Apparently, mc2xml, the software package that downloads and xml-formats the electronic program guide information to my MythTV installation, stopped working a couple of days ago… EPG data is empty after tonight 
The original site is down, and I checked a couple of forums. They all point to a new site where you can simply download the new package, and start downloading again… luckily…
TV Vlaanderen broadcastst Eén HD and others. Apparently Eén HD is only 720p where others (like Discovery Channel) is broadcasted in 1080i, which is a noticeable difference, no?
The reason, someone told me, is that Eén HD on Telenet HD is actually 720p too, because Telenet just uses 720p for all its HD transmissions…
I’ll look into it further, don’t take this as ‘the thruth’, but use it as a guidance to be cautious and to not just believe everything Telenet tells you 
Well,
after some testing and trying, it looks like the TechnoTrend S2-3200 is working quite well with MythTV 0.22, though I don’t have or use the DVB-S2 stuff yet… no dual LNB, no HD equipment, just testing for the future.
My Backend was running Ubuntu 9.04 with Mythtv 0.22 packages, which did find the card, but couldn’t use it.
I installed a test machine on an similar motherboard/config and used Ubuntu 9.10, and the card was detected. Switching the TVV smartcard over to the S2-3200 CAM/CI, I was able to scan and later tune in to the TVV encrypted channels!
Bottom line: Ubuntu 9.10, MythTV 0.22 and TT S2-3200 with TVV smartcard: working out of the box!
Update: Sander Van den Bosch has the same setup (kind of, also using the S2-3200 with a TVV subscription). He had an issue receiving the encrypted channels, and he asked for a little information (the reason I installed this testsetup and eventually did the upgrade on my ‘production’ backend). I tried, and he ‘copied’ what was successful for me, but he didn’t succeed in getting the same results.
In the end, he found out that his CAM (original TVV CAM) had an ‘old’ firmware, which wasn’t compatible… It seems my 2 CAM’s (also original TVV CAM modules) are ‘newer’… He used a Windows XP laptop to update the firmware, and succeeded in receiving the TVV encrypted channels! He was able to tune into Eén HD successfully!
Another happy MythTV – TV Vlaanderen user 
I had a major issue at home with my MythTV backend server… and off course, right before I was implementing a decent backup strategy.
I wanted to move to a Raid5 solution to increase speed and disk capacity, but wanted to do an Ubuntu 9.04 reinstall, move all data and config over from the old single-disk install, and keep running on settings and recordings already in the database. At the same time I wanted to upgrade the backend to Ubuntu 9.10, and use the newer MythTV 0.22 packages.
My install went pretty fine, using software Raid 5 on 3 disks I still had lying around (WD Raid edition SATA2), formatting the 500GB usable space as an ext4 volume, and installation of MythTV and other related packages was done without any issues. I started copying from the old single-disk setup to the new soft-Raid volume, and was almost done migrating. The configuration of MythTV through mythtv-setup couldn’t find my Technotrend S-1500 DVB-S card I used for months now, without any issues on Ubuntu 9.04… so I needed to have a look at that… but I even didn’t get to that point!
All of a sudden, the session over ssh was having some big issues, not finding commands, giving errors etc… Returning to the console, a lot of raid error messages were displayed, so a reboot and recover/rebuild was needed… the machine didn’t take any commands anymore… even a ‘halt’ or ‘reboot’ didn’t work…
When powering down and back up, the machine hung at the kernel loading, giving me a serious error not retrieving md0 anymore… Panic!!!
I disconnected my original disk, booted a Live session of the Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 cd (ext4 is better supported in 9.10 than it is in 9.04), and tried almost everything I know and could find about retrieving data from a faulty software raid volume… to no result…
I decided to do a fresh install on ext3 instead of ext4 with the Ubuntu 9.04 distro, to resolve the card-support issues I was having with Ubuntu 9.10, which worked out pretty fine again.
Card was detected, and scanning gave the results I expected.
I hooked up the original single-disk install SATA drive, and wanted to start copying the database, recording and settings files, but I wasn’t able to mount any of the original partitions on the disk. After some looking around on the disk, I found all partitions vanished! The disk was empty! Even more panic!!!!
Testdisk, an open source partition and data recovering program, had me regain access and information of the recordings partition, and I immediately made a copy of the data to my backup-server, but still no /etc or /var/lib/mysql to be retrieved to get access to the original database and settings… So I need to start from scratch, and convert the old recordings to standard mpg or avi files, so I can at least play them without info etc… That’s not the end of the world!
Now, the MythTV 0.22 upgrade part was going to be the hardest…, or so I thought.
In Ubuntu 9.04, the 0.22 MythTV packages aren’t available through the normal repositories…
I searched in google, and eventually found a page on the MythBuntu site that describes the necessary steps and packages needed to upgrade a 9.04 (or even a 8.10) Ubuntu distro with the MythTV 0.22 release…
The MythTV backend server was easily upgraded through the use of the MythBuntu Repositories package
After installing this deb file through dpkg -i, going into aptitude and doing an update/upgrade, the MythTV packages were upgraded to 0.22 automatically.
