Well recently I split my two myth boxes into a true slave and master configuration. I have to admit this was more troublesome that I expected. I decided my myth box in the living room would be a slave with no tuner. Since the case (silverstone lc10m) has the built in imon IR receiver, I figured I was all set.

I was even more impressed when I found out lirc now offers direct support and I no longer had to use venky’s build.

However as usual I encountered an issue. I was able to compile and install lirc without issue. Using irw produces output from the multi-median remote. But it also highlights another issue. The ir receiver just randomly stops receiving signals and hangs for about a minute. This was very frustrating and I hit the forums trying to find an answer. All I could find was from an earlier revision of lirc from around 2005, after that nothing.

As far as I can understand it, it appears that LCDproc is interfering with the ir receiver somehow. So here I am stuck with lirc that kinda works and no real solution. I will continue to search for the answer but until then, I’m stuck using a keyboard, which is not ideal.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The setup went okay, although I must admit I encountered some issues with the whole frontend/backend slave setup which I will detail in a later post.

This post is about blanking the screen as I often fall asleep while watching a movie or show. This increases the chance of screen burn in, and is something I want to avoid.

I am still researching how this can be done automatically but in the interim I have come up with the following solution. I have setup the power button on my hauppauge remote to execute a script with changes the runlevel from 5, to 3. Essentially stopping the frontend and bringing the system down to a terminal.

Since most default installs automatically blank the terminal after a set period of time of inactivity I am set. Now when I am drifting off and far to cozy to get out of bed to shut off the monitor I can simply press power and let the system enter runlevel 3. Then after a few minutes the screen will blank automatically.

To get this to work I added the following configuration to the .lircrc file in /home/mythtv.

# Power Button begin
prog = irexec
button = Power
config = /home/mythtv/powerbutton.sh
end

With that done the next step is to create the actual script that will switch runlevels. (Keep in mind this assumes your mythtv user has sudo access to run the init command) The following script is run from /home/mythtv/powerbutton.sh.

#!/bin/bash
 
RL=`/sbin/runlevel | awk '{print $2}'`;
LOG="/home/mythtv/pb.log";
 
if [ $RL -eq 5 ]
then
   # shutdown
   sudo /sbin/init 3;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: [$RL] switching to runlevel 3\n" >> $LOG
   killall irexec
   sleep 1;
   /usr/bin/irexec &
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: starting irexec.\n" >> $LOG
   sleep 1;
   setterm -reset
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: resetting terminal.\n" >> $LOG
   sleep 20;
   RL=`/sbin/runlevel | awk '{print $2}'`;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: switched to [$RL], exiting.\n" >> $LOG
else
   # startup
   sudo /sbin/init 5;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: [$RL] switching to runlevel 5\n" >> $LOG
   sleep 20;
   RL=`/sbin/runlevel | awk '{print $2}'`;
   printf "`date`: powerbutton.sh: switched to [$RL], exiting.\n" >> $LOG
fi
exit 0

With that done, all that is left is to test it out. Of course you will need to either reboot to pickup the changes or restart lircd, then the mythtv frontend.

Keep in mind this is just temporary solution and not something I plan to keep doing. I know there are probably far better ways of doing this and I will be looking into them in the future.

The following instructions describe how to successfully setup the imon vfd for use with MythTV on a Fedora Core 5 system running at least a 2.6.16 kernel and above. These instructions are modified where needed from the original site venky.ws. Also these instuctions do not activate the IR receiver that comes included in the imon vfd in the LC10M enclosure, simply just the lcd display.

Stand Alone Driver for imon vfd

Prerequisites:
You must have the kernel source or headers in /usr/src/linux that exactly match your running kernel. The installation instructions below assume you are running a 2.6.16 kernel or above.

Installation:

Download the stand alone driver here

# tar xvzf imon_vfd.tgz
# cd imon

Remove the following lines from the imon_vfd.c file:

line 122 owner = THIS_MODULE 
line 147 owner = THIS_MODULE 
line 162 mode = DEVFS_MODE

Check for devfs_fs_kernel.h

# ls /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-`uname -m`/include/linux/devfs_fs_kernel.h
No such file or directory

If you do not have the devfs_fs_kernel.h file, just create a blank file.

# touch /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-`uname -m`/include/linux/devfs_fs_kernel.h

Before we run the make command I like to modify the Makefile and remove the `name -r` bit. Replace it with the real name of your kernel.

# make -C /usr/src/linux SUBDIRS=$PWD
# modules
# make install
# depmod -a
# modprobe imon_vfd

Now check to make sure the lcd device has been created.

# ls /dev/lcd0
/dev/lcd0

LCDproc 0.4.5 for imon

This is the most recent stable version of LCDproc together with the iMON patch.
Prerequisites:
You must have the kernel source or headers in /usr/src/linux that exactly match your running kernel.
Make sure you have the autoconf and automake packages installed.
Make sure you have ncurses-devel installed.
Install the standalone iMON VFD driver.

