MythTV Official Community Forum

Xubuntu 16.04.03 LTS, mythtv 0.29
Wiped a 10 year old Mythbuntu install, replaced one disk, did a clean install, and then copied over the old recordings.
The system uses lightdm to autostart my account, which then starts a script which in turn starts Mythwelcome. (The wrapper script lets lirc blow up mythfrontend and mythwelcome, but not the backend, if something locks up, then it restarts Mythwelcome.)

Current issues:

1. When mythwelcome starts it pops up for a second, then shows "attempting to connect to backend", then goes blank, then reappears. That is all OK. The problem is that 10s later it automatically starts mythfrontend without any input from a keyboard or remote control. This is going to prevent the system from shutting down after it does a wake. Where is the setting to autostart mythfrontend from mythwelcome? That needs to be turned off. If after it puts the system into mythfrontend an exit is ordered with the remote it ends up back in mythwelcome, then it seems not to go back to mythfrontend automatically, at least, not always.

2. Lirc seems to be responding very slowly to some keypresses. Other times it is snappy. Not enough experience yet to determine what, if any, pattern there is to that.

3. The system uses an old dual tuner HDHomerun. mythtv-setup has that as a single tuner which allows 2 jobs. But that doesn't work, when 2 simultaneous recordings are schedule it only does one and complains about a conflict. (Sorry, cannot
get to the exact menu now to read off the settings.) In 0.29 is it necessary to configure the second HDHOMERUN tuner separately, as it was back on 0.21?

4. The "exit" from mythfrontend and enter into it from mythwelcome are both pretty slow, about 6 seconds after the button press until the screen changes. On the old system there was no delay like that.

5. Mythfrontend blanks the screen after 5 (or maybe it was 10) minutes, I was out of the room. During which time it was flagging commercials. That is probably a power setting, perhaps in lightdm? How to prevent that in this Ubuntu release? With just a remote control there is no way to "wiggle the mouse" or "hit a shift key" to bring the screen back.

Thanks.

For the MythWelcome issues you might want to look at changing to it's replacement the idle screen

I stopped using LIRC and switched to using the in kernel stuff that mimics a keyboard. I now have the opposite problem of it being too quick to auto repeat and sometimes get two or three key presses when I want one. You can't win sometimes

Yes for some reason Mythfrontend has become extremely slow to start up and shut down. It's something we need to look into.

The screen blanking problem is not Myth doing it its probably your window manager or X server. I think in the past if disabling all screen savers didn't work I've had to use something like to be sure to disable screen blanking.

mathog wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 01, 2018 1:57 am

...
3. The system uses an old dual tuner HDHomerun. mythtv-setup has that as a single tuner which allows 2 jobs. But that doesn't work, when 2 simultaneous recordings are schedule it only does one and complains about a conflict. (Sorry, cannot
get to the exact menu now to read off the settings.) In 0.29 is it necessary to configure the second HDHOMERUN tuner separately, as it was back on 0.21?

...

AFAIK, Myth has always required that each tuner in an HDHomerun box must be separately defined via mythtv-setup. Each of those tuners is capable of multi-rec which means two (or more) streams within a channel.

Craig

Added the second tuner and that is working again.

Added xset s off to .bashrc, not sure yet if that helped.
edit: it did not, the screen still blanks.

Anybody know why mythwelcome is automatically starting mythfrontend???

For the blanking issue, this appears to be working (in bashrc)
The first disables any screensavers. The second disables VESA Display Power Management Signaling. To see the settings for those look in the output of

RATS.

It is still blanking, it just takes a bit longer. dpms is disabled, screen saver is disabled. Nothing shows up in the system logs when it blanks. 'ps -ef | grep -i screen' is empty. Very mysterious.

mathog wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 01, 2018 1:57 am

1. When mythwelcome starts it pops up for a second, then shows "attempting to connect to backend", then goes blank, then reappears. That is all OK. The problem is that 10s later it automatically starts mythfrontend without any input from a keyboard or remote control. This is going to prevent the system from shutting down after it does a wake. Where is the setting to autostart mythfrontend from mythwelcome? That needs to be turned off. If after it puts the system into mythfrontend an exit is ordered with the remote it ends up back in mythwelcome, then it seems not to go back to mythfrontend automatically, at least, not always.

On further observation the behavior described above only occurs when the system is started manually (push the power button). If the system restarts itself mythwelcome does not start mythfrontend. So the system does restart at the appropriate time, record a show, then turn itself off again, I was worried that it would stay on in that situation if mythwelcome started mythfrontend there too. It turns out this is documented on the mythwelcome page here:

https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythwelcome

as "automatically start mythfrontend". That setting is on a page which I never knew about because to get to it one must press "i/info". I'm not even sure that is mapped to a key on our remote, and there was no reason to even look for it because mythwelcome's main page did not give any indication that it existed. Mythwelcome's "set the settings" methods are to my mind baroque. One set requires that it be started with "-s" and the other two need key presses ("i" or "m"). If I were designing this program it would have the existing "OK" button and to the right of it or below it a "configure" or "menu" button which would be reached by pressing any arrow key. All the various things which could be set would be found after pressing OK (or enter) when "configure" was selected.