Mytharchive blues

Mytharchive is a MythTV tool that allows you to create DVDs from recorded programs. In theory, anyway.

I spent a frustrating weekend trying to create a DVD from recorded episodes of "Planet Earth"...what a fiasco!

• First frustration: a "skiplist" is not the same as a "cutlist". So, even if commercials get skipped while watching a recording in MythTV, that isn't enough to ensure that they will be skipped when creating the DVD as well. This distinction seems really unnecessary from a user's point of view. Anyway, you have to watch the recording in MythTV, then press "E" to enter Edit mode, then press "Z" to turn the skiplist into a cutlist.
  
  
• First attempt to use Mytharchive: After navigating a really disorganized and confusing multipage setup interface (par for the course in MythTV land), I get to the actual execution screen, which displays a Log of the activity. The log remains totally blank. No indication of what's happening, what's going wrong. Nothing. After some googling, I discover that this happens if there are some lock files from a previous mytharchive run hanging around. Once these are deleted, it will work correctly. Would be nice if Mytharchive would actually tell me that these lock files are preventing it from executing! Hey, maybe even offer to delete them for me. Crazy, I know.
  
  
• Second attempt to use Mytharchive: Unspecified error when trying to run ffmpeg. Googling led to this thread. Basically, I needed to replace some obscure support packages with "unstripped" variants (whatever the heck that means).
  
  
• Third attempt to use Mytharchive: After the above fix, I finally get a burned DVD...but it's unplayable in every DVD player I have access to, except my Macbook Pro. Even MythTV is unable to play its own DVD.
  
  
• Fourth attempt: I copied the ISO image from #3 over to my Macbook Pro, and used the OS X Disk Utility program to burn it to disc. This DVD is playable on all my computers (Mac, Windows and Ubuntu), but not on my relatively new Sony DVD player (which complains about "region resrictions", even though the disc is region-free.
  
  
• Fifth attempt: I tried to use devede to create the DVD ISO image, but gave up in extreme frustration after a few hours spent trying to get mythtranscode to produce copies of the video files with the commercials stripped out. This process is so arcane and unnecessarily difficult, it just makes me want to throw my machine out the window just thinking about it. Really, really, really user-unfriendly.
  

So, I'm stuck. I can make DVDs that can be played on computers, but not on my DVD player, but this process requires two computers and is far more hands-on than I was hoping for. My God, is it too much to ask that I just insert a blank DVD, tell it which recordings I want, and press "GO"? Apparently, yes. Yes it is.

And I didn't even get to the fact that all of the menu themes look like monkey-butt, and that the videos seem to suffer from really bad interlacing artifacts...ay, carumba!

Bye-bye iPhoto!

It was the last straw.

We've been using iPhoto on a mac laptop to manage our rather large photo collection for years. It's nice software for "average" use, but we seem to have outgrown it. We want to store photos on our NAS drive so that they will be accessible from any machine. However, because we have two versions of iLife on our macs, this is a bit problematic. It's also become annoying that iPhoto seems so slow to open and interact with sometimes.

The last straw came the other day, when we opened iPhoto and saw...nothing. Zero photos. I quickly went to the "Originals" folder (hidden inside the locked "iPhoto Library" directory), and was relieved to see all of our photos were still intact. However, I could not convince iPhoto of this fact. As far as it was concerned, we had never taken a digital photo in our lives. I tried googling a few fixes, but then I decided I'd just had enough.

I've installed Digikam on the mythbox, and we'll use that to manage our photo collection from now on. I haven't used it in years, and I really liked it back then, so I'm excited to see what the devs have been up to in the meantime.

By the way, installing digikam was not a no-brainer. A simple sudo aptitude install digikam failed because the normal digikam package is incompatible with KDE-4.2. I followed these instructions to add a PPa repository for new Digikam-0.10 packages that are compatible with KDE-4.2. That's life on the cutting edge, I guess.

Disk full!

Last night, the root partition on my mythbox reached 100% capacity. I've been dreading this moment, because the partition is rather small (4.6 GB) and has been more than 80% full for a while now. What put it over the edge? Last night, I attempted to burn some recordings to DVD with MythArchive, and the transcoded MPEG file (which would take up to 4 GB for a full DVD) gets stored under /var/lib. Oops.

I'm actually rather impressed that the system didn't die or even panic; processes that needed disk access simply quietly failed. Unfortunately, one of these processes was mythfilldatabase, so I managed to miss a recording due to this issue.

To mitigate this full disk problem, I had the brilliant idea of moving part of my root partition onto my /myth partition (which is ridiculously huge compared to root), and then symlinking it back to its original location. I wasn't crazy enough to try doing this with anything really critical, like /usr or /bin, but I thought /usr/share would be reasonably safe. I used rsync to copy files over to /myth, and then rebooted. The system came back up fine, but then MythTV launched into a database setup screen. Oh. No. Did I somehow hose my MythTV database?! But no, it was just that the MySQL daemon wouldn't start with a symlinked /usr/share for reasons that I can't even pretend to comprehend. After restoring the original /usr/share, MySQL and MythTV behaved normally.

I settled on moving/symlinking large /usr/share subdirectories, like kde4, doc, fonts, and foomatic. THis seems to be working fine, and it allowed me to free up almost 1 GB of acreage on root. Not too shabby.

Someday soon, I'm going to just stick another disk in the machine. Disks are so cheap these days. Heck, I even have a 500GB disk laying around (from a linux box that went boom), but it's SATA, so I first need to buy a controller card.