Argh!!!

Quoth Zap2it Labs today:

For several years we have offered a free TV listings service to hobbyists for their own personal, noncommercial use. In October of 2004 we posted here an open letter saying the future of Zap2it Labs was at risk because of certain growing misuses of the Zap2it Labs data. Unfortunately this misuse has continued and grown. These misuses, combined with other business factors have led to the decision to discontinue Zap2it Labs effective September 1, 2007.

Doh! I’m not sure what this means for MythTV, but at least there’s a few months to figure it out. Hopefully users won’t have to go back to the dark days of screen scraping.

I wonder what the “misuses” were.

Renewed my Zap2it listings for MythTV…

Your subscription has been extended to 2007/09/10

Status: Active
Subscription Expires: 2007/09/10
Subscription Plan: Gold

Yay!

After emerging MythMusic on my brother’s (soon to be finished) MythTV rig, I got the following error at the end of the run:

* Regenerating GNU info directory index... * Processed 127 info files; 1 errors install-info: No such file or directory for /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

After a little hunting, I was able to find the solution on the Gentoo forums (thread). Basically, it’s just an old symbolic link that is not needed. The solution is to simply unlink it:

# unlink /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

Seems to have worked.

It’s that time of year…

Your subscription has been extended to 2007/03/10

Status: Active
Subscription Expires: 2007/03/10
Subscription Plan: Gold

Nice. Zap2it rules.

I extended my Zap2it Labs subscription for MythTV again today…

Your subscription has been extended to 2006/12/10

Status: Active
Subscription Expires: 2006/12/10
Subscription Plan: Gold

No survey this time, just hit the submit button.

Sometime over the weekend the power supply in my MythTV box went south. It didn’t completely die, but the fans started to sound really bad. So I figured it would be a good idea to power it down until I could swap in a spare.

Tonight I finally put the spare in (an old Enermax 431W) and powered it back up:

Unfortunately the new one is a bit louder than the original stock Antec power supply (which was almost silent). But it is nice to have Myth back in action.

After a very long time, I finally decided it would be a good idea to upgrade MythTV. In the course of the upgrade, I ended up switching from XFree86 to Xorg. Thankfully I was able to just copy over my old XF86Config file to /etc/x11/xorg.conf and it pretty much just worked. I did get the following keyboard errors (just like Matt said I would):

(EE) Failed to load module "Keyboard" (module does not exist) (EE) No Input driver matching `Keyboard' No core keyboard

The fix is to just change the keyboard driver in the config from Keyboard to kbd:

Identifier "Keyboard1" Driver "kbd"

Next, Mythfrontend was failing to update the database schema, claiming there were duplicate columns. To make a long story short, I used the advice given on the mythtv-dev list from 2004 and manually dropped some columns using phpMyAdmin:

ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN lastmodified; ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN filesize;

For what it’s worth, I didn’t have to drop the ‘oldprogram’ column mentioned in the post.

After that, everything seemed to work fine…

I didn’t even lose my old recordings or programming schedules in the upgrade. I’m shocked!

Spent a little time with my copy of Foundations of Python Network Programming tonight, learning how to work with sockets. I run MythTV at home, so I thought writing a Python script to talk to the mythbackend server would be a good little test case to try.

The problem is that there is basically no documentation for the MythTV network protocol other than the source code itself. Issac doesn’t seem to have any interest in documenting it, and when I asked about it in the #mythtv chan on Freenode tonight, I got a rather blunt reply… “no.” That’s unfortunate.

I was able to find a couple of pages that were helpful, including the WinMyth project’s protocol page, but there is no definitive reference available.

Sure, I could run tcpdump or ethereal and sniff out the protocol as I try different commands, but that’s going to be a lot of work. And even if I do figure it out, each new revision of the protocol (currently at v15) will break anything I write. I’d then have to go through and try to figure out the protocol all over again.

Anyway, I was able to get my app to talk to the server and send/receive information. Here’s an example of the initial handshake with the server:

Creating socket... done. Connecting to 192.168.1.7 on port 6543... Connected from ('192.168.1.5', 1761) Connected to ('192.168.1.7', 6543) 20 MYTH_PROTO_VERSION 8 12 ACCEPT[]:[]8
So that’s kind of cool, but it’ll take a lot more work to make it really useful.

Update: Some more protocol information over at MythTV.info.