[mythtvnz] Freeview EPG Best Practice?

[Nick Rout]

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Hadley Rich <hads at nice.net.nz> wrote:
> On Thursday 29 May 2008 10:12:09 Nick Rout wrote:
>> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I'll confirm that your mini howto for xmltv seems to have worked, I'll
>> > check what has been added to the database tonight. Adding the xmltv
>> > package certainly made a difference to what is available in the video
>> > sources screen of mythtv-setup!
>>
>> How do I check that mythfilldatabase has in fact run and added to the
>> schedule? Apart from looking in the EPG and seeing how far in the
>> future it goes?
>>
>> I can't find any reference in /var/log/mythtv/*
>
> There's a couple of ways;
>
> http://frog.nice.net.nz:6544/
>
> http://frog.nice.net.nz/mythweb/status
>
> (where frog.nice.net.nz is your backend)
>
> SELECT * FROM settings WHERE value = 'mythfilldatabaseLastRunStatus';
>
> Or run mythfilldatabase and look for lines that say how many programs were
> updated in the console output.
>

OK well theres two more things that need to be added into a howto, so
I will record them here:

1. You need to set mythfilldatabase to run automatically. Its the last
page in Setup|General. (that was a D'OH moment)

2. In mythbuntu I ran into this problem: mythbuntu runs the backend as
user mythtv and the frontend as the user you create on installation
(in my case 'nick'). When you set up the grabber in mythtv-setup, it
puts the config file in /home/nick/.mythtv/Freeview.xmltv (where nick
is the user and Freeview is the video source name you allocated).

The trouble is that the backend running as mythtv does not look in
nick's home directory, it looks in its own, ending up with an error
512 (FAILED: xmltv returned error code 512.) when mythfilldatabase is
run. There are useful logs in /var/log/mythbackend.log which told me
there was a critical failure in that the grabber was not configured
(although I knew it was).

The solution is to make a link from the one in nick's home directory like:

cd ~mythtv/.mythtv
ln -s /home/nick/.mythtv/Freeview.xmltv

(may need sudo applied depending who you are at the time, the
Freeview.xmltv seems to be readable by world, so no need to change
permissions).

This seems to be a mythbuntu bug which I will report in due course, if
no one else has. I am grateful to the contributors to this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=624517