Microsoft is avoiding using standards at all costs.. as usual.

I read in a computer magazine sometime this month that Microsoft Media Center will, in the future, support automatic wakeup of the computer in order to record shows. The reason it does not work right now, Microsoft states, is due to the fact that motherboards do not support their "On Now" technology

This is strange. My MythTV box manages to start up at specified times, record stuff and then shut down again... Can it be that Microsoft is, again, avoiding the use of established protocols, like the wakeup feature of BIOS:es in order to force everyone to use something they designed (and in this case does not work yet).

I am getting tired of this same old song. When will it stop? Do we really need 6 kinds of wheels?

Welcome mythwelcome!

The 0.19 release has been around for a while now, and I installed a couple of weeks ago. It works Ok, except for Live TV, which seems to have been reworked into a state of no usability. I do not mind, however.. I think maybe this is the least useful feature of MythTV.

A very nice feature though is the new mythwelcome program. It is designed to be a solution that fixes alot of the small issues that has been solved in the past by small scripts and lock files.
Mythwelcome is started instead of the frontend. After it has been started, It can be set to start the frontend if the startup was automatic. Otherwise, only mythwelcome is shown (see picture below).



The trick is that mythwelcome does not count as a frontend. So, during recording, it will show what the backend is doing, and when it is done, mythbackend may shut the computer down. This mimics the ability of the scripts I've posted in this blog previously, with a nice frontend, but there are twists.

* Using the remote, the user may block and unblock shutdown.
* You don't have to start the frontend or a web browser on another computer to learn what the MythTV box is doing, and for how long.
* Start an Xterm (or another program) using the F12 key
* Set up to two daily startup periods when the MythTV box should start, regardless of recording schedule. This is a great feature which allows for getting to the box from a remote location.

I used to have problems, however. See these threads [1,2]
Whenever I started mythwelcome from an Xterm or the .xsession script, the screen froze.
However, if I started it with verbosity level set, it started ok from an Xterm, but froze the screen from the .xsession. I stopped investigating this, since I seemed to be the only one with the problem, and started using my old scripts again.

Today, I started fiddling with it again, and it turned out that the fault was the windowmanager, 'evilwm' that I was using. I switched to fvwm2, and mythwelcome starts up ok, regardless of how it was called. Strange....