You can count on hackers..

Summer usually means that ther are a lot of hackers out there having a bunch of time to spend on a project. I have done some work as a sysadmin, and I know that not all of those projects involve building things... hacking into a server and messing things up also counts as a project, for some...

Fortunatelly, some spend their time more wiselly. Like Martin Bene, who spent the summer making a patch that I have frequently requested on the mythtv-users mailing list: a patch that makes mythburn work. This is a copy of his post:

You asked for it, you got it:

Another update for the mythburn scripts, no new features this time but
major rewrite of configuration.

* No more hardcoded paths
* new installer
* cleaned up requirements for access rights: all write access either to
temp dir or to config dir.
* single config file with settings for directory locations, database
etc.

The update is available either as a patch against current mythburn CVS
or as a complete tarball (content equals cvs+patch).

http://mabene.icomedias.com/mythburn/cut-0.5.diff is the diff, apply
with patch -p1 -E (a couple of files get removed).

Full tarball at http://mabene.icomedias.com/mythburn/mythburn.tar.gz

* put the mythburn stuff in a sensible place; /usr/share/mythburn might
be a good choice.
* cd /usr/share/mythburn
* ./install.sh

The installation script prompts you for
- tv dir (where the recordings are stored)
- directory where mythtv fonts live
- directory to put temp files (will be created)
- place to put DVD file structure (will be created)
- user the webserver runs as
- group the webserver runs as
- directory where MythWeb is installed
- host the mysql database is running on
- name of mysql database
- username for accessing database
- password for accessing database

All config settings have defaults that match KnopMyth setup. Most
settings are checked so it's not easy to enter invalid settins that
could lead to problems later on.

The installation script sets file and directoy owner and access rights,
writes a config file, creates symlinks in the Mythweb directory and
patches the "burn dvd" link into mythburn.

If all required packages are installed, you're ready to go.

This should work regardless of your installation; I wrote the scripts on
gentoo and did some minimal testing on Knopmyth.

Let me know why it doesn't work for you and how I broke your system :-)

Bye, Martin

So, go get it. Try it! (I haven't)- There is a rumor of a frontend patch around too.. is christmas comming early this year?

LIRC IR Blaster ?

When I first started planning this project I figured that with the change in Sweden from analog to digital TV we would have to fgure out a way to control an external settop box from MythTV. For this purpose, there are IR blasters available that will act as a remote control and send irsequences to an externa box.
I went ahead and bought one of these things here.
However, since the cable company we use have decided to provide all channels in analog format also, we will not use the thing, it seems.
Though, I have been thinking of other things to control using it.. maybe the VCR? My girlfriend will soon be working, we hope, as a teacher and the schools around here have not yet embraced the DVD for presentation of multimedia content.
The bad thing is that not much else is within reach of the box... :-(