compensate for this deficiency:

  1. Connect the set top box with your computer using a serial cable
  2. Download and extract keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 6:08 PM in MythTV

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Tuesday, 3 October 2006

MythTV 0.20 Woves

Two weeks ago I started to look into MythTV 0.20 and right away ran into a huge problem. What happened was that I tried to connect a new MythTV Frontend to my old 0.19 version where the new frontend automatically and without asking updates the DB schema. This led to the problem that any recordings by the old backend creates a recording that cannot be skip through and the length of the recording is out of sink (around 76hours for a half hour). Then it turned out that in order to install 0.20 I need SuSE 10.1 (at least that was the only one available now) and therefore I would need to upgrad  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:23 PM in MythTV

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