Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Remote MythFrontend for Mac OS X

I have a policy of reporting on my blog the result of any research which took me some serious yahooing to discover. Here's one such entry.


On a whim, I tried the Myth Frontend for Mac OS X, and of course there was trouble from the start connecting to the backend running on my Linux Fedora Core 4 desktop machine.

First, you have to have mysql setup to allow remote usage. If you followed the Wilson Myth(TV)ology instructions, it will be almost there, but you have to give access to the other machines on your local network (which in my case has the assigned IP address pattern of 192.168.0.x, where x is between 1 and 15; your's might be different. So on the Linux box, you have to do the following:


$mysql -u root mythconverg -p

(enter password)



mysql>grant all on mythconverg.* to mythtv@"192.168.0.%" identified by "yourpassword";

mysql>flush privileges;

mysql>exit



Then you have to make sure the firewall allows the three ports you need for this job. So again on Linux (KDE) open up the Security Level control panel from the System Settings menu, and add the following to the "Other ports" field:


mysql:tcp, 6543:tcp, 6544:tcp



Then I was able to run the mythfrontend for Mac OS X and discover my 1.33GHz Powerbook G4 is not up to the task of displaying the stream, it's worse than the EyeTV performance, which is actually viewable on the same hardware.


Oh, how I am looking forward to Intel based Mac Minis. I've got a little space here next to the monitor just for one.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

The Intel Transition

I spent Thursday and Friday at a workshop Apple put on to help developers transition their code onto Mac OS X for Intel. I won't get into the technical aspects of the workshop, as that was labled as confidential (although I have no idea why), but I would like to say that the Apple employees were great. They are comitted to the success of the transition, and know it is important to have plenty of native software available at first hardware launch. They were helpful, and never condescending in the face of ignorance. If you are a Mac developer, and get offered a chance to go to one of these events, go. It's a rare and immensely valuable experience.

Also, DTS engineers have some interesting side jobs.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

could not get file information for /dev/lirc

I ended up ruining my Mythtv setup and reinstalling from scratch. The Wilson Myth(TV)ology instructions have moved on to using Fedora Core 4. Frustration was around every corner, as little things were missing. For example, it wasn't mentioned that you had to download and install the firmware for the pcHDTV capture board.

But the longest running problem was getting my ATI Remote Wonder working again. The OS recognized the existence of the USB receiver, and it worked as a mouse, but everytime I tried running irw, irw would immediately quit, and in the process lockup the lircd daemon. If I looked in the log files, I would see the warning "could not get file information for /dev/lirc" and true enough, the only device for the lirc framework was the /dev/lircd interface, no lirc or lirc0 nodes as every online tutorial said there would be after the install.

I did a lot of googling, and finally found this posting on the MythTV website. Basically, it said, I couldn't use both the module which gave me mouse functionality (ati_remote), and the module which allowed lirc to read from the device (lirc_atiusb). Sure enough

#/sbin/lsmod

said that both modules were loaded. I had to disable the ati_remote module, so I first found it:

#locate ati_remote
#/lib/modules/2.6.12-1.1447_FC4/kernel/drivers/usb/input/ati_remote.ko

So, I went in and changed the name of the ati_remote.ko kernel extension to ati_remote_disabled, rebooted, and all of a sudden lirc could see the Remote Wonder.