Installation:

Download LCDproc from here

# tar xvzf lcdproc-0.4.5-imon.tgz 
# cd lcdproc-0.4.5-imon
# aclocal; autoheader; autoconf; automake -a 
# ./configure
# make
# make install (as root) 
# cp LCDd.conf /etc

Now add an entry for the imon_vfd so it will be loaded at boot time.

# echo "/sbin/modprobe imon_vfd" >> /etc/sysconfig/modules/lirc.modules

Finally add LCDd to the rc.local file so that it is started at boot time.

# echo "/usr/local/sbin/LCDd &" >> /etc/rc.local

Lastly be sure to enable the option for LCD output in the MythTV options menu.

There has to be an easier way I thought, and I have been searching for a long time. I have seen a lot of people complaining about the same thing but no real solutions. So I decided to do some digging and that is when I discovered filters and categories. However I could not find any documentation out there.

To begin I should first describe my setup. I have inside my main video directory two subdirectories, Movies and Television, were I keep the files respectively. The problem I had was that in the Video Manager all these files appeared in one giant list. This made it next to impossible to navigate through the list to find a recently added movie to update.

The first step in this was to create the categories. To do this go into the Video Manager and then select any video file and edit its metadata. Here, select the category and create one for each sub directory you have. For me, I created two categories, tv and movies. Once these are created exit back out of the Video Manager.

Now the next step would be to manually go through all 1000+ files updating the metadata, setting the category to the appropriate value. Initially I started doing this, but after the first 100 or so, I realized there had to be an easier way. And there is, not only is it more accurate but its way easier. What is it, how do you do it? Well let me tell you. I decided to do a mass update on the Video database.

Thats right, with just a few cleverly executed sql statements all this could be done for me, fast and efficient. The first thing we need to do, is find out the ID of the categories. So the proper sql statement to do this is:

SELECT * FROM videocategory

This gives me the following result:

intid	category
1 	tv
2 	movie

Thats pretty simple and all we really need, to do the mass update. So my next step is to set the category to tv for everything I have in the Television directory. To do that all I have to do is run the following sql statement:

UPDATE videometadata SET category=1 WHERE filename LIKE ('%Television%')

Notice that the category value is the intid value from our previous sql statement. Also notice the percent before and after Television. I did this because it doesn’t matter where you have your video directory mounted, or named it will work regardless. Be careful with this, with my setup Television only appears in the pathname for my tv shows, and does not exist elsewhere. If you are not 100% sure of your file structure, change the first percent to the entire path. So for me this would be ‘/video/videos/Television%’. Once that is done, repeat for as many subdirectories and categories as you have, changing the category and filename as appropriate to fit your needs.

Now its time to go back into the Video Manager and setup a default view. A default view only shows files based on category, which we just setup. By default the view is set to ALL and if you are happy with that, you can skip this step. I wanted my default view to be movies, since those are the ones I like to keep updated. Never ever set your default view to “Unknown”. If you do the Video Manager will be useless until you add a new file. I at least could not find a way to switch views when there is nothing in the list.

To set the default view, select any file and then select “Filter Display” near the bottom of the menu. Here change the category to whatever you want the default to be, for me this was movies. Then go to the bottom and click “Save as default”. This is also how you can switch between views. So if you want to see everything with the category tv, select tv as the category and then select Done.

So now with everything organized into categories, I can easily update newly added movies by changing my view to unknown. Presto, only newly added files are listed, which should be a much easier list to deal with. Now just update the imdb info and change the category to the appropriate value, and your finished. Its just that easy.

I also know some people are going to say, you could have reduced that sql statement into just one using a sub-select. Well yes I know, but since sub-selects are fairly new to mysql I decided its best to show all the steps. Besides its only 1 tiny query, that will work for everyone, so who cares.

I have also been thinking about how to automate this process, and may build something for mythweb. So if you would like something like that, please give me some encouraging words to help get me motivated. If anyone has any ideas or tips on how to improve this process let me know. Lord knows I would appreciate those as well.

Enjoy!

I’ve been secretly working late into the night for the past couple of days attempting to update my system for this release. But I kept running into problems.

First apt-get would fail to dist-upgrade my system, as would yum. Each would fail on different dependancies. For most of it I would have to use yum to fix the apt-get dependancies, and vice versa.

After most of that non-sense was outta the way. I did a apt-get update, and everything seemed to be going ok. That’s when I noticed something that sent shivers down my spine. MythTV was being updated! “Oh no” I thought, I’m not ready. But it was too late.

I quickly shut down the backend, and the frontend hoping to recover this mess somehow. When the update was finished, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. I fired up the backend and it loaded ok. The proper next step would of been to run mythtv-setup, but my system auto loaded the frontend. Hey it loaded!

Best part is, everything works. All my recordings are there, the frontend looks good, my video’s play no problem.

All in all, things seemed to work out fine in the end.

[update] I lied, the frontend didn’t start right up. In fact as usually X wouldn’t start. I’ve been down this road so many times I knew right what to do. I grabbed the latest nvidia driver and reinstalled. Presto, the frontend loaded. This happens everytime I update my mythbox. Its happened so much I forgot I had to do it lastnight.