Andrew's blog

The MythTV mini-conference has been and gone and from my point of view from organising it, it was a total success. We had a stack of great talks (including an impromptu talk by Paul Wayper on the customised wooden panel on his Dell laptop).

Nigel Pearson was great, giving us all an insight into the development of MythTV, not only how the development process works, but also the complexitiy of the internals of MythTV. That was really interesting.

An unexpected bonus was that all the talks were recorded. We weren't expecting the A/V stuff to be setup until Wednesday, but it was all ready to go (after one minor cable change) on Monday morning in our room. Fantastic! A big thank you to Josh and his A/V team. The recordings aren't up for downloading yet, I'll post here (and on the mythtv-users mailing list) when they're ready.

At the end of the day we had a large discussion about what features people wanted to see in MythTV, and in particular what features people wanted to see in MythTV for a 1.0 release. The general consensus was that MythTV as it stands has more than enough features for 1.0. Once the recordings are up I'll write a list of the key items that were discussed.

Finally, thank you to all my speakers, and everyone who came along to listen, and who took part in the discussion afterwards.

Cheers!

For the MythTV Mini-conference at LCA 2009 we're going to have some lightning talks, and have a few spare slots.

If you'd like to tell people how great your setup is; your current pet project; or almost anything else, then please let me know.

Well, as of debian-maintainers version 1.39 (uploaded on 2008-07-08) I'm now a Debian Maintainer.

w00t!

Francois will upload a new version of MythTV Status soonish which amongst other things adds the magic fu required to allow me to upload it directly. Oh, and I've changed MythTV Status to be GPLv3.

More w00t!

I'm pleased to announce a new version of my little script - 0.6.1.

Notable new features:

• Details on disk space are reported, and individual storage groups[0];
• If there isn't enough program guide data, a warning is shown;
• The --email-only-on-conflict option has been extended to mean "Only on alert" which now includes both the previous points (this means, you'll only be emailled if there is something which needs your attention);
• For each recording (scheduled, current and conflict) show the channel name it is related to;
• We do a little bit of rinsing on the XML data now to remove some invalid unicode characters that occasionally appear;
• Suppress some warnings if the user doesn't have access to MySQL and handle some other error conditions in a nicer manner.

If you install the .deb, then the MOTD is updated automatically and the email will be sent daily if there are conflicts (and you've set some email addresses).

As usual, you can check the project page.

[0] To get the details on the individual storage groups you need to apply a couple of patches to MythTV. Please see the FAQ in the tarball or for Debian type boxes, /usr/share/doc/mythtv-status/FAQ .

Update: I've disabled comments for now as I'm tired of all the spam.

I'm pleased to announce a new version of my little script - 0.5 0.5.1.

Notable new features (from the shiny new ChangeLog):

• Add support for printing colour in the encoder status display.
• Show any schedule conflicts, or if the MythTV Perl API isn't usable, a warning is displayed.
• Display the amount of time until the next recording.
• Add --version & --help options.
• Allow suppressing blocks of output.
• The report can be sent via email with the subject set correctly. With an option to only send out email if schedule conflicts are detected.

If you install the .deb, then the MOTD is updated automatically and the email will be sent daily if there are conflicts (and you've set some email addresses).

As usual, you can check the project page.

Update: I've released 0.5.1 which should make the colour look good on non-black backgrounds as well.

The other day I was recompiling some kernels during the day on our MythTV backend, which at the time happened to be recording my wifes favourite program (Grey's Anatomy, we discovered it part way through the season, so the repeats are good). It turns out the compilation caused some issues with the recording (which reduced the WAF).

So to increase the WAF, I'm making sure this doesn't happen again. I've written a script that spits out the MythTV status which is then displayed in the MOTD. It is available over here.

I've found this is a pretty effective way of letting me know of any upcoming recordings and what is going to be happening on the system in the next little while. It is a whole lot easier than using the status page on MythWeb.

Sample output:

MythTV status for localhost
===========================
Status: Mon Oct 15 2007, 8:41 AM

Encoders:
cerberus (9) - Idle
cerberus (12) - Idle

Scheduled Recordings:
2007-10-15 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-15 18:00:00 - 3 News
2007-10-15 20:30:00 - Mythbusters
2007-10-15 22:00:00 - Flight Of The Conchords
2007-10-16 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-16 18:00:00 - 3 News

I run Debian, so there is a .deb. For those not running Debian there is a tarball (but the MOTD updating glue is Debian specific at the moment). For those interested in hacking there is a git repository.

Hopefully I'm not the only one that finds this useful.