MythTV 0.22 Upgrade

Version 0.22 of MythTV was release last week and I just had a go installing it on my Fedora 11 system.

I was going to wait until after Fedora 12 was released next week but I read that it will include version 1.7 of XOrg which is not currently supported by the legacy drivers for my NVidia GeForce 5200 graphics card. I found a set of RPMs for 0.22 in the RPMFusion testing repository so I decided to give it a shot.

Before upgrading I did a bit of reading on potential issues and came across a MySQL database corruption problem. Although MythTV uses UTF-8 internally, it configures the database connection to use latin-1. I thought the documentation could have been a lot clearer in stating what the preferred encoding configuration for the server, the connection, and the actual database should be. In the end, I decided that the issue only applied to those distros that have changed the default character encoding in the MySQL server from latin-1 to UTF-8. My 0.21 database showed latin-1 encoding so I decided to do a backup of it and just see how far I got with the upgrade.

I shut down the mythbackend service and ran the YUM udpate with the RPMFusion testing repository enabled. I didn't see any errors in dependencies and all the plugins I had from the 0.21 version were updated. I ran mythtv-setup and it did a number of database schema upgrades, all without error. Once the menu screen came up, I did a quick check that all the settings looked normal and then quit.

After starting the mythbackend service, I ran the mythfrontend command. This did a few database schema upgrades for MythMusic, MythVideo, and some other components without error. It did however warn that another client was connected to the database and that it should be shut down. I suppose I shouldn't have started mythbackend before I ran mythfrontend for the first time.

Watching Video

I tried to watch some TV through my PVR-250 and it worked great. Channels also seem to change much faster than in the 0.21 release. The OSD and program guide also worked perfectly.

My graphics card doesn't support the new VDPAU video rendering library but FFmpeg support still works fine for my card. I haven't spent much time testing new configuration options but there doesn't seem to be anything major improvements in this release for old SD capture cards.

One cool feature of the new version of MythVideo is that you don't need to use MPlayer to play MP4 files. You get menu options for aspect-ratio and audio sync adjustment and you can even watch live TV from your capture card in a picture-in-picture window.

UI Improvements

The default theme in MythFrontend (terra) isn't the most attractive but I was surprised at how snappy the navigation was. The slight pauses between some menus in 0.21 seems to have been reduced.

I was a little disappointed that the UI for MythMusic hasn't been given the same attention as other areas. The interface is not very attractive and the playback controls and playlist navigation still look fairly clunky although some of the menus have got a bit of clean-up to make them more compact. I haven't had any problems playing my music files (FLAC and OGG).

I'm not sure which UI theme I'm going to stick with but most have seen improvements in the way they present lists and large bodies of text. I'm sure we'll see some more themes over the coming weeks and months now that the MythUI backend has stabilised.

Issues

I did try to add the set-user-ID bit on the frontend command with chmod +s /usr/bin/mythfrontend but then it wouldn't start and it didn't print any error messages. This is different to 0.21 so I'll have to look into this a bit more.

Update 23/02/2010: I figured out that I had to modify the file ownership of the mythfrontend binary before it would start. I changed the file owner from root to the user that I run mythfrontend under and everything started up fine.

I also ran into this error in MythVideo when I tried to play MP4 files:

libfaad.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I solved this by creating a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libfaad.so.2 to /usr/lib/libfaad.so.

The only other issue I had was that, because the UI themes are mainly designed for 16:9 screens and my monitor is 4:3, things like album art and video previews appear to be squashed horizontally. I think that the themes should be flexible enough to adapt to the aspect-ratio of the display.

Transcoding and DVD-authoring are also working well and I haven't noticed any major changes in these areas from 0.21.

Overall I'm happy with this update and the system seems to be as stable as 0.21 and the UI performance has generally improved. Thanks to the teams at MythTV and RPMFusion for another great update.