MythTV News slowly crawling back to life
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If you have visited mythtvnews.com within the last 28 hours, you will have noticed that things have been all wrong. It all started with an email from my hosting provider. They had shut down mythtvnews.com because it was using too many resources on the server which was shared with other websites.
Although bringing down the server is pretty cool, it was also a problem that I had to do something about.
So now mythtvnews.com has been moved to a new hosting provider. It is still shared, but I have this silly notion that since I am paying more now, the server must also be able to handle more traffic. 
The site doesn’t look like before, and I will try to fix that over the next couple of days.
Mythbuntu 8.10 Alpha 6 - be careful
Mythbuntu 8.10 Alpha 6 was released nine days ago. Normally testing alpha software is risky business, at least for your data which you should always backup before the testing begins.
But this time it seems that even hardware is at risk. As Engadget reports, there is a bug in some of the Ubuntu Alpha’s which will potentially overwrite the MAC adress of Intel network parts. It seems to specifically affect 82566 and 82567 based LAN parts (ich8 and ich9).
New in Mythbuntu 8.10 Alpha 6 is:
- Lots of bug fixes across the board in Ubiquity and Mythbuntu Control Centre.
- Bug fixes for MythTV
- General bug fixes
MythTV covered by Systm on Revision3
If you want to hear about your options when building a MythTV system, you can check out episode 64 of Systm on Revision3.
Actually the show aired back in August, but I only just realized right now.
Setting up Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard for MythTV
Frequent readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of this Logitech keyboard. And now on the MythTV wiki there is a new page describing how you can get the most out of your diNovo keyboard, including how to set up those extra buttons and the “mouse track-pad”.
Movie poster downloads from IMDB lowres? - the fix is here
If you are using MythVideo, you know that you can download metadata and movie posters from IMDB.com. Apparently the layout on IMDB has been changed recently. This breaks the download code in MythTV. It doesn’t break it completely - you will typically get a poster with a lower resolution.
The fix has already been checked in, so if you are running trunk, you should be OK. Since the download is contained in a perl script it should be pretty easy to fix. You can find the patch here and a discussion of the problem here.
XMLTV 0.5.53 released
This is a small release. The changes can be seen here:
- tv_grab_is: minor fix to midnight handling
- tv_grab_na_dd: add auto-config config file option
- tv_grab_na_icons: adjust to site changes
- tv_grab_ar: now supports 2 data sources
- tv_grab_uk_rt: improve episode numbering
- tv_grab_huro: fix –offset problem and data source changes
- tv_grab_eu_epgdata: added category support, stop times, age-rating, more!
- *NOTE* fix to _eu_epggdata episode num will break duplicate detection in MythTV
- tv_grab_dk - non-working, removed
- tv_grab_dk_dr - new grabber for Denmark!
- tv_grab_is: Islandic grabber returns
- And of some bugfixes and polish.
MythNetTV - release 5
Whoa. Not long ago I reported on release 3 of MythNetTV and now release 5 is here. According to the developer:
Release 5 is by far the best tested release of MythNetTV yet, with both unit tests and several users working quite closely with me to resolve problems found in the wild.
The combined change log of release 4 and 5 is quite long, so I’ll just mention a few items and you can check out the complete lists yourself.
- There is now a users mailing list at http://lists.stillhq.com/listinfo.cgi/mythnettv-stillhq.com
- The command line has changed slightly
- Added video/msvideo to the enclosure whitelist
- Transcode avc1 videos, because some need it
- Abandon downloading after 3 failed attempts (you can configure the number)
- Detect stuck bittorrent downloads
MythBuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 has been released
This is based on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) which has a release date of October 30th. The release notes mentions that:
- The guided partitoner in the installer will now default the recordings partition to XFS instead of EXT3.
- Lots of bug fixes across the board in Ubiquity and Mythbuntu Control Centre.
- Several MythTV bugs that were sent upstream got fixed.
Because it is now based on Ubuntu 8.10, it includes the 2.6.26-5.15 kernel and X.Org server 1.5.
Dark Knight Batman theme
I’m going to see Dark Knight tonight, so I just thought I would share this new MythTV theme with you. It is 4:3 based unfortunately.
Nice looking frontend candidate from Dell
Dell just recently announced the Studio Hybrid PC which actually looks quite nice. The specs are nice too.