Tag: mythtv

One of the nicest features of MythVideo, is being able to store your collection of DVD’s on your hardrive.
From there, its a simple task of selecting the Video from the Video Gallery, and hitting play.

You can fetch all the Movie’s details from IMDB, including poster art and movie ratings.
This makes it much more convenient, and more useful than having to fetch the DVD from your collection to watch it.

The only downside that I can see, is that you’ll start to run out of disk space very quickly, as each movie will take up between 4GB and 8GB.

I faced a few challenges in getting this working, and I’m going to try shed as much light on this as possible. Continue reading Getting the Rip DVD part of MythVideo to work

In part of my quest to automate the startup of my MythTV, and in my quest for WAF (Wife approval factor), I’ve identified a few small issues that don’t seem terribly well documented anywhere.

I’m going to document them here, as clearly as I can.

This Howto contains a very simple startup script for automatically starting mythbackend on boot.

I’m using Debian lenny/testing, but this will apply to most Debian versions, and perhaps Ubuntu too.

You’ll need to create a file, lets call it /etc/init.d/mythbackend, with the following in it.

#!/bin/sh
# Start/stop/restart mythbackend
#
# Modification done by Benoit Beauchamp, based on rc.mysqld by
#
# Copyright 2003 Patrick J. Volkerding, Concord, CA
# Copyright 2003 Slackware Linux, Inc., Concord, CA
#
# This program comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
# You may redistribute copies of this program under the terms of the
# GNU General Public License.
#

# Start mythbackend:
myth_start() {
  if [ -x /usr/local/bin/mythbackend ]; then
    # If there is an old PID file (no mythbackend running), clean it up:
    if [ -r /var/run/mythbackend.pid ]; then
      if ! ps axc | grep mythbackend 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null ; then
        echo "Cleaning up old /var/run/mythbackend.pid."
        rm -f /var/run/mythbackend.pid
      fi
    fi
    /usr/local/bin/mythbackend -l /var/log/mythbackend.log -v important,general -p /var/run/mythbackend.pid -d
  fi
}

# Stop mythbackend:
myth_stop() {
  # If there is no PID file, ignore this request...
  if [ -r /var/run/mythbackend.pid ]; then
    killall mythbackend
  fi
}

# Restart mythbackend:
myth_restart() {
  myth_stop
  myth_start
}

case "$1" in
'start')
  myth_start
  ;;
'stop')
  myth_stop
  ;;
'restart')
  myth_restart
  ;;
*)
  echo "usage $0 start|stop|restart"
esac

Then you’ll have to set that file as executable

chmod +x /etc/init.d/mythbackend

Now, test it and make sure it does what its supposed to.
Make sure mythbackend isn’t running, and then try:

/etc/init.d/mythbackend start

Check to see if its running. If not, check all the paths in the script, if it is, hurray!

Now we need to add it to run on boot, and as a bonus, shutdown mythbackend properly on shutdown
We’ll do this the Debian Way ™

update-rc.d mythbackend defaults 90

And that should do it! Give your machine a reboot and see it mythbackend started on its own.