[mythtvnz] Turning off all jobs on backend

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 15 Mar 2014 12:46:27 +1300, you wrote:

>I have a weak little machine for a backend (I am waiting for the
>delivery of a better machine - but the old one died and I am using what
>I have got)
>
>So I have made /dev/null the programme for commercial flagging.  Is
>there a way to turn it off entirely in the backend?
>
>I had about 4 mythpreviewgen instances running.  How do I stop them?
>After restarting the backend process all mythpreviewgen instances
>stopped and the backend is going much better now!
>
>cheers
>Worik

Most of the jobs (including commercial flagging) are things you can
control - there are settings for jobs to be run and you can just turn
them off for each recording rule and in the template(s) for the
creation of new recording rules.  There are also general settings for
all user jobs in mythtv-setup (and mythweb?).  See here:

  http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User_Jobs

But mythpreviewgen is a special case - it is not a "job" and is run
directly by mythtv without any user options controlling it.  There
used to be a couple of settings in the settings table for it
("PlaybackPreview" and "HWAccelPlaybackPreview"), but the code that
uses them is commented out in my copy of the 0.27-fixes source code.
So the only option I can think of for preventing it from being run is
to find the executable (/usr/bin/mythpreviewgen in Mythbuntu) and
rename the file to something else, eg mythpreviewgen.original.  The
code that runs mythpreviewgen (in
mythtv/libs/libmythtv/previewgenerator.cpp) checks to see if it is
available and seems to log an error if it is not, but otherwise should
have no problem with it not being there.

However, if you install updates, the mythpreviewgen file will likely
be reinstalled every time that happens and you will need to rename it
again.