I tried connecting with my 0.21 based frontend machines (which run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS), but found that the database structure was changed in such a way the 0.21 cannot contact and use the 0.22 database structure… An upgrade to 0.22 on these machines is needed as well.
I installed the same MythBuntu Repositories package package on these 2 machines, and found it could only install the already installed 0.21 version. I needed to upgrade the distro to 8.10 or higher… I decided to go all the way up to 9.10…
The standard AMD based pc which resides in my living room and is hooked onto the beamer, is the easiest… if anything goes wrong, I can just reinstall it with 9.10 from scratch…, so I started with this one before messing up the MythBuntu 8.04 installation on the AppleTV in the bedroom (which is a lot more work to do a complete (re)installation).
Though not supported, I changed over the /etc/apt/sources.list hardy listings to karmic, and did an apt-get update followed by an apt-get upgrade and an apt-get dist-upgrade… I met a lot of errors installing or configuring packages, and needed to uninstall a lot of packages through aptitude, but eventually using apt-get dselect-upgrade and another apt-get upgrade and dist-upgrade, the machine eventually ended up booting fine with Ubuntu 9.10.
I installed the MythTV 0.22 packages through aptitude and ended up configuring the connection to the newly installed database on the backend. Two minutes , and some screen adjustments later, I was looking at LiveTV through the new 0.22 MythTV release!
For the AppleTV, I will follow the same things, but I’m making a full rsync of the complete filesystem first. If anything goes wrong, I can just rsync it back over it, and have the machine working again…
Now I just need to convert all recordings to a viewable format (mpg or avi) and change all the filenames so I know what recording is in what file… that will take another weekend to do so, I think.
First impressions of 0.22: faster, slicker, … but I didn’t see that many adjustments or changes… (except from the new theme stuff, which was the biggest change announced off course)
Next on the list: BACKUPS!!!! I have a backupserver giving me 2,3TB through NFS of which still 1,2TB is free, why wouldn’t I use it??? :p
More to follow later…
At least now, I’m up to date again…
I’ve been running a beta version of Ubuntu 9.10 for over two weeks now, with mixed feelings.
Updater tool isn’t really consequent about updating my machine, making me check updates again after installing them over and over again.
The overall performance of the machine, bootup times etc are great, but when loading Gnome, it always freezes when gathering my deskbar icons and settings, so there must be something wrong.
FPM2, the password manager I love and use, doesn’t “copy” the passwords anymore, making me have to ‘edit’ the entry, let it display the password, select and Ctrl-Ins it to copy it and use it in another application…
Firefox is version 3.5 by default now, but Astaro pre 7.5 firewall Config GUI’s have an issue with their drag-’n-drop functionality with 3.5, so I needed to get it out and install 3.0 again, which ran quite OK.
Now the best part is: I just received a ‘partial upgrade’ notification, letting me know MythTV has an upgrade waiting to 0.22… Nice!!!
I’ll be testing it with my 0.21 backend, and maaaaaybe, if I feel very lucky and adventurous, I might install it on the backend machine I have running here too…
I’ll keep you posted on my findings and the new things I find in 0.22 that are really worth mentioning!.
Mythtv is still advancing, though it took a while before 0.22 really got usable, it seems, but hey! I’m patient, I know they’re working hard to make it the best Media Center Software solution there is.
Keep up the good work! MythTV rocks!
I recently had a changeover to TV Vlaanderen, as you might have read in my other posts.
Not sure if it was related, but I had some issues watching and recording programs, while the DVB Broadcasted EPG function was on.
I searched around for a decent solution that could pull the EPG data from the web, and as the good old xmltv grabbers for Belgium don’t work anymore, or at least they didn’t in june/july because of the source website blocking the grabbers from getting the info from their webpages, I stumbled upon mc2xml.
I got it all to work thanks to a script, I can’t remember where I got it from. Normal decency obliges me to post back my additions or changes (if at all…, don’t remember that part anymore either), which you can find under the seperate page EPG configs and scripts in my pages section.
Good luck and if you have additions, changes, remarks, … please let me know so I can adjust or complete my configs and post them back for others to read here.
I’ve been struggling through several setups to get TV Vlaanderen pay-channels on my MythTV setup.
Apparently, sometime last year they went from the old encryption system to Seca3, which isn’t easy to get up and running..
I tried the NewCS and Opensasc-ng way on an Ubuntu 8.04 using several guides, and had minor successes: The newcs seemed to work as it was reading my TVV smartcard located in the USB Smargo card reader, and OpenSasc-ng was configured to get the info out of the camserver, but I never succeeded to get the channels appearing in MythTV, leaving a ‘LAMc’ notification in the frontend, at best…
Finally, I tried with a TechnoTrend S-1500 with its CI, and without NewCS and OpenSasc-ng, the image appeared, no config needed, just plug the smartcard in the CAM that TV Vlaanderen delivered, and put it in the CI.
