Myth upgrade and problems related to other crap that I blamed on the upgrade.

My mythtv-backend box was making some funny noises, and considering /dev/hda is no-less-than 9 years old, I decided it was time to upgrade. I used Mythbuntu 8.10 and combined the frontend and backend on the machine I had previously used as just a frontend. I was able to do this because of a recent black friday special where I snagged an HDHomeRun for only $120. I have been nothing but impressed with it.

So the upgrade was actually very easy now that I look back. I did have one issue with the Nvidia driver which comes with 8.10. I chose the 177 driver, which as it turns out is incompatible with my Geforce FX 5200. If you have this card, or a similar vintage, save yourself some headache and choose the 173 driver.

I was worried about losing my old recordings. Well, let's be honest... I didn't want to sleep in the doghouse after destroying all my wife's recordings. Anyway, this was actually the easiest thing to do, just two commands: mysqldump to a file and mysql to reinsert on the new machine. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Backup_your_database Of course, this assumes that you have also moved over your recordings directories. In my case I moved the same drives over to the new machine so no copying was necessary.

There was one issue I ran into though, and I'll note it here in case anyone else has the same problem. While scrolling through the list of recordings I found a bunch that would not load. In fact, once I tried to view one, mythfrontend would refuse to play any, and occasionally segfault. The error I got was:

NVP: Couldn't find a matching decoder for: /storage/recordings/filename.mpg

This problem actually existed before my upgrade, and might have been related to some disk corruption. I tracked it down to a single video entry that when viewed in the selection window, would mess up all viewing of other recordings. It turned out that the actual .mpg file did exist, but there were no .png files generated for it. Is this what caused the error? I'm not sure, and I opted for the quick-fix, which was to delete the .mpg and then delete it from myth. Once I had removed that file, mythfrontend returned to its rock-solid, heart-touching glory.