Well that was stupid…easy MythTV fixes
Just a real quick tip for anyone having problems watching live TV or recording shows in MythTV. After a fairly fresh install I could not watch live TV. My screen would go black for a second and I would be kicked back to the main menu. I also was not able to record shows. The recording would show up on the schedule but nothing would happen when the time to record would actually come. So my tip is check your log files!!! They are stored in /var/log/mythtv (at least they are in ubuntu). You should have mythbackend.log*, mythwelcom.log, and mythfrontend.log* in that directory. The log files are incremented making the highest number the oldest file and the one without a number your newest file. So check the newest file first.
As for my problem I checked my frontend log first, but I didn’t see much information besides the fact that I changed skins. So I decided to check the backend. Here is what I found.
2008-11-23 10:26:22.432 TFW, Error: Opening file '/media/mythtv/recordings/1941_20081123102621.mpg'.
eno: Permission denied (13)
2008-11-23 10:26:22.436 TVRec(1) Error: RingBuffer '/media/mythtv/recordings/1941_20081123102621.mpg' not open...
2008-11-23 10:26:22.437 TVRec(1) Error: CreateLiveTVRingBuffer() failed
2008-11-23 10:26:22.438 TVRec(1) Error: Failed to create RingBuffer 1
Now this may not be too obvious to most people but take a look at “Permission denied (13)”. DOH! I forgot to give my user permissions to the directory I set up to record my shows in (as well as my live TV folder).
sudo chmod 777 /media/mythtv/*
and now I am able to watch live TV and record whatever shows I feel like.
Just thought I would save you the hassle if this happens to you.
What kind of video card do you use? I have a ShuttleX box running Ubuntu with a PCI and AGP slot. I cannot figure what kind of card to get that would be compatible to run.
On my current machine I am using a integrated Intel GMA X3100. If you are not playing HD video you can easily get away with most integrated graphics but if you are planning on playing HD I would suggest using a Nvidia video card.
I am using my machine for HD and I easily got away with a FX5600 with a Pentium 4 3.0 HT processor. I find with MythTV you need more processor than you do video card because most of the time the processor needs to make up for where the video card driver is lacking. And lets face it, in Linux, almost every high end video card is not as supported as it is in Windows.