Wow - been a while!

Ok, so it's been a while since I last posted here. Things have been moving on since my last post.

Not long after I had installed the system, they went and advertised the 0.22 release of MythTV! Naturally, being the kind of person I am, I wanted to dive right in and test it ... but then again, what about my existing recordings!?

The answer? To build a bigger and better box of course! So, diving into the small repository of machines I had, I found an AMD64 box, loaded it with a gig of memory, and ordered myself a 500Gb drive to throw in it. I also ordered another Hauppauge DVB-S card, and then a HVR-1300. Everything seemed to start off smoothly. I installed the base system with Mythbuntu 9.10, and once that was up and running I immediately killed it by copying the database and files off the old box to the new one. Much to my surprise, a reboot later and it was asking me to update the database structure to the new 0.22 version, and off it went.

It's not without it's issues of course. I still have references to the old system dotted around in places, but on the whole it's fine. HD broadcasts are not watchable live, due to the system just not having enough oomph to decode on the fly, but that is something for the future (like when I finally get myself a HD television). Storage groups are a bit of a melon twister to start with, but that is soon sorted.

The main problem now is ... sound. I have one of those nice(?) on-board sound cards that will do 5.1 surround sound. I have all the speakers connected, and using alsa-mixer and speaker-test, I know that the setup is correct and working just fine. The problem is that no matter what I try, MythTV refuses to use it correctly. If I try and use the ALSA settings in the setup, then I only get the rear channels played from movies and the like. If I use the /dev/mixer etc in the settings then it works fine for movies, but won't upmix for normal TV and I have no volume control. I am sure there is something I am missing somewhere, but I just can't find it at the moment!

Oh - just a word on housekeeping. For those of you that use the "myth.find_orphans.pl" script to check for orphaned database entries/files, and you get the "0 valid recordings" issue ... the key is the "host" option to the script. This was a gotcha for a while for me, as I was trying to run it with "localhost" as the option ... this will only work if you haven't changed the setting so that other frontends can run off the box. If you have, then you need to use the host name that you set for it to correctly find the options ....