So, for all you out there struggling with the same issues: TechnoTrend S-1500 with CI does the job, no problems whatsoever.
Now I only need to get the EPG running, it seems that it is only getting partial data from the DVB-S stream…
Maybe mc2xml might work now?
Any help with it is welcome…
Telenet decided to, as of today, change about 90% of their Free To Air TV Channels on the Cable (the old In.Di network) to encrypted, which makes about all my TV channels unusable.
On the website of In.Di, nothing has changed, and they do not mention anything about any upcoming or already-made changes on the network. More info about the changes can be found here.
I already have about all the needed hardware for a changeover to TV Vlaanderen, just need DVB-S(2) cards, CI/CAM interfaces and a TV Vlaanderen subscription, which will be completed later this week, and the hardware installation will be installed this weekend…
I will post all information about the changeover to TV Vlaanderen when I have more info.
An updated channels list (both current In.Di and upcoming TVV) will be posted in the designated area on this blog.
When I wanted to watch TV this evening, I could get my frontend to connect to my backend.
It said something about ‘backend not running?’, which I knew it was…
Checking the backend server, the / partition was at 100% usage, and I only had about 200MB free on /myth (out of 320GB)
I quickly found out that the /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log was about 1.8GB (almost half of the entire partition size!)
Almost all lines in the logfile were like these:
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
When tailing the logfile and restarting the myth-backend service I noticed that it said something about the database not being opened correctly:
2009-03-09 19:51:24.754 DB Error (KickDatabase):
Query was:
SELECT NULL;
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
2009-03-09 19:52:45.217 Using runtime prefix = /usr
2009-03-09 19:52:45.220 DBUserName is not set in mysql.txt
2009-03-09 19:52:45.221 DBPassword is not set in mysql.txt
2009-03-09 19:52:45.221 DBName is not set in mysql.txt
2009-03-09 19:52:45.222 Empty LocalHostName.
2009-03-09 19:52:45.223 Using localhost value of barabas
2009-03-09 19:52:45.240 New DB connection, total: 1
2009-03-09 19:52:45.251 Unable to connect to database!
2009-03-09 19:52:45.255 Driver error was [1/1045]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to connect
Database error was:
Access denied for user 'bram'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2009-03-09 19:52:45.309 DB Error (KickDatabase):
Query was:
SELECT NULL;
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
................................................................................
2009-03-09 19:52:47.679 UPnPautoconf() - No UPnP backends found
2009-03-09 19:52:47.680 No UPnP backends found
No UPnP backends found
Would you like to configure the database connection now? [yes]
[console is not interactive, using default 'yes']
Database host name: [localhost]
[console is not interactive, using default 'localhost']
Should I test connectivity to this host using the ping command? [yes]
[console is not interactive, using default 'yes']
Database non-default port: [0]
[console is not interactive, using default '0']
Database name:
[console is not interactive, using default 'QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
Looking up this error, I found in one of the Ubuntu forum entries, that somehow an empty mysql.txt is being used instead of the normal one in /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt
A quick
find / -name mysql.txt
showed me a mysql.txt file in every user’s .mythtv folder, like /root/.mythtv, /home/bram/.mythtv and /home/mythtv/.mythtv
The last one contained no usable data, it was an empty default example config, stating nothing but DBHostName = etc… no usable data.
I quickly removed all mysql.txt files which weren’t in /etc/mythtv and restarted the services: the Backend ran without any odd messages or errors:
2009-03-09 19:54:04.983 Using runtime prefix = /usr
2009-03-09 19:54:04.986 Empty LocalHostName.
2009-03-09 19:54:04.986 Using localhost value of barabas
2009-03-09 19:54:05.004 New DB connection, total: 1
2009-03-09 19:54:05.013 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: localhost
2009-03-09 19:54:05.015 Closing DB connection named 'DBManager0'
2009-03-09 19:54:05.017 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: localhost
2009-03-09 19:54:05.019 New DB connection, total: 2
2009-03-09 19:54:05.033 Connected to database 'mythconverg' at host: localhost
2009-03-09 19:54:05.036 Current Schema Version: 1214
Starting up as the master server.
Problem Solved!
Ever since the last changes on the In.Di network somewhere in december, één and Canvas have been stuttering from time to time. That makes it hard to watch shows like De Slimste Mens Ter Wereld, which is on every Monday to Thursday night…
The stuttering makes the image freeze for about half a second to a second or so… and comes with parts of the image scattered, discoloured, misplaced, partially frozen, …
I checked and followed things like the syslog, mythbackend and other log files, but nothing looks like the signal is interrupted or contains errors.
The fact is, it looks like it is only happening with één and canvas, but mostly when watching (recordings too) shows on één…
As één and canvas (both the SD, HD and the ‘+’ channels) are all ‘doubled’ (channel 1101 through 1109 and again 1161 through 1169), I tried both of the sets, but they both have the same issue…
Don’t know why or where the stuttering comes from….
If anyone has an idea (or where to look…), let me know…