On Sunday I decided to revisit an old project of mine, ripping some VHS video tapes that aren’t on DVD. Since I was still rebuilding my box, I decided to install MythTV 0.21. I have to say that, with the short jaunt I had, it seems to have improved quite a bit. The best thing I saw was that there was a notice when starting up myth for the first time that it wanted to upgrade my database schema (I had created it from an old 0.20 version). That is a major step in the right direction. The whole philosophy of letting a *client* make changes to a *server* is just absolutely absurd, even moreso when the client does it automatically. That has caused a lot of pain in mythtv users (myself included), when you want to test a new version on a client and it upgrades your backend, breaking it completely. Whoops.
Anyway, one annoying thing I ran into was that since Myth’s SVN servers were down for part of the day, I couldn’t even install the program since there was no way to get a snapshot. Having ebuilds in the tree that use SVN to install it directly has always been an annoyance to me, so yesterday I finally ripped that out and replaced them with actual tarballs. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while. Doing it for the myth plugins is not as simple a process, but I’ll get it done. I’m also going to merge the mythtv-themes and mythtv-themes-extra packages into one (also, if you’d like to get new themes in there, just file a bug!). There’s no real reason those should be separated.
I also, ironically enough, had issues setting up IVTV. It wasn’t really a pain, it’s just been sooo long since I played with it I completely forgot how to do it. Heh. I had to recompile my kernel about 3 times before I finally got it right.
I know it’s a bit confusing why there is both a media-tv/ivtv and media-tv/ivtv-utils in the tree, and here’s the official word: media-tv/ivtv is the kernel modules that need to be built for anything before 2.6.26. As of 2.6.26, the IVTV drivers are in the mainline kernel, so you only need ivtv-utils. There ya go. Simple. I updated the description and ewarning of ivtv-utils to hopefully make that slightly more clear, though it may be in user’s best interests if we just added an IVTV ebuild for 1.3.0 that also pulled in the utilities. Or merge them back in one package. I dunno. I’ll think of something.
I also pushed the ivtv-utils-1.3.0 ebuild to stable, since that’s pretty shameless it’s been unstable for so long. Ah, well, I’m behind. Perpetually, it seems. The fact is I gave up on recording TV with Linux a long time ago since I discovered the magical world of Tivo. And even now, today, I don’t even use that. I just watch DVDs I’ve ripped. That’s the reason the category doesn’t get much TLC from me these days.
But, installing Myth again has gotten me fired up about fixing the bugs and getting things up to date. I’ll be poking at it some more in the coming days, and I’ve already fixed a few more things since then. We’ll get some new snapshots in the tree and some kinks worked out for ya. Happy day.
Edit: We decided to just revert media-tv/ivtv to unstable and only support the newer kernel and media-tv/ivtv-utils instead. Also see this forum post.